What Role Does Social Media Play for Apparel Resale Franchise Owners?

Social media marketing is a necessity in today’s retail environment, with nearly 47 percent of consumers citing social as a driver of purchases.

Not only is leveraging social media impactful to generate awareness and sales, but it’s also one of the most cost-effective and simple marketing strategies available. Requiring a limited financial investment, social channels represent some of the strongest avenues for local business owners to keep their brand top-of-mind among consumers.

For Plato’s Closet®, Style Encore® and other resale franchise owners, who receive new and unique inventory every day, showcasing new products on social media is a particularly solid strategy to attract customers and generate demand.

Here’s how clothing resale franchise owners are leveraging social media to incentivize sales – both online and offline:

Capitalizing on Social Media on a Local Level

From beauty and apparel to musical instruments and sporting goods, 91 percent of retailers have a presence on at least two social channels.

Facebook is unsurprisingly the most popular network across product categories, with 100 percent saturation of apparel brands. And, although 82 percent of clothing businesses and boutiques can be found on Instagram, adoption was much slower among other retailers.

Both Facebook and Instagram can be incredibly powerful marketing tools for apparel brands. The platforms’ highly-visual nature lends to showcasing a business’s latest arrivals, especially clothing and other image-oriented products. These channels can be particularly useful for local resale business owners since they receive a constant stream of new, one-of-a-kind products every day. Social media lets them update their channels and inform audiences in real-time, quickly reaching hundreds or thousands of consumers in their target demographic.

Even if a national resale franchise brand has a corporate social presence, it’s crucial for franchise owners to also create their own social media pages for their local business. This helps them reach consumers within their specific market, which in turn, drives traffic to their particular location. Plus, within a national resale franchise brand, each store’s inventory is different and constantly changing, underscoring the importance of separate local channels for widely-variable products.

How Clothing Resale Franchise Owners Turn Social into Sales

By regularly posting photos of new products to Facebook and Instagram, Style Encore and Plato’s Closet franchise owners have found incredible success driving online sales and in-store visits alike. Many franchise owners have created an additional ecommerce component to their business via social media, offering customers the opportunity to buy products online and have the items shipped directly to them. This comes with the inherent advantages of opening their local business up to more potential clients by marketing on a national scale.

However, clothing resale franchise owners who primarily leverage the channels to feature their new products have found similar success within their local market. Utilizing Facebook Marketplace and other local listing sites, franchise owners are able to generate greater interest and drive sales for their new products. Local customers can then pick up the product in-person, so franchise owners are able to avoid any logistical hurdles with online payments and shipping while capturing more demand driving tangible, in-store sales. Similarly, some franchise owners will agree to “hold” an item for a period of time at the store, per a request of an interested local follower.

Style Encore and Plato’s Closet franchise owners have been able to optimize their clothing resale social posts by following different best practices, such as:

• Curating entire outfits instead of photographing one item at a time
• Listing the prices of each item featured
• Highlighting the cost savings from the original retail price
• Making the online payment platform link prominent and easily accessible
• Utilizing Instagram and Facebook stories
• Posting popular brands and products daily

Capturing Demand from Social-Savvy Consumers

In an increasingly fragmented digital landscape, it’s crucial for brands to reach consumers where they’re spending the majority of their time. Whereas consumers may only occasionally frequent a brick-and-mortar or ecommerce store, they spend more than two hours each day on social media. Generating interest and driving sales becomes much easier when you directly present your product to them, instead of relying on the consumer to actively seek it out.

Social media provides an avenue for national brands and local business owners alike the unparalleled opportunity to directly market to 2.2 billion consumers – for free. Although Facebook Ads and sponsored posts on Instagram can be relatively inexpensive, simply leveraging your free social channel, posting regularly and maximizing your follower base can also be impactful.

Building a strong organic following is an important and effective marketing strategy, since an authentic social presence creates a sense of trust, community and value-add for users. Particularly with respect to a brand’s marketing tactics, consumers continue to place higher importance on personalization, authenticity and transparency among businesses – all values inherent to an effective, organic social media presence.

Unlike passive ad viewers, your social media followers represent an audience replete with captured demand, whose genuine interest and trust in your business means they’re much more likely to convert into tangible sales.