I worked with 252 Clothing Brands and discovered this...

Summary

Elijah Delporte shares 40 invaluable lessons distilled from his experience working with 252 clothing brands, aiming to enhance your fashion brand's content strategy. He highlights the significance of community building, offering value over direct selling, and optimizing content for engagement rather than superficial metrics. Delporte emphasizes learning from failures, avoiding the pitfall of following mainstream trends, and identifying your brand's unique narrative. By targeting niche influencers, creating meaningful connections, and focusing on storytelling, brands can amplify their presence and foster a loyal community. These discoveries challenge traditional marketing methods in the fashion industry.

Highlights

• Most clothing brands make the mistake of turning their page into a giant ad. Instead, focus on offering value first! 🍀
• Boosting Instagram posts is a facade; it clouds genuine feedback and learning. 🚫
• A clear definition of your target community aids in crafting compelling content. 🧠
• Harness the power of niche influencers, rather than generic fashion influencers, for better brand representation. 🎯
• The 50/30/20 content rule helps maintain audience engagement by diversifying posts. 📈
• Establish personal connections by working with local influencers face-to-face. 🤝

Key Takeaways

• Don't turn your brand's Instagram into a giant ad; bring value first! 🙌
• Avoid boosting posts to prevent inflated metrics and ensure honest learning. 🔍
• Craft your content strategy by defining your unique community and values. 💡
• Engage with niche influencers for more personalized brand promotion. 🧩

Overview

When starting with clothing brands, Elijah quickly learned that merely posting product photos on Instagram is like turning your profile into a billboard. Instead, Elijah stresses the importance of delivering valuable content before selling. By seeing content from a viewer's perspective, brands can enhance enjoyment and value.

Elijah digs into the traps of boosting posts and superficial engagement figures. He labels boosting as a shortcut that deprives brands of learning opportunities. Instead, authentic content that resonates with audience interests is more likely to foster genuine engagement and growth.

The journey through 252 fashion brands taught Elijah the necessity of community and purpose in content creation. By aligning content with shared beliefs and involving niche influencers, brands create a stronger identity and reap the benefits of a loyal audience. Elijah encourages brands to step out of the monotony of fashion content by drawing inspiration from unexpected places and focusing on storytelling.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The author shares their initial misconception that a clean product photo was the key to successful content creation for clothing brands. Through experience with 252 brands, they've learned what works and what doesn't. To help others, they plan to share '40 brutal truths' about fashion content creation. The first lesson addresses the common mistake of only posting product images on Instagram pages, which can lead to a monotonous and ineffective brand page.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Lesson 1: Providing Value First Lesson 1: Providing Value First highlights the importance of delivering value before making sales pitches. It draws a comparison to ads on platforms like YouTube, which viewers often skip. The key takeaway is that a brand should not be 'skippable' like an ad. To achieve this, brands should assess their content from the audience's perspective, ensuring it provides genuine value and enjoyment to the viewer, fostering a sense of community and engagement.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Lesson 2: Avoid Boosting Posts Lesson 2 discusses the pitfalls of boosting posts artificially on Instagram. The example given is of an individual who had many views but lacked engagement such as comments and followers, and the quality of content was subpar. The crucial learning is to avoid pouring money into boosting posts because it only serves to inflate visibility artificially without achieving genuine engagement and growth.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Lesson 3: Defining Your Community In Lesson 3: Defining Your Community, the focus is on understanding the importance of genuine engagement with your audience rather than relying on inflated results through paid boosts. The chapter emphasizes that as a brand owner, experiencing and learning from failures is crucial. These failures allow you to discern what strategies are effective and help prevent continuous monetary investment into strategies that do not genuinely engage your audience. Real engagement should lead to product sales, and it's essential to embrace and learn from failures quickly for growth and improvement.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Lesson 4: Conditionally Releasing Products Lesson 4: Conditionally Releasing Products - The chapter discusses the challenges of content creation in the fashion industry, particularly when targeting a broad audience that enjoys wearing clothes. Traditional approaches like flatlays, studio shoots, and model photos are seen as overused. To stand out, it's important to specify the community you aim to build by clarifying the shared beliefs, actions, values, cultures, ideologies, lifestyles, and traits of the people who will join your community.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Lesson 5: Using Niche Influencers The chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding the target audience's needs and what unites them as a community. It warns against the common mistake made by clothing brand owners who invest heavily in stock without having a following or understanding their market, leading to financial losses and unsold inventory.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Lesson 6: Staying Within Your Resources Lesson 6: Staying Within Your Resources discusses a strategic approach to releasing products. It emphasizes the idea of conditionally releasing products by setting conditions such as reaching a target number of followers rather than relying on a fixed date. This strategy involves using followers or a mailing list as a more reliable metric for determining when to release or announce products. The chapter suggests multiplying the number of followers by the worst conversion rate to establish a more secure plan for product release.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Lesson 7: Look Beyond for Inspiration Lesson 7 emphasizes the importance of seeking inspiration beyond the conventional paths, such as not solely relying on fashion influencers whose generic appeal may not yield expected sales returns or adequate return on investment. It suggests that halving your expected sales numbers can provide a more realistic target.