Please click here to download a pdf copy of our “Building Your Marketing Strategy” guide.

Please click here to download a pdf copy of our “Company Profile”

• Should the links not work for any reason, please email us to request a copy.

The purpose of any marketing campaign is to create brand awareness, followed by consumer engagement, site traffic and ultimately sales conversion.

The idea behind any marketing strategy is to tell your brands story across multiple channels, targeted at your consumer demographic to create a sales funnel.

Content will need to be produced in line with your brands ethos & core values. Studio & location photo-shoots, videography, graphics & text copy will need to be produced. Identifying the right models, influencers & sponsorship of the right events will be key in driving the development of the content & increasing the profile & consumer reach of your brand.

To achieve this goal, multiple marketing channels will need to be utilised to deliver this content to the targeted end consumer. Social Media growth alongside Digital Online Advertising, Influencer Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation are all examples of the online tools available to drive the sales funnel. Other offline marketing might be run alongside the online marketing; including event sponsorship or print media.

Your brand will need to constantly create new and engaging content.

From photography to videography, from copywriting to graphics your content needs to tell your brands story, ethos & core value to your target consumer demographic.

Any content which is be created will subsequently be used across all the other marketing channels so it’s key to get this fundamental stage right.

If required, we have the ability to organise the creation of your content including photographers, videographers, models, locations and much more.

Due to the potential number of different possible 3^rd parties (such as photographers) which may be required, please contact us if you would like to discuss any possible content creation and we can estimate a budget for this.

Alternatively, you may develop your content yourself for use across the marketing channels.

A combination of the following marketing channels will need to be utilised;

Social Media Management (SMM)

Creating & posting content, engagement with consumers, growth of your followers.

Social Media Advertising (SMA)

Adverts run across different social media platforms.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

Adverts run across the search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Ranking your website organically in the search engines.

E-Mail & SMS Marketing

Text alerts & email notifications to existing customers.

Influencer Marketing

Celebrity & Influencer endorsements.

Offline Marketing

Examples include event sponsorship, TV, radio or print based media (i.e. magazine, billboard or public transport advertising).

Your brand must have a social media presence.

Should you require us to manage your social media accounts or should you intend to do this yourself; the aim is to develop engaging content, post daily, engage with consumers, align your brand with like-minded brands in other sectors & ultimately increase your follower count & post engagement.

We can assist not only in posting content at the right time of day but have an over-riding social media strategy to increase followers & engagement.

If you choose to operate your social media accounts yourself we can provide you access to our Social Media Content Creation & Content Posting

Please click the links above to request access to these calendars to help with your planning (please note these are Google Calendars & you will require a Google Account to access them).

These calendars provide alerts ahead of time to prompt you when to create content & when to best post content. i.e.

To create Christmas theme content in November ahead of the event in December.

To post content with an Easter theme ahead of the event.

Having great social media accounts & posting great content is no longer good enough on its own to reach your audience.

The social media platforms physically suppress content from reaching your desired audience.

Did you know only C.1-2% of organic content posted will even reach your followers let alone new potentially customers who don’t already follow you!

The social media networks deliver content to their users based on algorithms & how engaging a piece of content is (i.e. the more people that engage in the piece of content, the more people the network will show that content to).

The issue however is to reach an audience in the first place considering the networks physically supress the content by the very virtue it doesn’t have any engagement.

Of course, the social media networks say they do this to improve their sites by only showing relevant content to users however in truth the only way to get your content out to your desired demographic is by using their advertising tools.

We create & target adverts at your consumer demographic and continually test new ad types & audience groups. We will continually check Return on Investment (ROI) of adverts to maximise reach of your adverts & drive traffic to your site. We will target new customer acquisition as well as re-marketing to users who have already engaged with your brand and are most likely to convert.

Social Media Advertising is likely to be the #1 driver of traffic & sales conversions.

Just like Social Media Advertising (SMA), SEA works in exactly the same way although the adverts will be created on the search engines rather than social media networks.

Adverts will be created targeting different advert types, different engagement types & different audiences.

Adverts will be targeted at ‘new customer acquisition’ as well as ‘re-marketing’ to potential consumers that have already engaged with your brand.

What is slightly different to SMA is that on SEA we will also set up ‘google shopping’ feeds whereby consumers searching for products (rather than your brand specifically) will show in their shopping feeds.

