5 Best Viral T-Shirt Marketing Strategies

Rauan Sedowlasy
7 min readSep 10, 2021

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Your t-shirt store is fantastic, but how can you get more people to buy your shirts? It’s not enough to simply post on social media or send an email blast. You need a dedicated viral t-shirt marketing campaign that focuses on generating quality traffic and leads for your store. Here are some t-shirt marketing ideas that can make your store go viral.

Start Using T-Shirt Mockups

A great way to increase your sales is by using a t-shirt mockup with a model. This way, people can get a clear idea what your t-shirt looks like on a real person. Online mockup generators can do it in a minute.

T shirt mockup with a model
Mockup made on Placeit

How to Make a T-Shirt Mockup

Here’s how you can make your mockup:

Step 1: Go to Placeit and click on T-Shirt Mockups

Step 2: You can choose only free templates if you want

Step 3: Insert your design

Step 4: Adjust the size and shirt’s color and click on free download

T-shirt business checklist

How to advertise t-shirts online? Here’s my short but effective checklist for your t-shirt business:

  1. If you’re looking to start a t-shirt business, the first thing you need to do is come up with a great name for your company. You can use business name generators.
  2. Next, you’ll want to create an eye-catching logo that will represent your brand and help it stand out from other companies in the industry. You don’t need to design it from scratch, choose any template and use drag and drop editor.
  3. Now that you have a logo and company name picked out, it’s time to get started on designing some shirts! You’ll need images or graphics for your shirts, so people know what they are getting when they purchase them.
  4. Once all of this has been taken care of, it’s time to set up shop! This includes setting up your website and social media accounts where customers can order their products. If you don’t have a website, you can upload your designs on print on demand stores like Redbubble or Teespring. It’s completely free!
  5. Finally, you’ll want to take advantage of marketing your products to reach as many customers as possible.

Focus On One Niche Market in Your T-shirt Business

The most important part of a successful t-shirt marketing campaign is to focus on one niche. The best way to achieve this is by designing shirts that are related to a specific topic. This would allow you to develop a brand and target a certain audience. Here are some niches you can consider for your t shirt business.

  • Babysitter t-shirt store

This store is focused on selling t-shirts related to childcare. You can create lots of Typography Designs using keywords like “Best Babysitter Ever” or “I’m a Babysitter and a Very Hot One”. You can easily target your audience by running Facebook ads by profession.

  • Underwater World
  • Bride
  • Bus Driver
  • Parkour
  • Choreographer

If you’re not very good at making cool t-shirt designs, I’d recommend to check out Christopher Delorenzo’s Skillshare class called “Hey, Cool Shirt”. It really helped me to improve my designs. This is a referral link, but I wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t valuable. You can watch any class on Skillshare for free for 14 days.

Christopher Delorenzo’s class about t shirt design
T-Shirt Design Class by Christopher Delorenzo

Content Marketing as a Part of Your T-Shirt Marketing Campaign

Content marketing is the process of producing and sharing relevant, valuable, and consistent content. The ultimate goal is to attract a target audience. Content marketing includes building relationships with your customers by developing your brand identity. You can do this by targeting one specific niche market in your t-shirt business.

A successful content marketing strategy should include a range of different approaches in order to keep things fresh and interesting. Here are some examples how you can drive more traffic to your t shirt store:

  • Write a blog post on Medium or on your own website and send customers to your store
  • Make a YouTube videos (how-to’s, product reviews, etc.)
  • Create an infographic
  • Post to social media sites like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter.

Your content should be about the needs of your customers, not the needs of your business. It should be valuable and helpful to them, so they keep coming back for more.

GermanShepherdShop is an example of a company with a great marketing plan. They consistently post GSD related pins and their Pinterest account gets about 5.7 million views per month, that’s how they drive traffic to their website where they sell t-shirts and lots of other stuff.

Example of a business with a great marketing plan

How to Use Pinterest for Your T-Shirt Business:

Step 1: Create a new Pinterest account that links to your t-shirt store.

Step 2: Pin some products from your store to a board of products similar in style and theme.

Step 3: Follow what is going on with popular pins in the field of your store by tracking hashtags related to the niche you have selected. You can do this on a mobile app or by going to Google and typing in different keywords. This way, you’ll know when new content comes out that is related to your niche! For example, “fashion” pins will come up if you type in keyword “fashion” on Google.

Step 4: Follow users who pin related pins to online stores and similar content in your niche.

Step 6: Post a couple of pins every day, you can easily design them on Canva.

Use Facebook Ads For T-Shirts

If you’re looking to increase traffic and leads for your t-shirt store, you may want to consider using Facebook ads. These ads can be aimed at different niches and professions to really target your market. You might find that running Facebook ads will be just what you need to get interested buyers coming into your store!

Here Are a Few Reasons to Consider Facebook Ads for Your T-Shirt Store:

Target Specific Audience

One of the biggest advantages to running Facebook ads is that you can target specific demographics. If your store sells t-shirts for moms, then you might only want to run an ad aimed at mothers. You can also target people by profession or college they attend, like dentists or teachers. This will help people find your store and its products more easily on Facebook!

See if a T-Shirt Design Is Popular

Another great reason to use Facebook ads is that you can see how popular a certain t-shirt design is. You can make sure that your ads are running for designs people like and would want to buy, as opposed to wasting money on designs you think they’d want. You can also see how many people are clicking on the advertisement, so that you know approximately how much traffic it’s generating.

Track Your Campaign

You can also track a variety of statistics. You can see how many clicks your ad got, how many people visited your store, and which advertisements were most successful or popular. This way, you can optimize your campaign to make it as effective as possible for future efforts!

Take Advantage of Viral Trends

Another great benefit to Facebook ads is the fact that you can jump onto viral trends by creating t-shirt designs specific to those topics. You might have seen that people are currently talking about cryptocurrency, so now would be a good time to create t-shirts related to Bitcoin and Cardano!

Is Online T-Shirt Business Profitable?

There are hundreds of people making millions of dollars by selling t-shirts online. So, yes, it can be very profitable. Print on demand sites make it even more profitable since you don’t have to pay for expensive retail space, shipping costs are much lower, there is no need for inventory storage or shipping related expenses. Now you have to make sure people know about the shirts you’re selling.

Conclusion

If you’ve been struggling with marketing your t-shirt business, it might be time to rethink the way you market.

You have a lot of options when it comes to marketing your t-shirt store. You need to find the right niche market and audience in order to get noticed.

In general, content marketing is one of the most cost-effective types of digital advertising that will help grow your business over time, since customers are more likely to purchase from sites they’ve been following or visiting regularly already.

It can also be helpful to form partnerships with influencers who have an established reach within that target audience.

If there’s anything else I can help with, please let me know!

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something using these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks.

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