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Lesson 8: Engaging Storytelling This chapter highlights the importance of engaging storytelling in building a brand identity, specifically in the context of fashion brands. It emphasizes the value of collaborating with niche-specific influencers to differentiate a brand from the multitude of others in the market. By targeting influencers with more specialized audiences, brands can potentially achieve higher conversion rates. An example is provided of a clothing brand in the basketball niche, illustrating the effectiveness of this strategy.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Lesson 9: Utilizing Trial Reels Lesson 9: Utilizing Trial Reels covers the pitfalls of partnering with top-tier influencers like NBA players. The chapter highlights that brands often invest significant resources in sending products to these influencers hoping for exposure, but frequently receive little engagement or return of investment due to these influencers already having substantial sponsorship deals. The lesson underscored is to avoid overreaching by aiming for high-profile partnerships that may not yield the expected benefits, and instead, focus on more strategic, suitable collaborations.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Lesson 10: The 50-30-20 Content Method The chapter discusses the 50-30-20 content method which provides a structured approach to content creation and influencer collaboration. It advises to collaborate with influencers who are of similar size rather than those with millions of followers, as it is more manageable and beneficial. The personal experience shared underlines the challenge of maintaining creativity in content, especially when repeatedly working with similar themes, such as clothing brands. The method encourages diversifying content creation efforts to avoid burnout and enhance creativity.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Lesson 11: In-Person Influencer Collaborations Lesson 11 discusses the value of looking outside of one's industry for inspiration in content creation, specifically highlighting "In-Person Influencer Collaborations." It uses the example of a football brand to illustrate how borrowing elements from other fields can revitalize and inspire fashion content. The idea is to draw creative ideas from unrelated areas like football clubs, players, and themed pages, showing that inspiration from diverse sectors is beneficial even for seemingly unrelated fields like clothing brands.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Lesson 12: Be Divisive The chapter "Be Divisive" offers a narrative on how contrasting styles of storytelling can impact engagement. It presents a scenario in a factory setting, where a chaotic atmosphere filled with overheating machines and stressed workers creates a vivid picture of a challenging work environment. The narrative contrasts different story-telling approaches, presumably aiming to illustrate how various descriptive techniques can maintain or heighten audience engagement, particularly for those interested in building communities around shared interests, like football.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Lesson 13: Developing Characters In this chapter, the focus is on developing characters in storytelling. Different approaches to storytelling are discussed, including 'helicopter storytelling' which provides an overview, and 'POV storytelling' which immerses the audience with dialogue, setting, and context. These techniques can be applied to personal stories or brand narratives, helping to convey a deeper connection with the audience.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Lesson 14: Use Close Friends Feature Lesson 14 focuses on the 'Use Close Friends Feature'. The transcript discusses leveraging social media strategies, predominantly focusing on Instagram's Close Friends feature and suggesting the integration of trial reels to rapidly increase audience engagement and growth. Lesson nine previously emphasized using trial reels to test content among non-followers by adjusting single elements in different content versions. A notable example shared was a brand increasing its followers from 300 to 25,000 in two weeks by employing these strategies.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Lesson 15: Offer Unique Collab Opportunities Lesson 15 emphasizes the importance of creating multiple versions of content to determine which performs best before posting it on your main page, promising significant growth as a result. The chapter also introduces the '50 30 20' method for content posting, suggesting that 50% of content should focus on world-building, highlighting the significance of specific and ultra-relevant references.
• 08:00 - 08:30: Lesson 16: Avoid Bulk Content Creation Lesson 16: Avoid Bulk Content Creation discusses the importance of tailoring marketing content to your community. It emphasizes understanding the unique cultural elements within your community, such as specific gear or routines, and integrating these into your content strategy. The chapter breaks down the type of content that should be created: 50% should be cultural content that only your community can relate to, 30% should show activity-focused content with real community members using your products, and the remaining 20% should serve as product refreshers to remind audiences about your offerings. This approach helps in maintaining a strong brand identity and engagement with the audience.
• 08:30 - 09:00: Lesson 17: Content Series Lesson 17 emphasizes the strategy of working directly with influencers by shooting content in person. The chapter suggests that although influencers might not deliver quality content on time and require constant follow-ups, filming in person allows for better quality control, more content creation, and stronger relationship building. Even if it means working with influencers who have fewer followers, the benefits of direct collaboration outweigh the disadvantages.
• 09:00 - 09:30: Lesson 18: Community Challenges Chapter 18 discusses unique challenges that communities face. It begins by suggesting the value of in-person activities to engage with people around you. The chapter mentions an example where Tricko successfully sold out a product quickly due to strong community engagement and effective word-of-mouth marketing, without relying on traditional advertising methods. This illustrates the power of building a loyal customer base and the importance of authentic interactions.
• 09:30 - 10:00: Lesson 19: Fake In-Person Events The chapter 'Lesson 19: Fake In-Person Events' discusses two types of people in the context of consumer behavior. The first type are those who easily fall for advertisements and purchase items without necessity, filling their closets with unnecessary products. The second type, whom the content targets, are the leaders and purpose-driven individuals who look beyond the advertisements and make conscious choices. These individuals are characterized as those who strive for greatness and pursue their life purpose with determination. The speaker aligns these attributes with the brand Trio, suggesting that it caters to people who are willing to go the extra mile in pursuit of their goals.
