How to plan and run a successful luxury brand marketing campaign

Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, luxury brands and the fashion industry are on standby. The sales of luxury brands could decline $450 billion to $600 billion worldwide in comparison with last year. The health and economic crisis has proven to have a long-term impact on the consumer purchase behavior that has the capacity to completely rewrite the luxury brand market. 

  The decline in luxury sales

It’s times like these that brands need to adopt an innovative mindset and creative problem solving approach. The luxury industry as a whole needs to navigate the uncertainty, sketch out recovery and plan for profit. So, how can luxury brands set up a digital marketing strategy to rebuild themselves? 

Top 5 luxury brand marketing strategies

In today’s market, luxury brands have to connect with customers using more creative assets than ever before. With several luxury brands pushing themselves into the premium category, it is important to distinguish your luxury brand cleverly and retain your mystique. 

1. Understand your consumer

Typically, a standard upscale marketing strategy is used for every consumer to generate sales. However, fine-tuning your approach will get you more business from luxury consumers and can further turn them into loyal customers. Luxury brand marketing is more relevant now than ever. The key to generating sales with this strategy is to understand your luxury consumer and incorporate creative assets such as brand images and videos to pique their interest. 

You might assume that only affluent consumers purchase luxury goods. But, the truth is that other groups of consumers are fairly likely to purchase these products. Luxury brand marketing is no longer solely dependent on handling brand recognition and reputation. It comes down to figuring out what your customers’ needs are. Once you understand and classify customers based on their needs, you can easily cater to them. 

2. Social media strategy

With over 3 billion people using social media, a majority of luxury customers can be reached via social media. Luxury brand marketing through social media has been proven to be one of the most rewarding strategies. It enables you to build awareness about your luxury brand and boost visibility among potential customers. You can also specifically target your customers based on where they work, how old they are, what university they attend, what they like, etc. Here is an example of a Facebook ad targeting married couples and young adults. 

Facebook ads

Apart from increasing brand visibility, you can also improve your customer service through social media. Social platforms have broken down barriers between customers and brands. Instead of calling a customer service line, customers are turning to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to solve their issues. 

You can further increase engagement and connect with your customers with these 2 strategies:

• Post a series of interactive Instagram stories.
• Host a Q&A live session on either Facebook or Instagram.

Experiment and analyze the type of engagement that your customers like most. You could then automate your creatives using cutting edge technology to stand out from other competitor brands. 

3. Retain brand heritage

Heritage is your luxury brand’s value proposition that builds and maintains strong relationships with consumers. Demonstrating brand heritage using creative assets has proven to be a key performance driver. It helps your brand stay unique and authentic which positively influences your brand image. Using your legacy to convey your value boosts your brand strength in the consumers’ eyes. 

However, in the current digital age, many are of the preconceived notion that heritage has to be compromised. But, to thrive in a digital setting doesn’t mean for your luxury brand heritage to be infused with trendy technology.

For example, Moncler, an Italian apparel company, commonly known for its in-store experience with designer alliances has adopted a new brand marketing strategy. The luxury apparel brand prioritized to create a digital in-store experience with monthly guest designer collaborations. 

Moncler’s designer collaboration

By retaining their brand heritage, they aim to conquer the Instagram space in the coming months. Ultimately, brand heritage is key if you want to retain strong relationships with your customers.

4. Value good SEO

Good SEO can be a goldmine for luxury brand marketing. As luxury brands focus on building great customer experiences for their physical stores, they tend to neglect their online presence. Most luxury brands have barely minimal online presence with poor SEO making them almost concealed for users.

For example, when you google search for Gucci bags, the advertisements for the same are supremely unrelated and direct you to several other eCommerce websites.  

Irrelevant ads for Gucci bags

With the entire population shifting to a digital platform, improving your SEO would prove justice for your luxury brand marketing efforts. Here are a few tips to improve your SEO:

Improve your page loading speed

Ensure that the speed of your loading page is lesser than 3 seconds as about 40% of visitors will abandon your website otherwise. 

