Retail may be evolving, but some things stay the same: Internal resources and manpower haven’t scaled to account for the always-on nature of social media and the increasing number of channels to which brands are expected to post; best distribution strategies are murky and involve a long list of variables; and upper management still doesn’t get why influencer marketing is important.
We discussed how fashion and beauty brand executives, directors and managers are dealing with these consistent challenges at the Glossy Summit, which took place this week in Miami. To get an idea of the biggest hurdles facing those on the foreground at these brands today, read on for choice, anonymous and fully honest excerpts from conversations hosted on-site.
Navigating social media platforms
“Our biggest challenge is budget, convincing the owners of the purse strings that [social media marketing] is something that is very important. When there are so many things you know you need to be doing, and you’re passionate about all of them, and they say, well, which one is going to move the needle first, it’s like, well none of them are going to move the needle instantly. But if we don’t start now, it’s never going to. We’re already behind. That’s a huge challenge.”
“Finding reliable platforms is a struggle for us. The ones who are supposed to help you identify the influencers that are best suited for your brand. You’re told that they’ve been matched with your brand right off the bat, but then you see that they’re working with just anyone. It’s really hard to get that consistency. They’re usually not a brand match, or the influencers die off, and you have to start over. And by die off, I just mean they lose their influence.”
“I wouldn’t count any of the platforms out, even Snapchat. You never know when they’re going to come up with something new that breaks the mold a little bit, and you’re going to wish you had invested more.”
Ad position: web_incontent_pos1
“The more resources we need are covered simply by internal man hours. We can’t put paid media behind everything, especially when it comes to something we’re testing. If we want to see if we should be putting a budget behind something, we need to put in the work with what we have first.”
“We have to turn outside of our social team, which is only four people, to cover the creative. Our design team has been roped into making things for social media because we’re so small. There’s talent there, so we use them as much as possible to get that in front of our audiences.”
“We do Stories content but not at the level where it’s everyday — we’re still holding back a bit because I want to make sure that we’re ready with an arsenal of content that hasn’t been seen if we need it.”
Ad position: web_incontent_pos2
Trials and tribulations of influencer marketing
“Our influencer strategy has changed a lot in the past year because we were originally doing a lot of seeding as a way to gain entry to this much bigger market and to gain a lot of ground there. Now we’re looking at the absent spaces in our own market and how influencers can help us tap in and fill in those gaps. We’re centered a lot on the coasts, but we’re losing in the middle of the country. So rather than focus our strategy around scale, we’re focusing it on white space.”
“Our challenge is getting out of our little bubble. As a fitness brand, there’s a lot of success to be found with fitness and fashion influencers, but there’s a cross-pollination opportunity through lifestyle, food and beauty because those followers also like fitness. But that presents its own hurdle, which is balancing all of the right content at the right time of year and getting it in front of the right group. We have to push ourselves.”
“If you’re not using an actual software tool, you’re not going to know what percentage of an influencer community is bots. I’m shocked to see what people’s real audience reach is. Knowledge is power but it’s also a burden.”
“Coming from a footwear brand that wants to work pretty aggressively with influencers, you can imagine the headache with sizing and seeding and gifting. It is highly complex.”
“We started working with influencers without a benchmark goal, and without any sort of analytics tool to even track our progress because the upper echelons didn’t understand why we would need the investment in an analytics tool.”
“There’s something to be said — I’d rather pay more and have agency management involved to control the outcome of the influencer content. When dealing with people directly, especially ones that don’t have brand experience, they can be difficult and you really see the need for an agent.”
“It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s in-house work with influencers plays out, because these influencers have been dealing with algorithm changes themselves. So if Facebook is managing that relationship themselves, I’m going to have a lot of questions about that. How will I know what’s going on on the back end with the influencers who have greater reach?”
Debating distribution
“Amazon is going to kill your e-commerce business. They just do it better, faster, smarter, cheaper. That’s why the brand story and curation and all those bells and whistles that go into the brand voice and the reason for being that’s what brands have over Amazon.”
“We have zero visibility to anything Amazon does. We used to have an actual buyer we could talk to, and they disappeared. Now there’s no buyer. It’s strange, but it’s consistent with their behavior. It’s really scary.”
“Amazon’s priority is world domination.”
“Everybody’s confused how to go about distribution. But the light bulb has gone on, and now there’s a big rollback from brands focused on wholesale distribution; they’re trying to get closer to the consumer. They had websites before, but they weren’t built out — but now they’re driving to them. Things are shifting.”
“There’s the ‘make versus buy’ debate. The easy play is to partner with Amazon. It’s harder to build out efficient systems yourself.”
“Retailers’ promotional strategies are affecting our business. When we launch a collection at Lord & Taylor, it does great for us. But once Lord & Taylor gets promotional, and we’re not included in that, the collection just dies.”
“The amount of data and info across channels is overwhelming: Where are you getting margin? Where are you discounting? Angering one partner by what you’re doing with another? How do you maintain consistency?”
“We’re venture-backed, so revenue is the No. 1 priority — hitting metrics quickly. Wholesale distribution is key. Amazon and wholesalers are the easiest ways to scale.”
“Not honoring online prices and not taking online returns in-store is an old, antiquated way of doing things. We don’t accept returns of our online exclusives, and it’s affecting the business; there’s a disconnect between online and in-store.”