• 10:00 - 10:30: Lesson 20: Analyzing Loyal Customers Lesson 20 discusses the concept of loyal customers and maintaining exclusivity. It introduces the idea of a 'waitlist' to engage with those truly interested in the vision presented. This chapter emphasizes the importance of timely participation, as missing a scheduled 'drop' results in having to wait another month. It reinforces that commitment to quality and uniqueness cannot be rushed, and encourages potential customers to make a deliberate choice whether to join or not, fostering a sense of exclusivity and dedication among the audience.
• 10:30 - 11:00: Lesson 21: Building Relationships in DMs The chapter discusses the need to be divisive in branding in order to solidify and strengthen community loyalty by making clear who is part of the community and who is not.
• 11:00 - 11:30: Lesson 22: Sell the Lifestyle, Not Just the Product In this chapter, the focus is on the importance of developing recognizable characters for your brand. These characters can include the brand owner, employees, key customers, or influencers who consistently appear on your brand page. The chapter emphasizes that having familiar faces associated with your brand is an underrated but effective strategy for content creation and fostering a community. It suggests looking into how well brands like UVU manage their communities, as discussed in detail in Lesson 14. The chapter also touches upon the concept of a 'clubhouse' as a communal gathering place where members can interact and converse about topics of shared interest, highlighting the importance of community building in brand development.
• 11:30 - 12:00: Lesson 23: Consistent Posting This chapter discusses the importance of consistent posting for building a community around a brand, especially for clothing brands. It highlights the use of email and SMS lists as key tools for nurturing a sense of loyalty. However, there is often a significant leap between simply following a brand on social media platforms like Instagram and committing to provide personal information like emails and phone numbers. To bridge this gap, the chapter suggests utilizing Instagram's 'close friends' feature, which allows brands to selectively choose who to include in this insider group, thereby enhancing community integration and interaction. This approach reportedly leads to a higher conversion rate as followers become more invested in the brand.
• 12:00 - 12:30: Lesson 24: Use Existing Resources Lesson 24 highlights the importance of leveraging existing resources for better engagement. It suggests sharing exclusive content or special interactions with close friends to boost engagement on close friends stories. Lesson 15 is revisited, which stresses offering influencers something valuable enough that they would pay for it, rather than expecting to pay them for a typical collaboration.
• 12:30 - 13:00: Lesson 25: Focused Platform Strategy Lesson 25: Focused Platform Strategy emphasizes the importance of strategic collaborations with influencers to promote brands. By offering to create content featuring your products for influencers, you not only save them the hassle of hiring professionals but also tap into their established audience. This mutual benefit is a powerful marketing strategy.
• 13:00 - 13:30: Lesson 26: Create a Tagline The chapter emphasizes the importance of not creating content in bulk, especially for beginners. It suggests adopting a nimble approach that allows for quick adjustments, testing, experimenting, and changes according to what works and what doesn't.
• 13:30 - 14:00: Lesson 27: Focus on Storytelling Lesson 27 focuses on the importance of storytelling in content creation. It emphasizes the use of content series rather than individual content pieces. Just like a TV show, where the series represents the overall concept, and each episode represents individual pieces, storytelling should maintain consistent characters, setting, and fundamentals while varying the events. Using Nike as an example, the chapter suggests content ideas like interviewing athletes, where the overarching theme (Nike's brand and athletic focus) remains consistent, but individual stories differ.
• 14:00 - 14:30: Lesson 28: Ideation Process The chapter titled 'Ideation Process' discusses strategies for content creation, emphasizing the importance of reusing existing content ideas instead of creating new ones from scratch each time. It highlights lesson 18, which suggests starting community challenges that encourage participants to share content while featuring your product. This approach not only engages the audience but also helps in selling products as people partake in these challenges. The idea is to ensure that the challenges align with your brand's identity. Additionally, lesson 19 introduces insights from working with diverse groups, like a Christian organization, pointing out how specific collaborations can benefit content ideation and brand engagement.
• 14:30 - 15:00: Lesson 29: Focus on the Loyal Minority Lesson 29 emphasizes the importance of focusing on a loyal minority of your audience when planning events or initiatives. It shares an example of an athletic brand that wanted to engage with its relatively inactive community. Instead of waiting to plan a large event far in the future, they were advised to start immediately by inviting friends, emphasizing the value of creating content from the event rather than worrying about attendance numbers. The lesson highlights that the impact often lies in the content shared online, reaching even those who follow from afar.
• 15:00 - 15:30: Lesson 30: Write a Mission Statement Lesson 30 focuses on the importance of having a mission statement to ensure people recognize and are aware of a community's existence, allowing them to engage even if they can't attend physical events. Highlighting the impact of virtual events on achieving similar engagement and content effects as real ones, it underscores the potential to gradually attract genuine participants.
• 15:30 - 16:00: Lesson 31: Don't Center on Personal Brand The chapter emphasizes the importance of analyzing the Instagram profiles of loyal customers. By examining what they post, who they follow, and their beliefs and values, businesses can gain insights into their customers' interests, ideologies, and lifestyles. This information helps to identify common traits among loyal customers, which can be leveraged to attract and replicate similar customer profiles. The key takeaway is the value of analyzing customer behavior to strengthen and expand a brand's customer base.
