What is the best way to market/raise awareness about new clothing products?

[Target-Dry]

We are an Outdoor Clothing Company that designs our own range.  We primarily sell through Retailers & distribution networks, but around 2 years ago went online.

We update our collections twice a year, and we really struggle to get attention and awareness of our new designs.

Can anyone recommend the best practice for getting newly launched products successfully "marketed"?

[DJ123]

What are your top 3 competitors doing to accomplish the same thing that you can see in the open marketplace?

Start there, and come up with your own crafted strategy based on what you have learned about competition in your industry.

[KevinBudzynski]

Successful clothing lines aggressively use PR and digital marketing (social media, contests, press releases, utilizer bloggers and so on). The key is to create awareness and spark word of mouth. It's extremely difficult to do and often times cost $$$. Good luck!

[David-Kley]

Besides having a clean site, that makes it easy to shop and order? Use social media and PR to it's fullest.

We optimized a sports clothing site before. Here are a few tips to get you started

On Google+, find sporting communities, and join groups that your product fits into. For example, for winter gloves, you could join a ski, or outdoor community, and post info and links there. For this to be successful, make sure you post high quality content, not something that appears "sales driven". Nobody likes a spammy self-promoting online salesman.

Twitter, follow people and brands related to what you sell. Use URL shorteners so you can create a more convincing tagline with your link (twitter only allows 140 characters, so make it good)

Facebook is a bit tricky, but using a small ad campaign works really well to get things moving quickly, especially when just starting out. We set up high quality posts, and promote them using a small daily budget for 2-3 weeks at a time. Even with $5 per day budgets, we see between 200-400 likes per month. This is not "buying likes" since the people liking the posts have an active interest in the product or post info. Once you have them like you page, their news feed will update with posts from you in the future.

PR releases and digital marketing.
PR release can help increase awareness and traffic, if you post info that is actually newsworthy. Release a new type of material or product that redifines a niche? Write a release about it. Here is a blurb from our seo blog about press releases:

"Press Releases Without Actually Having Newsworthy Content

I know what you are thinking. "So if article submissions are out, I should do press releases instead." My answer would be, if you actually have something newsworthy, GO FOR IT! If you don't, then NO. A lot of businesses use press release sites simply to try and get links from news channels, and get their name out in front of the public by any means necessary. Here's the catch, you run a business, and kudos to your for doing so. According to Dun and Bradstreet there are 23 million and counting small businesses in the US as of 2010. This isn't saying that what you do or that the service you provide isn't newsworthy, I'm saying that merely existing alone doesn't qualify you. If you speak to any public relations agency, they will be quick to point out that there is much more to good PR than just a slew of press releases. Motion PR president Kimberly Eberl states that:

"Public relations is a conversation between a company and all of its different stakeholders. It encourages company transparency and works to the benefit of all parties. PR is about building awareness and leveraging relationships through various channels and markets."

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. In essence, it's about link building. Creating press releases just for the sake of links alone is not a good practice, and can become expensive if done regularly. A good press release is one that can help other people. Remember, humans are social creatures, and when we find something that helps us, we share it. By having people share your information and providing something that is truly newsworthy and good, this can help your media relations be more effective, and believe me, the links will follow."

-Link to full article

Hope this helps you get a good start!

[Target-Dry]

That's helpful - Learn from the competition!

Thanks for posting.

[Target-Dry]

Yeah, we need to ramp up our social media engagement.

We've had accidental success with a few small bloggers, But we find it very difficult to identify whether a blogger will influential or not.

Any tips or tools to help?