There are two three documents you must never start a clothing line without. These documents are: a clothing line business plan, a marketing plan and a trademark / copyright. Successful businesses always have marketing plans that would guide them through the process of selling and distributing their products. If you want to achieve efficiency in the selling and distribution of your brand, you should create a marketing plan. Here is a sample clothing line marketing plan template you can use.
A marketing plan helps you to understand more about the clothing industry and where you currently stand in the market (your market position), it also helps you develop a strategy to beat your competitors, penetrate the market and increase your revenue. Your marketing plan should cover at least the first five years of your business. To write a marketing plan for your clothing line, you should follow the following steps-:
Writing a Marketing Plan for a Clothing Line – Sample Template
1. Describe your product
First, you should describe the type of cloths you would be producing. There are so many niches in the clothing industry, so you have to specify where you want to belong. Do you want to specialize in producing men’s wear? Or women’s clothing? Or maybe you want to opt for designing bridal outfits; you should choose a niche that would be spelt out in your marketing plan.
2. Describe your business
Next, you should describe your business. Where will your business be located? Do you plan to have branches in other places eventually? What are your expansion plans? Do you plan to branch into other niches in the future? All of these should be stated in this category. You should also include details about your employees and any other details about your business that you feel would be relevant.
3. Analyze the benefits of marketing
You should analyze why you think marketing would be beneficial to your business. How would a marketing campaign increase sales? Why do you really think you need an effective marketing strategy to achieve success in your clothing business? All of these should be carefully analyzed under this category of your marketing plan.
4. State any challenges related to marketing
What are the challenges or problems you think that you would encounter in the process of launching an effective marketing campaign? Is it the high costs? Or perhaps the inability to measure results? You should include this in your marketing plan too.
5. Create your marketing budget
Next, you should create a budget for your marketing campaign. How much are you willing to spend on promoting your brand? When you know how much you can spare, then you would know how to create marketing plan to fit your budget.
6. Market Segmentation
First, you have to identify your target market and decide on the category of people that you would want to sell your products to. You should also obtain demographic information on your target market like the age grade, income and style preferences.
You also have to consider geographical locations especially if you are looking at selling in the international market. The way people dress in China is different from the way people dress in india. And the buying style of people in the uk may not be the same as the way people buy in America, so you have to give special consideration to geographical location when writing your marketing plan.
7. Advertising and promotion strategy
It is also important to carefully analyze the advertising and promotional strategies you would use to increase awareness for your clothing line. Remember that the advertising strategy you choose must be suitable for your target market. If your clothing line caters to senior citizens between the ages of 60 – 90-, the internet might not be the best place to advertise, this is why you have to consider your target market before choosing your advertising strategy.
Few ways that you can advertise your clothing line include newspapers, fashion blogs, internet, radio and television adverts, press releases, celebrity endorsements and event sponsorships. You would also need to outline your promotional strategies under this category of your marketing plan. What promotional methods do you want to use? There are several you can consider like referral discounts, freebies, flash sales etc.
8. Sales strategy
Next, you should outline the strategies you would use to get your product into the market. Would you own a retail clothing store or create an online store? Would you make use of distributors instead? How do you plan to reach out to the people that you plan to sell your products to?
9. Pricing strategy
Another thing to include in your marketing plan is your pricing strategy. You should think of how to fix competitive prices for your products that would pull customers to you.
10. Competition
You should also analyze your major competitors and outliner the methods you plan to use to beat them in their game.
11. Industry Analysis
It would also do you a lot of good to obtain as much information about the clothing industry as you can and include it in your marketing plan. You should carefully analyze the strengths. Weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the industry and analyze the ways through which you plan to deal with them.
12. Customer Service
Your customer service operational plan should also be part of your marketing strategy. Bad customer service could lead to loss of valuable customers so you need to plan how to attend to your customer’s enquiries and complaints in a prompt and timely manner.
13. Corporate social responsibility
A lot of business owners overlook this but it is one of the fastest ways to gain more patronage. You can increase awareness for your brand and gain more customers just by being involved in charitable activities and sponsoring events like fundraisers, donations etc.
These are the basic things that should be included in your marketing plan. However, you should understand that a marketing plan is not just something you sit behind your computer to write, you have to do a careful research, analyze and obtain as much information as you can.
The information you obtain from your research is what you would use to write your marketing plan. Then you should also continue to update your marketing plan regularly and include new ideas that would help you achieve more sales.