• 16:00 - 16:30: Lesson 32: Repeat Success In Chapter 32, titled 'Repeat Success,' the focus is on understanding and engaging your community effectively. It's emphasized that knowing the interests and beliefs of your community helps in deciding the content to post on your page. The chapter also highlights the importance of building relationships through direct messages (DMs). It encourages reaching out to your audience to ask about their preferences and desires for your content, fostering engagement and insight into your audience's interests.
• 16:30 - 17:00: Lesson 33: Contextual Product Shoots The chapter discusses how brands can strengthen their connection with their community through contextual product shoots. It emphasizes that strong associations between a brand and certain activities, lifestyles, or people lead to a more powerful brand identity. The difference between fashion labels that are merely clothing businesses and those that are true clothing brands is also highlighted. A true brand goes beyond just selling products; it's about creating and reinforcing these associations.
• 17:00 - 17:30: Lesson 34: Integrate Content Creation Lesson 34 focuses on the concept of integrating content creation as a valuable tool for brand strengthening. One key takeaway is that a strong brand identity is not solely dependent on the products you sell, but rather on the lifestyle and values you project through your brand. The idea is to market lifestyles that come with the brand, creating a consistent and engaging content strategy that doesn't rely exclusively on product launches. By doing so, brands maintain engagement and grow their audience with evergreen content, which remains relevant regardless of new product releases or specific timeframes.
• 17:30 - 18:00: Lesson 35: Avoid Big Brand Comparison Lesson 35 emphasizes the importance of consistency when posting content for a brand. The key takeaway is not to expect immediate results from limited efforts, similar to not expecting muscle growth from only a few bicep curls. Rather, consistent posting, like doing thousands of reps over time, is crucial. By posting daily, brands can gain a competitive edge over those who don't maintain this level of activity.
• 18:00 - 18:30: Lesson 36: Simplify Content Complexity This chapter discusses the importance of minimizing the time gap between content posts to quickly understand what works and what doesn't in content creation. It advises content creators to utilize available resources, like using a current iPhone camera due to its high-quality imaging capability, rather than investing in new expensive equipment without weighing the cost versus the actual value it brings to their content production.
• 18:30 - 19:00: Lesson 37: Timing for Private Accounts The chapter discusses the financial considerations of investing in high-quality camera equipment for a business. It questions whether the investment will directly translate into equivalent sales revenue. The narrator advises that instead of spending a significant amount on a camera, learning lighting techniques could enhance the quality of any average camera.
• 19:00 - 19:30: Lesson 38: Avoid Trivial Content In Lesson 38 titled 'Avoid Trivial Content', the main focus is on the importance of concentrating on one social media platform to achieve mastery. The lesson recounts the personal experience of failing to make an impact on YouTube until the decision was made to focus exclusively on it. This approach of channeling efforts into mastering one platform, instead of spreading focus thinly across multiple platforms, is emphasized as the key to growth. The author addresses a common concern about putting all efforts into one platform by acknowledging that when you're starting out, you essentially 'don't have any eggs' to worry about distributing.
• 19:30 - 20:00: Lesson 39: Invest in Education Lesson 39, titled 'Invest in Education,' does not appear directly referenced in the transcript provided. Instead, the transcript seems to reference 'Lesson 26,' focusing on branding strategies such as creating a succinct tagline to effectively communicate a brand's narrative, akin to Nike's 'Just Do It.' Further details specific to 'Invest in Education' are not included in this excerpt.
• 20:00 - 20:30: Conclusion & Call to Action The conclusion emphasizes the importance of storytelling in brand content, rather than focusing solely on lifestyle or superficial visuals. It highlights the example of Nike's 'Just Do It' slogan as an embodiment of substance in branding. The call to action is for brands to focus on meaningful engagement with their audience through storytelling, rather than creating content that lacks depth and fails to connect with the audience.