Optimize your creative assets

Creative assets add tremendous value to your website. However, they have to be optimized by resizing and compression to improve your overall site ranking.You could use an image compression tool like TinyImage to create fast-loading images at scale.  Besides, you can also use keywords to improve your SEO. For example, instead of naming your creative asset “handbags”, you could name it “best handbags for every woman”.

Produce high-quality content

Once you begin to produce high-quality content on your website, you’ll begin to drive more traffic to your website and thereby increase your customer reach. 

5. Create a sense of exclusivity

The fundamental reason for consumers purchasing luxury goods is that luxury labels remain exclusive even when everyone is wearing them. This exclusivity forges a strong personal connection to the luxury brands they wear. If anyone could purchase a Rolls Royce, the exclusivity and appeal of the brand would plummet. With the internet being ubiquitous, several luxury brands are concerned about losing their exclusivity.

However, a great alternative to building exclusivity online would be though concierge services, brand-inclusive creative assets, private member groups, and loyalty perks. Another great way to create exclusivity for your luxury brands is to keep people abreast of your product and its offerings. It is crucial to communicate regarding your launches to encourage your customers and ensure that your luxury brand is still exclusive to them.

Here are a few examples of how luxury brands used marketing strategies using creative assets to leverage their social presence and get back in business. 

Examples of luxury brands and their creative strategies

1. Chanel

As we head into the end of 2020, Chanel is considered to be the most influential luxury brand on social media based on overall engagement. At present, it has more than 57 million followers on Twitter and Instagram alone.

So, how is Chanel standing its ground against the tremendously competitive market of luxury brands, and how do they use creative assets? Let’s walk you through the 2 main strategies that helped Chanel find its edge. 

Luxury video strategy

Chanel is knee-deep into generating and producing creative assets that have more than 300 million views on both Facebook and Youtube. These numbers are higher than any other industry leaders. Chanel’s video content seems to transform several viewers into a faithful audience. 

On youtube, Chanel is far ahead of other luxury brands having around 1.7 million subscribers. The secret to their large subscriber base is their enormous quantity of creative assets. Here’s a luxury video of Chanel introducing its Haute Couture collection. 

Multi-purpose content across platforms

Chanel has extensively researched customer interaction across different social media platforms to curate specific content for each. The brand’s Facebook page solely focuses on video content with about 60% of the posts being video-intensive creative assets. Creating personalized videos can drive customer interaction and further boost ROI.

Videos on Chanel’s Facebook page

Such a simple execution with creative assets has the potential to create high customer engagement. Chanel, despite being an old brand, had radically modernized itself through social media. It seeds content that their audience will engage with and share with enthused interest. Chanel’s expertise in digital media strengthens its consumer reach and brand impact.

2. Burberry

The fundamental strategy used by Burberry was to provide an in-store experience online. Every few months, Burberry runs an online campaign for brand-awareness which ultimately drives customers into their physical stores. Over 60% of their marketing budget is spent on digital media.

With such a marketing strategy, it’s reasonable why Burberry sits in the top 3 most followed luxury brands on social media supported by their extensive use of creative assets. Burberry has a magnanimous presence on Facebook and Instagram that draws users to its page. 

Burberry’s Facebook page

Burberry’s Instagram page

Burberry also puts forth other social marketing strategies that provide an edge to the luxury brand. It was one of the first major brands to experiment with Snapchat. One of the most successful social campaigns of Burberry was Art of the trench in 2009 which was a mini-site of collated photos of people wearing Burberry coats. 

Art of the Trench campaign

Conclusion

Therefore, a great way for luxury brands to stand out would be to enhance brand visibility by using creative assets to engage across social networks. Creative assets would allow luxury brands to gather several media posts into one digital wall. This would improve the engagement of your audience and thereby help you escalate back into the market.