The basic overview of search engine optimisation is that the search engines crawl the internet with their ‘bots’ trawling the content of what makes up each site (headers, footers, written content, images, in-bound & outbound links, hidden code, how much traffic a site has, etc.) This gives each website a ‘quality score’.

There are ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ quality scores (i.e. the search engines sore positively as well as negatively based on what the bots find on your site).

Each outbound link your site has to another site, a little bit of your ‘quality score’ passes to the site you link to. Similarly, each inbound link your site has carries a little bit of their quality score to your site.

What the search engines are trying to do is determine how ‘relevant’ your site is to any given subject (i.e. the more keywords in your sites content, the higher the quality score of your site, the more traffic your site gets, the more inbound links carrying high quality scores from other sites, etc), then the more ‘relevant’ & ‘authoritative’ the search engines will believe your site is to any given subject.

What we do is;

Trawl your site to ensure the hidden content (the code beneath your site, the headers & footers, etc.) are perfect to achieve the highest quality score.

Ensure all visible content is keyword rich & relevant.

Build out content (i.e. blogs) on your site so there’s more relevant content for the search engines to ‘score’.

Link your site into our existing network of other websites to pass quality score to your site.

Link build with other sites so you have more quality in-bound links, increasing your sites ‘relevance’.

This is an ongoing task, continually refining & add more content & links, which in turn create a higher ‘quality’ & ‘relevance’ score for your site.

This will see your site climb through the search engines which will ultimately drive more organic un-paid traffic.

Often the first thing however is to try to ensure potential consumers can even find your site whilst searching. We would target your brand name as a keyword & link your website into our existing SEO network of sites to give your site an initial boost to ensure (where possible) consumers can find your site when searching for your brand.

You will need to create bi-monthly newsletters & monthly text campaigns promoting ‘new in’, ‘sale’, ‘competitions’, ‘discounts’, ‘special offers’, ‘news’, etc.

Both Email & SMS should promote various incentives (behind the scenes, new in, competitions, early access) to your existing customer base. Keeping them engaged in the brand.

We have some tools which will, for example, send out a newsletter and then anyone that doesn’t engage with the newsletter will be sent a follow up text. We also have a large list of existing consumers (however we have to work within GDPR rules ensuring they opt into any subsequent communications).

There is a wide range of influencers with different consumer demographics.

Identifying the right influencers is key.

It’s not only about getting the right influencer at the right price, it’s also about building a network of influencers with different profile & demographic levels.

Many people get influencer marketing wrong. Too many people believe you simply reach out to an influencer & agree a budget for them to post & that when they post you’ll return sales. It doesn’t work like that, it’s very difficult to establish a direct ROI on what you spend vs what you return in sales.

Think of influencer marketing like the top of the sales funnel & casting a broad net creating brand awareness. You need multiple influencers posting almost continuously & driving brand awareness. Over time their follower demographic will become aware & subsequently engage with your brand (be that liking, following, commenting or visiting your website).

A combination of influencer endorsement followed up by social media re-marketing adverts will, over time, result in sales conversions.

What we do is help identify the right influencers with the right demographic. Then, rather than simply agreeing a single post budget with them, look to ‘contract’ them for X posts per month over X period. We will build up a network of influencers, each with commitments to X number of posts per month.

We then create an influencer posting diary with them to ensure you have endorsement posts specific to your brand going out daily.

For example, we would identify different influencers with different profile levels. Obviously the higher their profile the more they charge. We tend to identify;

One main key influencer (+500k followers)

A couple of high-profile influencers (250k – 500k followers)

Several mid-level influencers (100-250k followers)

Multiple entry level influencers (50-100k followers).

You will also be contacted by aspiring influencers (-50k followers).

We therefore create a pyramid network of influencers based on their profile level;

Rather than getting the influencers to quote for just one post, we’d look to contract them over several months (either returning a cheaper cost per post or more posts for the same sum).

We would then work out a posting diary whereby each influencer is told what to post & when (i.e. what we want them to promote & when).

For example, if we secured the above pyramid network of influencers & we contracted them over a 3 month period with x3 posts per month each, we’d quickly ‘bank’ several posts which we can then create a posting diary so that posts are going out daily across many influencers;

We will be the first to say our expertise lie in online marketing & not offline advertising however you may wish to engage in offline advertising as well.