I worked with 252 Clothing Brands and discovered this... Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 when I first started creating content for clothing brands I thought a clean product photo was all you need to get good results i could not have been more wrong and after working with 252 clothing brands on their content strategies I've seen exactly what works and what's a waste of time and so to save you the struggle here are 40 brutal truths about creating fashion content that I wish I knew sooner lesson number one most clothing brands when they go to creating an Instagram page only post their product and when you go onto their page that's all you see and it looks
• 00:30 - 01:00 like a giant ad the problem here is that ads are skippable when you see an ad come on up on a YouTube video for example you just can't wait until you can press skip ad and you don't want to be skippable as a clothing brand and so lesson one is to provide value first and sell second watch your page from the perspective of someone in your audience and think do I actually enjoy the content I'm seeing here and what would provide value to me as a viewer or someone that wants to be a part of this community lesson two i had a brand owner that came to me saying that he was
• 01:00 - 01:30 having trouble growing his page and learning how the content algorithm works and I looked at one of his posts and he had all of these views but no comments and no engagements and very few followers and the content wasn't that great either i quickly realized that he was boosting his posts on Instagram artificially these aren't ads these are just he's pouring money into the posts that that it shows to more people so lesson two is don't boost posts the reason why is because it artificially
• 01:30 - 02:00 inflates the effects or the results that you see which means you don't get the opportunity to learn as a brand owner what actually works and what doesn't and it means that you're going to have to perpetually invest money into boosting and it's not even really being consumed or enjoyed or interacted with by the audience that's seeing it so what's the point of doing that if you're not going to sell products on the other side it's actually very important to feel every failure in the beginning because the quicker you fail the quicker you learn
• 02:00 - 02:30 lesson three content creation becomes very hard when you're making it for people that like to wear clothes because it's highly broad and that restricts you to flatlays studio shoots model photos and we've seen enough of that on the internet and so lesson three is define the community you're trying to build when you clarify the shared beliefs actions values cultures ideologies lifestyles and traits between the people that are joining your community you know
• 02:30 - 03:00 exactly what kind of content is going to serve them and what brings them together and what unites them what the common string is because that at the end of the day is what community is made of it's a commonality between everyone in it lesson four i have had countless clothing brand owners come onto the calls with me and tell me about the many thousands of dollars they've lost and the boxes full of stock that are collecting dust in their garage and it's because of one simple reason they didn't have any following they decided to go out order something in bulk and then
• 03:00 - 03:30 release it to absolutely no one and no one bought it of course and so that's why lesson four is to conditionally release products what does this mean it means you put conditions not a date but this is how many followers I'm going to get to before I even release anything or even announce anything you could do the same with an email or SMS list and it's a much more sure way to go about releasing products a great rule of thumb is to take your number of followers multiply it by your worst conversion
• 03:30 - 04:00 rate and cut that number in half that equals what you were most definitely going to sell out in terms of number of units lesson number five i often get people coming to me saying that they've invested so much into influencers but nothing has come back as a result from it they didn't get the sales they expected and certainly have not got the return on investment that is to match what they put in and so my answer to this is lesson five stop investing into fashion influencers they're generic
• 04:00 - 04:30 we've all seen it before and their in their audiences are highly monetized they've seen so much fashion and you are going to be a needle in the hay stack in terms of all the other clothing brands that appear on their page so instead invest in niche specific influencers and that's going to help you build your brand identity the audiences are probably monetized much less which gives you the opportunity for a higher conversion rate lesson six i was working with a clothing brand that was in the basketball niche and they were adamant
• 04:30 - 05:00 about working with top NBA players as influencers and so they would reach out to them and they would even fly out to meet them just to give them their products the only problem was they'd spend so much and this NBA player would barely give them anything back barely even showing their product or wearing their product cuz they already had all the sponsors and it was hella expensive with no returns and so lesson six is don't punch above your weight leave the really big guys for those brands with
• 05:00 - 05:30 lots and lots of resources if you've got a thousand followers find an influencer with 5,000 or less around the similar size to you don't be reaching out to those with millions and millions cuz you'll get little from them it's going to run you dry you're going to go broke and it's just not worth your time lesson seven when I started creating content with clothing brands over time I found it hard to get creative ideas again i found myself doing the same flatlays and product videos it was getting really
• 05:30 - 06:00 boring and so lesson seven is look beyond the fashion industry looking outside of the fashion industry for content inspiration can really ignite the fire once again take a football brand for example and this only works with niche specific brands i'm going to be looking at football clubs football players football theme pages all of which don't really have anything to do with fashion and the kind of content they're posting I'm thinking is valuable to clothing brands that is going to give
• 06:00 - 06:30 me some ideas of what I can post to gather a community of footballers too lesson eight i'm going to read you the same story in two different ways and you tell me which one is more engaging last year I went to a factory in LA to check on my manufacturer and the place was a mess machines overheating workers stressed and the owner scrambling to keep up with orders here it is the second time the air rire of burning fabric as I stepped over a pile of halfstitched hoodies the owner wipes sweat from his forehead muttering "We're three weeks behind." I glanced at the
• 06:30 - 07:00 machines one was smoking this was my manufacturer the first version was helicopter storytelling where I give you an overview of what happened the second kind was POV i bring you with me i give you dialogue i give you setting context and you really feel what's going on do the same with your page and when you're telling stories with your brand if you want to tell a story about how your brand started behind the scenes or maybe with someone that embodies your brand
