Broadcast Yourself™

Within the fashion industry, visuals are some of the most important aspects of marketing. The best way for consumers to decide if they enjoy a brand or not is by visualizing the clothing items on real people. This fact is precisely the reason that YouTube is such an important resource for any fashion company attempting to add a strong social media presence to their brand.

YouTube has an estimated four billion video views each day (Smith, 2015); naturally, any fashion company would want to take advantage of all these potential marketing opportunities. This particular social media outlet is so important because it encompasses so many different aspects of the brand, including advertisements, promos for future campaigns, clips from fashion shows, and interviews with stylists. But most importantly, it showcases the clothing lines. Potential buyers can see how the clothing items are intended to be styled and take that into account when deciding whether or not to purchase. Potential buyers can tell if they feel that this brand seems like a right fit based on the videos that the fashion companies post to YouTube.

Chanel is the most successful fashion brand on YouTube, coming in at about 400,000 subscribers (Blattberg, 2014).

(Picture taken from Chanel’s YouTube site.)

Creating a YouTube channel is completely free to do, but channel owners do have the opportunity to make money from this site based on how many views they receive on their videos. Fashion companies that do not take advantage of this site lose the possibility of gaining an impressive amount of viewers and sales from people who love to browse the Internet for fashion-related videos, which, admittedly, is quite a lot.

(Gifs from http://giphy.com/)

Not only does YouTube present the opportunity of making international fashion brands successful, but it also is a platform available to individuals who simply have a strong interest in the fashion industry. Many teenage fashionistas with a passion for expressing their style use this social media site by creating a channel, uploading videos that showcase their personal styles, and interacting with other uses that have similar tastes and goals. Some of these users even become extremely popular; for example, this YouTube user has over 2 million subscribers.

(Picture taken from YouTube user MakeupbyMandy24’s channel.)

YouTube creates a whole community for young people to gain fashion inspiration and share their own techniques and advice. Many popular beauty and fashion brands will even sponsor these “YouTubers” so they will give positive reviews about a certain product, and in turn, the followers of that channel will check out that brand themselves.

YouTube, with its increasing popularity, presents a fool-proof way to add more viewership to a fashion company’s campaigns and other related videos. In addition, its accessibility to individuals without a brand but a passion for the industry further shows how versatile and useful the site can be. Fashion companies that are still not utilizing this site should understand the potential success they can gain from it and just how much profit they can make by posting videos online.

Christina

Resources:

Blattberg, Eric. (December 22, 2014.) The top fashion brands on YouTube, in 5 charts. Digiday. Retrieved from http://digiday.com/brands/top-fashion-brands-youtube-5-charts/

Chanel. (April 7, 2015.) Kristen Stewart, face of the CHANEL Spring-Summer 2015 Eyewear Campaign. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPq7hlZRNPk

Smith, Craig. (April 4, 2015.) By the Numbers: 80+ Amazing YouTube Statistics. Digital Marketing Ramblings. Retrieved from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/youtube-statistics/