Examples of offline advertising include; event promotion, celebrity endorsement, tv or radio, print media, billboard or public transport advertising.

If you are interested in any of these forms of advertising, we can help identify a PR partner with you.

We already have connections with very good PR companies which can assist in this area if you’d like further information.

Marketing budgets can run into the £tens of thousands, £hundreds of thousand or even £millions of pounds. This said, most customers do not have the luxury of a £multi-million pound marketing budget!

Therefore, whilst technically marketing budgets can be a ‘as long as a piece of string’, we understand there are limitations & sensible budgets need to be worked within.

What we do is to work with a customer to identify what budgets they have to put towards marketing & then work with them in how to best target that budget.

That might be a combination of services we can provide as well as channels a customer themselves might be able to look after.

Whatever your circumstance, we’ll work with you to identify a budget & then propose how that budget is best spent for maximum results.

Below we have outlined some example budgets based on what we would consider as an ‘ideal scenario ’ but also balancing that with trying to be sensible with the overall budget.

This is only a suggestion and budgets may or may not allow for all of the below to all be done at once. There are also options with cutting back on some elements or time dedicated to certain marketing activities to achieve a certain budget.

Therefore, whilst the costs outlined below are an ‘ideal’ solution you might decide to try to run some of this yourself, cut back on time committed to some channels or decide not to run some areas initially.

Content Creation

Price on application

Please contact us if you’re interested in content creation we can discuss your project & formalise a quote for you.

Social Media Management (SMM)

Based on C.10hrs per month management £500pcm

Social Media Advertising (SMA)

Based on C.10hrs per month management £500pcm

In addition to the management fee we suggest a budget of £1,000 – £2,000pcm is put towards the physical cost of advertising split between new customer acquisition as well as re-marketing.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

Based on C.6hrs per month management £300pcm

In addition to the management fee we suggest a budget of £500pcm is put towards the physical cost of advertising split between keyword advertising, Google Shopping & display remarketing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Based on C.10hrs per month management £500pcm

In addition to the management fee we suggest a budget of £100pcm is put towards link building.

E-Mail & SMS Marketing

Based on C.3hrs per month management £150pcm

In addition to the management fee we suggest a budget of £200pcm is put towards SMS & Email credits.

Influencer Marketing

Based on C.10hrs per month management £500pcm

We suggest a budget in the region of £1,000pcm – £1,500pcm (+ free products) is put towards influencer marketing.

This budget would be split between a couple of high profile, multiple mid profile & several entry level influencers & then a posting calendar worked upon delivering multiple influencer posts per week across the social networks.

Offline Advertising

Price on application

Please contact us if you’re interested in any offline advertising, we can identify a PR partner & they can propose costs.

Training

Price on application

Please contact us if you’re interested in any training sessions on any of the marketing channels we can discuss your project & formalise a quote for you.

The above ‘ideal’ budgets are based on C.10hrs of our management time per month per channel.

Which channels you decide upon or if you would like more or less time spent on each individual channel can be adjusted to fit your budget.

We offer discounts on these rates subject to other services we might provide customers, as follows;

If you are also taking your fashion design or product sourcing with us (details can be found on our sister division Rag-Sourcing), we can offer a 20% discount off your marketing rates.

Alternatively, if you are taking your website build with us (details can be found on our sister division Rag-Creative), we can also offer a 20% discount off your marketing rates.

If you are taking your fashion design, product sourcing and website build with us we can offer a 30% discount off your marketing rates.

As an example, subject to other services being provided, our marketing management fees might be discounted by as much as 30% as follows;

Social Media Management (£500 @ 30% discount) £350pcm

Social Media Advertising (£500 @ 30% discount) £350pcm

Search Engine Advertising (£300 @ 30% discount) £210pcm

Search Engine Optimisation (£500 @ 30% discount) £350pcm

>Email & SMS Marketing (£150 @ 30% discount) £105pcm

Influencer Marketing (£500 @ 30% discount) £350pcm

Budgets will also need to be agreed & put towards each of the marketing channels (see Likely Costs above)

The marketing strategy & what to focus on at what times needs to tie into;

The seasonal sales windows (i.e. ensuring you have product delivered on time for each season)

The design & sourcing windows (i.e. ensuring your product design, sampling & production meet the seasonal sales windows)

The content creation (i.e. ensuring you’re creating content in advance of the seasonal events).