• 07:00 - 07:30 really encourage them to bring you into the scene using those vital elements of POV storytelling lesson nine i had a brand that came to me with 300 followers and two weeks later he grew his audience to 25,000 how did we do it lesson nine is use trial reels this is a feature on Instagram that allows you to test pieces of content with nonf followers people that aren't in your audience and what we did is for every single piece of content we tested three different versions just changing one element that element was
• 07:30 - 08:00 the hook and so I encourage you to do the same for everything that you post create three versions it doesn't take that much more time post them as trial reels and whichever one performs the best that's when you upload it to your main page and I promise your growth will go through the roof lesson 10 how much do you post of what content as a clothing brand well Day Media introduced me to the 50 3020 method and it goes something like this 50% of your content should be world building this is the ultra specific references to things that
• 08:00 - 08:30 only people in your community understand for a footballer it's the gear that they bring to training it's the whistles from the coach anything that's like a mood board 30% then is activity focused it's actually seeing your product on real people in your community doing the thing that they do when they wear your clothing the last 20% is product refreshers and this is where you remind the audience that you do sell clothing and that's what this is about at the end of the day lesson 11 some brand owners find themselves frustrated because their
• 08:30 - 09:00 influencers don't deliver content on time and when they do it's crap anyway or they have to hassle and follow up a million times for it and that's why lesson 11 is to shoot with influencers in person always find them in your local area and if it means you have to downgrade the level or the status of the influencer the number of followers that they have then so be it but you can shoot a lot more stuff with them at a lot higher quality that you have control over and you build deeper relationships
• 09:00 - 09:30 when you do it in person so find them in your city and do it that way lesson 12 i want you to watch this video from Tricko how the hell did we sell out this jersey in less than five minutes with a closed website and 0 spent on ads i could give you a bunch of reasons but honestly one will be enough it's the same reason Matias has spent $5,562 on Triicko so far you see there are two types of people in this world the first type just follows the crowd
• 09:30 - 10:00 buying whatever an ad throws at them filling their closet with stuff they don't even need but then there are the leaders the ones who see beyond the hype the ones who move with purpose and if you're still watching I'm betting you're the second type i trust the algorithm to show my content to those who strive for greatness because Real recognizes Real and if you're someone who's willing to go the extra mile someone who's chasing their life purpose with everything they've got then Trio is your brand only
• 10:00 - 10:30 those who truly understand the vision join our weight list and let me tell you once a month you get a password but here's the catch if you're even 5 minutes late to the drop you're going to have to wait another month why because you can't rush greatness so if you're ready to stop following the crowd and start leading hit that weight list link but remember this isn't for everyone we don't really need you to join now coming away you'll either feel pumped up or turned off you're in or
• 10:30 - 11:00 you're out and so this is why lesson 12 is to be divisive make very clear statements about who's in your community and who's out and do so through your content because as a result your lovers the people that are head over heels your super fans of your brand are going to be so much more loyal and way more in than they were before lesson 13 many clothing brands have the issue of customers coming for a particular drop or product and leaving once that desire is satisfied but this can be combed by
• 11:00 - 11:30 developing characters characters are people that appear on your brand page consistently like you as the brand owner maybe employees key customers or other content creators or influencers having familiar faces for your brand is an underrated approach to content creation with creating a community and a brand that does it really well if you want to do extra research is UVU lesson 14 every community has a clubhouse it's a place for members to gather and talk and interact about the things and the
• 11:30 - 12:00 reasons they're a part of that community in the first place and for most clothing brands that place is the email list or the SMS list it's a way to show your loyalty to the brand but for most followers that's a big jump to make from following on Instagram to giving you their email and SMS so use the close friends feature on Instagram this is a way you can almost force them into the place to become a part of the community because you get to choose who's on your close friends list and the conversion rate is much higher plus the overall
• 12:00 - 12:30 engagement on close friends stories is going to be higher overall just make sure that you're providing some sort of exclusive behind the scenes or special interaction or decision-m that your close friends get lesson 15 most influencers when you reach out to them will ask you for money especially if they're of a good quality but mostly it's because your offer to them isn't good enough so lesson 15 is offer influences something that they would pay you for here's what this looks like instead of a typical collaboration where
• 12:30 - 13:00 you're asking them to wear your clothing and market it send through the images look through their page notice what kind of content they're creating and offer to create it with and for them this is probably something they would have to hire a videographer and editor for but you're just going to do it for them they're going to wear your product in the process you're going to post it as a collaboration at the end and you're going to reap the benefits of leveraging their audience it's a win-win lesson 16 i had a brand owner that figured out how to create 60 pieces of content in a
• 13:00 - 13:30 single day only to find out it didn't work after he posted and created it so stop creating content in bulk it's better especially in the beginning to adopt a more nimble approach that allows you to adjust test experiment and change very quickly according to what works and what doesn't creating content in bulk simply keeps you limited lesson 17 generating content ideas is hard as it is but it's made even more difficult
• 13:30 - 14:00 when you have to generate a new idea every single time you want to post something and so lesson 17 is to use content series not content pieces think of it like a TV show which is the series and then each episode is the pieces within that series the characters the setting and the basis for each story stays the same but the actual events inside the episode chain and so for a clothing brand like Nike this looks like a broad idea of interviewing athletes
