At Glossy’s Fashion & Luxury Summit, brand leaders met in working groups to talk about the challenges and potential paths to success in marketing. Conversations focused on reaching audiences on TikTok, targeting different age demographics, adopting channels like connected TV and direct mail, and working with influencers.
Read on for some of the questions brands leaders had and the takeaways offered by peers.
The question: What’s the best way to advertise on TikTok?
Solutions
“The content that really drives [engagement] on TikTok is by relatable and funny people. We have an in-house person who does all our TikToks, and we kind of position her as an influencer. People know her now. Her face is in the videos, and people like her.”
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“We’ve seen some success with TikTok ads, but we aren’t looking at conversion with them just yet. Right now, TikTok is really more for just driving awareness of the brand.”
“TikTok wasn’t really set up for conversion until very recently. They just rolled out [tracking] pixels, so they’ll probably have better proof points and conversion data in the coming months. It’s not as sophisticated as something like Instagram just yet, so you can’t compare the platforms apples-to-apples right now.”
The question: What other channels are brands seeing success with?
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Solutions
“We’ve been sponsoring podcasts and seeing a lot of success there. They’re great, but they are hard to measure. You can use a promo code if you want, but that will only help a little bit. You have to understand that there is a payoff there, it’s just not as visible.”
“We’re doing connected TV because it’s very measurable. If someone sees our ad and goes to our site, we can see that. It’s not the most efficient, in terms of cost, but it’s very good for segmenting. For Mother’s Day, we were able to build a very specific Mother’s Day audience just for that campaign. We selected the demographics and regions we wanted and went from there.”
“Video has been great for us. One thing we started doing was, instead of showing the full video campaign, we were pushing out snippets of it. People would see just one vignette, one scene or one product in a short video, and that would then drive them to the site and the rest of the campaign. We don’t show them the full story because it seems like people don’t want to see the full story. The tease is more engaging.”
“It’s boring, but programmatic display ads in publisher content newsletters have been so effective and so cheap for us recently. They’re literally 10-times more effective than our other channels for the moment and a lot more affordable.”
The question: Is anyone seeing success with direct mail?
Solutions
“Direct mail has been very efficient for us. It’s almost like it’s disruptive again. Years ago, it was all you saw. But now, with your inbox full of emails, it’s exciting to get direct mail again. We see amazing returns on retargeting audiences with direct mail. It’s especially good for cart abandonment.”
“We don’t buy data for direct mail, we just our own data for that. We do six brand books a year and send them to our loyal customers, which we know will be effective. Those are strategically timed, but then we also do cart abandonment stuff on a weekly basis.”
“One challenge for direct mail is that, if you’re a sustainably-focused company like we are, paper can be very wasteful. Especially over the pandemic, some paper mills closed and no one was really expecting that direct mail would come back and paper would be in demand. So we won’t send direct mail if it’s not on recycled paper.”
“Also on the sustainability point, we ship all of our products [candles] in glass. And glass is quite hard to recycle. So included in all of our packaging are suggestions on how to reuse our vessels and ways to extend the lifecycle — anything to decrease the impact of our shipments.”