Everything from design through manufacture, from content creation & posting through marketing & PR; all need to tie into one.

We have created a helpful visual timeline overview of all the elements & stages to provide you with an overview of your brands launch to help with your planning.

The timeline overview gives a general 18 month plan of what you need to be achieving at what phases during your brands launch.

Please click the link above to download a copy of the timeline overview.

• You may require to print or zoom in to see all the details.
• We highly recommend you take the time to read & understand it.
• Below is a thumbnail version.
• Should the link to our timeline overview not work for any reason, please email us to request a copy.

We have also created helpful Production, Content Creation & Content Posting calendars which tie into the visual timeline overview to help with your planning.

Please click the link above to request access to these calendars (please note these are Google Calendars & you will require a Google Account to access them).

Below is an example graph of what you should be hoping to achieve with your marketing strategy.

This is not an exact science & many factors can influence the growth of your brand, but this graph shows an example of what you should be trying to achieve.

When launching a brand, it is not as simple as just making good product, creating a website & turning on advertising & seeing sales & direct return on investment.

First & foremost you are building a brand. A bi-product of creating your brand is the sale of your products. It your case this happens to be the sale of clothing, but it could be anything, from computers to toothbrushes, from dog food to soft drinks.

Marketing is the key, not necessarily the product!

What you are trying to achieve with your marketing is to initially drive consumer awareness, followed by consumer engagement & ultimately sales conversions. Subsequent repeat business from existing consumers helps contribute towards your average ‘customer lifetime value’.

This graph is to try to illustrate the overheads (i.e. cost of goods + marketing & other overheads) vs. the revenue (i.e. sales)

Initially there will likely be high overhead investment into product & marketing, over time the sales will start to increase eventually overtaking the overheads, repaying the investment & turning into profit.

The speed at which this happens is subject to many factors, not least the speed at which the marketing budget can be applied, the design & quality of the product & the ‘X-factor’ of when the brand takes hold of the consumers imagination.

Please note;

The X-axis denotes time & the scale changes from months to years (condensing the data).

The Y-axis denotes cost/revenue & the scale changes from /£10k, to /£100K to /£1m , to /£5m (condensing the data).

As you can see from this graph, there is initially investment into product (red) + marketing & other overheads (navy).

As the brand starts to gain traction, the sales revenue (blue) starts to increase. Slowly at first (as you drive brand awareness), then it should start to speed up significantly (as consumers start to convert & your average ‘consumer lifetime value’ starts to increase), then it should hopefully start to rocket (as the brand takes hold on consumer imagination).

We would hope that by the C.18-24 month period the sales revenue starts to overtake the overheads & by year 3 the brand is into profit.

Below is the same graphic illustrating this.

Due to how the graph condenses time & cost / revenue you will see below that the ‘break even’ point should hopefully come around the 18-30 month stage & by the 36-42 month stage the brand will hopefully not only be in profit but have re-paid any previous investment as well.

Given a long enough time scale we’d hope to see something like this (with a bell-curve). How high that bell-curve might go is anyone’s guess!

We recommend you read the below linked articles.

The majority of these are blog articles of different websites intended mainly for SEO content to boost the sites own search engine ranking.

Therefore, you have to take the articles with a ‘pinch of salt’ from the perspective of who wrote them however they are still interesting articles to read to try to understand what’s effected the growth of other recently successful brands.

Gym King | Sik Silk | 11 Degrees | Gym Shark

This document outlines the basis of any given marketing strategy we would look to implement.

Of course, your marketing strategy would be tailored to your brand & your budget.

First & foremost we will look to identify a marketing budget with you. Subject to that budget we would suggest which marketing channels might be the most important for you & which channels might be best for us to manage & which channels you might wish to manage.

This document outlines the different types of channels alongside examples of ‘ideal’ example budgets.

It also outlines what is trying to be achieved by the marketing strategy in terms of creating a sales funnel of consumer awareness, engagement, site traffic & ultimately sales conversion & gives examples of the brand awareness & sale growth over time.

The example ‘ideal’ budgets outlined are examples only based on a fictitious ‘ideal’ scenario however depending on your budgets we will tailor a quote for you, subject to which channels & how much time we dedicate to each.