• 14:00 - 14:30 and creating inspirational videos but from each piece of content the athlete changes they don't have to recreate a new content idea from scratch every time lesson 18 is start community challenges include parts where you encourage or require participants to share content with them in it wearing your product and on the plus side you'll probably sell some garments in the process just because of that factor just make sure that whatever challenge you pick it aligns with your brand identity lesson 19 i was working with a Christian
• 14:30 - 15:00 athletic brand that wanted to engage their fairly inactive community and so they wanted to launch some sort of community event they thought they had to do it far down the line but I said "Why don't we do it now in fact let's just invite your friends and it doesn't matter who else comes." So lesson 19 is to create fake in-person events sometimes the bigger deal about an event is the content that comes from it less the actual people that come to the event because as an audience member that follows your social media page from the other side of the world I just want to
• 15:00 - 15:30 see and know that the community exists so that I can be a part of it even if I can't come to an event in person that means that at a fake event you still achieve the same content effect and over time you can of course build it with real people that come out from your community too lesson 20 a brand came to me and they had no idea how to figure out what their brand identity was or who their community was for so we implemented a very simple strategy that took the top five most loyal customers
• 15:30 - 16:00 found their Instagram pages and analyzed what kind of things they post and who they follow this gave us important information about what they're interested in what they believe what they value their ideologies and lifestyles and we could find common traits between all of these loyal customers to figure out how we can replicate more people like this so lesson 20 is to analyze your most loyal customers if you have nowhere to go in
• 16:00 - 16:30 terms of defining your community this is a fantastic place to start and don't do nothing with that information you can use their interests and beliefs to determine what you start posting about on your page lesson 21 do you ever find yourself wondering what you are going to post you're totally stuck for ideas well that's why this lesson is to build relationships in DMs simply reach out to engage members of your audience and ask them "What do you want to see?" Be curious about who they are i've seen
• 16:30 - 17:00 brands do this and the connection between their community and the brand strengthens dramatically plus you don't have to do the guessing game with content anymore lesson 22 many fashion labels call themselves clothing brands when really they're just clothing businesses what differentiates the two well a brand is the association of two or more things it's your name associated with X activities lifestyles people and the stronger that association the
• 17:00 - 17:30 stronger your brand is so lesson 22 is to sell the lifestyle not a product because your brand isn't about what you sell it's about who you are and the kind of lifestyle that people live when they wear your brand plus creating lifestyle content means that you can also post when you aren't dropping or releasing any products and you can still grow your audience because it's evergreen it's not determined or based on a specific product at a specific time lesson 23 do
• 17:30 - 18:00 not come to me and say that my content isn't working when you've only posted 10 times i see it like going to the gym if you went and you did 10 reps of a bicep curl would you expect to see results no but maybe if you did 10 sets over 10 weeks then maybe you would see results but within that are thousands and thousands of reps so lesson 23 is to post daily this will very give you an upper hand on most clothing brands out there that don't do this and the reason
• 18:00 - 18:30 why is because the shorter the gap between when you post the quicker you learn what works and what doesn't lesson 24 have you ever asked the question "What camera should I buy?" I get it you want to make great content at a high quality well the answer is use what you've got if you've got an iPhone it's one of the recent ones especially it has a fantastic camera inside of it and if you are considering to buy a camera you need to weigh up the cost and the value
• 18:30 - 19:00 to the business if you want to buy a camera that matches the quality of a recent iPhone you can very easily expect to pay between $2 and $3,000 and so you need to consider whether that $2,000 investment is going to pay off in $2,000 worth of sales directly because of that purchase if the answer is no don't do it instead my suggestion is to learn lighting that'll make any average camera look good lesson 25 i used to post to Instagram Tik Tok
• 19:00 - 19:30 YouTube but I couldn't make it work and when I went to focus on YouTube only that's when everything changed and so lesson 25 is pick one social media platform at least to start until you master it and I'm still getting the hang of this one your focused efforts on learning one platform will create stronger growth rather than diluting your education across multiple platforms and I hear what you're saying you don't want to put your egg in one basket but the truth is you don't have any eggs yet
• 19:30 - 20:00 lesson 26 many brands when they start posting are a little all over the place and it's natural and so lesson 26 is to create a tagline this is a two to fourword slogan that encapsulates the brand narrative that is in every story that you tell this is like Nike's just do it every time they create a piece of content sharing the story of an athlete or what they do and how they do it them
• 20:00 - 20:30 getting up early in the morning that is just another embodiment of their tagline just do it so do the same for your brand lesson 27 when many brands start out creating non-product content more about their lifestyle the problem is it lacks any substance and as a result they don't get the results they expect so focus on storytelling storytelling has a lot more depth to it i can connect easier with it as an audience member and it's better than a shallow mood board or photo dump
• 20:30 - 21:00 even if there is some worldbuilding elements to it plus I can remember stories a lot better than general information details or product that's how we are wired as humans so if you want your brand to be memorable tell stories lesson 28 when crafting content strategies with brand owners I'm often suggesting these crazy ideas for things that we could create and it's often met with the response I don't know how I would do that and the problem is in the initial stages of ideiation it blocks the process to worry about how so lesson
• 21:00 - 21:30 28 is to worry about execution later my suggestion is you set a timer for 10 minutes and have a controlled scrolling session where you take notes on particular sources that you find inspiring that you would like to replicate with your own brand then read over those notes set another timer for 10 minutes and create your own list of content ideas without worrying about how you're going to make that work finally after that first 20 minutes you're going to look through that brain dump find one
