Little Kidogo Merchandise — The State of Social Media Marketing for Vintage Clothes in 2017

This blog summarizes what I have learnt about marketing a vintage goods business using Social Media.

So generally speaking about internet commerce, they say that “One of the most efficient ways to sell your product is through multiple online channels.” However they also say that one should be weary of the web’s all welcome, everything everywhere status as it “opens up a whole world of factors with potential to help or hurt your sales depending on how you handle them.” — (sorry I lost the link to this quote. I’ll attribute the quote to ‘The Internet’ as a substitute here, only this once…promise ;)

Okay so how does one handle the marketing of an online vintage business without ‘hurting’ sales?

Well firstly there are quite a few ways of doing marketing online. However, luckily for now we do not need to worry about any other means of marketing -

1. Because our budget is currently on diet (JOKES! Obvz we don’t have a budget, if I have to spell it out!?!)
2. Apparently Social Media Marketing and selling are both ideal for vintage businesses.

[Younger consumers are] going to bargain shops. They’re going to end up on Instagram. It’s not just the purchase. It’s the story behind the piece.

— Roy Deyoung, PMX Agency

So with our decision kind of made for us, let’s look at why and how to use social media marketing for a Vintage Business:

Why:

• low maintenance nature of sharing and shopping for products.

Seasoned vintage hunters have been trained to shop in this no-fuss way through marketplaces and classified ads.

— Shopify ( https://www.shopify.com/blog/211022217-sell-vintage-clothing-online )

• It’s free for as long as you want
• It works for other vintage businesses

Azeezat and Dare [from COAL & TERRY] have grown the account (and the business) without spending money on any formal advertising.

— Coal & Terry

How:

I’ve realized that people like to see something cool, that’s basically what they share and talk about in a nutshell. But now, what’s very important is to know what your customer thinks is cool (thats a fish from another pond though, check out my blog on finding your niche market here_)

So basically what happens after you know what your target market finds cool is the magic — literally LOL. You need to make magic and yeah, what’s magic again, ILLUSION! Business after all is also magic, Smoke and Mirrors Bruv, SMoke n Mirrors — maybe pancakes too, but in this case the pancake isn’t necessarily real — see what I did there :D

Anywhoos, so what I’m trying to say is that you need to disguise your product in the COOL. Make it drip with cool, ooze that which your customer finds irresistible and put your product in there somewhere, just pop it in — and POW! You have social media marketing technique that will make your customers scream like groupies and queue for days to get your goods — like they got smothered with some of that “Damn I want that! Miracle Marketing Cream” that’s so darn rare and elusive.

So right now you are probably asking yourself, where can I get this Miracle Cream? and “How does it work?!” — woah now you little eager easel, let’s breathe,keep calm and read on, its right down here…

• Use shout outs from celeb or influencer partners
• Focus on urging customers to create new content with your product in it. They call this user-generated content. It comes in many forms, depending on which platform of course, but one e.g. customer photos:

We actively ask customers to share their photos. As soon as they get their purchase confirmation there’s also a note in there saying, ‘Hey, this is our Instagram. Make sure to tag us. We’ll post you. We can’t wait to see you.’ This also makes them see that we are a reputable business and we’ve had real people buy from us.

— Coal & Terry

Coal & Terry Instagram Engagement

• When posting customer pictures, give them an idea of how they could style their clothes.
• Use any opportunity to create content.
• Make sure to give the context of the content you share so that it is always relate-able to your customers somehow.

We do a lot of behind the scenes to let people know what’s coming next. It looks cool and pretty but really, it’s a huge selling tool for us.

— Coal & Terry ( https://www.shopify.com/blog/211022217-sell-vintage-clothing-online )

• Make focused efforts on customer feedback.
• Chat to customers from your target market.
• Listen to customers who complain or suggest improvements.

“Listen to your first customers, the people who are willing to try out your product or service before everyone else, you can learn a ton and incorporate that learning into making your company better. We randomly facebook chatted with hundreds of people we thought might be in our target market before we built or bought anything and we continue to try and get as much feedback as possible. Really listen to the people who complain or have suggestions for improvement, if you don’t get defensive these people will be honest and tell you what your mom won’t. It’s easy for a company to say they talk to customers but it’s a lot harder to actually do. We aren’t talking about sending out a passive survey and asking for responses, we are talking about actually getting on the phone or on a live chat and having a one-on-one conversation.”

— Shinesty ( https://www.shopify.co.za/success-stories/shinesty-clothing )

• Make your content relatable and “hyper-local”

Our approach is creating hyper-local content for each of the countries that we operate in. That helps a lot. Kenya feels like, ‘This content was created by Kenyans for us’. Ghanaians and Nigerians feel the same way.

— Boakye Boampoing , OMG Voice (non vintage reference I know, but super important so just had to put it here!)

• find out the places your audience are, like WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, — there are all sorts of ways and means we use to find people.

We just give the content to our audience and most of our distribution is done via social media, social apps, SMS, and other ways. We create content and we find where to distribute it. That is what has really contributed to our success.

— Boakye Boampoing, OMG Voice (https://www.mediaupdate.co.za/media/141189/omg-digitals-tips-on-winning-over-african-audiences)

• Test out the kind of content that would work. Asked yourself ‘How advanced are these countries? What kind of content is already there, and what is nobody doing’ —
• Create video content (duh!)
• Keep customers engaged and entertained and give the brand an identity by means of a constant flow of quality and valuable content.
• Gain an intimate understanding of local markets.
• Create buzz by letting your customers in on your treasure hunts.
• Create a blog focusing on your vintage selling methods, efforts, item crushes and so forth.

In short social media marketing is about creating ads that do not necessarily look like ads but short content that people genuinely want to watch. So the same goes for marketing vintage goods then of course.

OKay, so to round it all off

Social media today is a multi-media affair. In order to tempt, entice and persuade users to make a purchase online, high-quality images are needed to help fans imagine the products in their hands.

See my blog on Product photography for selling vintage here

More about the author:

Carla Inez Espost currently consults, trains, produces, manages and creates Immersive content for Little Kidogo.

Little Kidogo is a distributed collective of world-class professionals on an ambitious mission to enhance lives through enabling African artisans to live off their work.

“We spend our time building bleeding-edge products that we believe will enrich our lives and the lives of the communities we live in. We are working to enable more Africans to become producers of digital content rather than consumers. We believe we can achieve this goal by actively sharing our learnings and the methods we utilize day by day to build great products.”