• 21:30 - 22:00 key idea that you believe could be achievable that you'd enjoy creating and flesh it out further and we do the execution later in that last step lesson 29 sometimes people call BS on my content because they say "My audience doesn't care about my story or my brand message they just want to buy my t-shirts that's why they're here that's what they're looking for." which for the most part I've got to give them credit it's probably true but here's the thing
• 22:00 - 22:30 the 20% that do care about your story and your brand message are also the 20% that are your most loyal and contribute 80% of the revenue so lesson 29 is don't focus on the 80% focus on the 20% the loyal minority create content for them and only them and if we can expand that section of your business you will dramatically increase not only your sales and your revenue but also your overall enjoyment because you get to
• 22:30 - 23:00 talk about stuff that you actually care about lesson 30 many brand owners want to make a buck a lot of money some other brand owners want to change the world in some very real way and if I'm coming from the perspective of an audience it's much easier to come behind the mission of a brand owner that wants to do something selfless so lesson 30 is to write a mission statement this is not only a great source to create content from but will also define the reason why people are coming to be a part of your
• 23:00 - 23:30 community what are they helping you achieve in this world lesson 31 sometimes I see brand owners trying to build their personal brand on the clothing brand page which serves as a contradiction when they tell me they want to build a community because that's not a community that's a personal brand so lesson 31 is don't make it about you the way that you should be thinking about your brand page if you're trying to build a community is how to encapsulate many personal brands of many people in one place not only your own
• 23:30 - 24:00 lesson 32 i don't know if I subscribe to the whole idea of not looking at analytics or statistics i get it if it stresses you out keep your mind intact first and foremost however those same people that make those comments also complain about not getting the results so lesson 32 is repeat content that works and the only way to do that is to look back on your content see what performs better see what performs worse cut the stuff that doesn't work and do
• 24:00 - 24:30 more of the stuff that does very simple lesson 33 flatlays and studio shoots for your products can get super boring and if you're selling a lifestyle can sometimes clash make you look like a theme page that's just selling products to make a buck so shoot your products in context this means asking the question "Where does someone wear my brand and my product and go to that location include the action and shoot it there with the model." For example a running brand is not going to shoot in the studio they're
• 24:30 - 25:00 going to shoot out running i know it sounds obvious but lots of brands miss this lesson 34 i had a client that was creating an MMA themed brand he came to me with an issue and it was he doesn't have enough time to create the content I was asking him to create i said "Don't you do MMA fighting aren't you training and at the gym do you shoot then?" And that was the life-changing turning point for this brand owner so lesson 34 is integrate content creation into your life if you're creating an MMA brand film in the gym film your training film
• 25:00 - 25:30 your tournaments this is stuff you're already doing it doesn't take that much extra time and you've got the sets laid out so whatever your brand identity or community that you're building is insert that here lesson 35 if you've scrolled Instagram for any amount of time it's easy very easy to look at big brands like Cortez or Nike and think why isn't my content as good as theirs and it's totally paralyzing it can be it makes
• 25:30 - 26:00 you stuck in thinking I'm not even going to create anything until this is perfect so lesson 35 is don't compare yourself to big brands they've got different resources that you don't have so don't expect to create content at the same standards and the content creators behind Nike never got to the level they did creating the quality that they do by being a perfectionist no they created lots of content for many decades to get to that level and if you want to do the same then create content appropriate to
• 26:00 - 26:30 your size right now lesson 36 with everything I'm saying some of the common objections are "I get it but I still want to create content of a particular quality for my clothing brand." Here's the way I think about it there are three different factors in the equation there is time there is quality and complexity you have to sacrifice one of these i say focus on simplicity and sacrifice complexity this means you can still create a lot of content quickly at a high quality because there's not much to
• 26:30 - 27:00 it for example instead of creating a whole twominute fashion film for your next campaign create a one shot you can still have the quality all the lighting it looks so professional and it's simple lesson 37 i was working with a startup with a 100 followers and he was adamant about having a private account like Cortez but here's the thing desiraability comes with popularity plus scarcity and he didn't have any popularity he had 100 followers for goodness sake that's to say that if
• 27:00 - 27:30 you're missing one of the elements in that equation you don't have desiraability and the whole private account thing doesn't work so 37 if you're thinking about it don't create a private account too early on don't rob yourself of the greatest asset you have in this beginning stage which is organic short form content this allows you to reach the world with your brand and you just simply don't get that if you're going to do it at all wait until you've consistently provided value over a long
• 27:30 - 28:00 time people know your name they want your stuff and then you can make it private lesson 38 the stuff on social media that performs the best is different this is likely why you're watching this video why you might have found some of my other videos it's because not other people make brand breakdowns like I do i have a unique personality and I like to lean into it the opposite effect happens when we see another day in the life of a brand owner series so lesson 38 is no more day in the lives in other words stop posting
• 28:00 - 28:30 trivial content because with oversaturation novelty becomes old and the same stuff stops working you can apply this to any concept in social media in general finally lesson 39 if you find yourself with some extra cash invest into something that nobody can take away from you it's education invest in your education figure out how to make content work learn hook strategies learn videography and photography do a lighting course or an editing course it
• 28:30 - 29:00 doesn't matter invest real money into your education and I promise it'll excel and what you will be able to do with that will provide you with a lot more money than buying a camera ever will now it's your turn leave a comment below letting us know one thing that you're going to change today in your clothing brand after learning what you have this is a great space for accountability this is why we have a community so why not utilize it and if you found value in this video you'll probably also enjoy
• 29:00 - 29:30 the one that's on screen right now that's going to teach you in five steps how to turn your clothing brand into a community click on that video now and I'll see you over