Content Marketing Rockstars: The GetFash Team

Meet Gerald and Cherie, the Content Marketing Rockstars behind GetFash, a platform that curates fashion & lifestyle inspiration that are practical to local women and in turn help fashion/lifestyle brands reach out and appeal to potential customers through their creative content marketing capabilities!

1. Why Content Marketing?

GetFash: To building affinity with people – It is evident that brand loyalty among consumers is increasingly difficult to establish and maintain. Especially in the women’s fashion & lifestyle industry. Due to relatively low barriers to entry, consumers are flooded with options from new, up and coming brands providing competitive prices.

For the first time, the amount of money poured into digital advertising spend has exceeded what marketers used to spend on TV and radio ads. This means consumers’ attention are also becoming more sparse as plenty of advertisers are fighting to tell consumers to “buy my stuff!”

That’s why it is critical to build affinity with the consumer and creating useful, relevant content can help achieve that. At Getfash, we publish articles and videos that help women gain outfit and beauty ideas for different occasions, how to be stylish and comfortable at the same time, fitness tips and inspiration, and cool places to hangout. We also tell “behind the scenes” stories of brands to help consumers connect and relate, which is an important aspect of their journey into becoming purchasing customers. Product demos/reviews are an informative and entertaining way for women to discover new stuff and make a buying decision.

In a nutshell, we curate fashion & lifestyle inspiration that are practical to local women. To help them bring ideas to life, we make our content shoppable – people can easily shop for the items featured in our content.

2. How did you get started with Content Marketing?

Gerald: My first-ever business venture was an e-learning website focused on helping students in my University to learn and revise important concepts on economics. As an “online tuition centre”, I created video tutorials that taught economics using mindmaps. Students could see the entire development of mindmaps for specific chapters through the videos, which helped them refine their thought process. Each video was about 30 minutes long and could cover up to 3 hours of what lecturers taught in school.

Therefore, the value proposition of my content was simplicity and specificity in learning plus a time-saving benefit, which was justified by thousands of students paying for access to the content.

I then brought what I learned about content creation and marketing to something that I am passionate about, which is living a stylish lifestyle, and started Getfash.com.

Cherie: I started off as a copywriter, and from there, it was a natural progression to content marketing. At my previous workplace, I got to experiment with plenty of different formats – we did blog articles, downloadable ebooks, and we’d even run surveys and collate the results which we used for media pitching. I learned a lot about coming up with compelling content which strikes a chord with your audience – this is something that’s applicable regardless of what industry or business you’re in.

3. Content Marketing requires lots of inspiration, How do you stay inspired?

GetFash: We believe that the north star for content creation should always be who the target audience is and what matters to them. For Getfash, our main audience comprises women aged between 25-34 and hold executive jobs such as sales, business development, management, finance, etc. It is important for them to look and feel great at work. Hence, our content direction is set towards curating practical fashion and lifestyle inspiration to help them achieve that.

We get our inspiration from the conversations that we have with our friends and whatever topics are trending on our newsfeeds – regardless of how unrelated it might seem, it can still serve as a springboard for new content.

4. What are some valuable insights you would give to businesses that are starting up or have been struggling with content marketing?

GetFash: The insights we have are specifically for fashion and lifestyle businesses who are looking to make their marketing efforts stand out and differentiate themselves. Use these metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content :

Clickthrough rate: Posted a new article or blog post on Facebook? Take the # of link clicks and divide it by the # of people reached. If this is less than 3%, you have a copywriting problem on your headline, post text and featured image (For videos, monitor your click-to-play rate)

Scroll depth: How far does your audience read into your content? Aim for at least 50% of your article/blog post to scroll to the end or your content. If not, you have a content value proposition problem and might need to rethink your content marketing strategy. (For videos, monitor your average view time and audience retention graph)

Call-to-action rate: Does your article/blog post have specific call-to-actions? Maybe you want audiences to check out a certain product or visit a specific page? Monitor the % of content consumers who take that desired action. Develop your own benchmarks and keep innovating ways to increase that rate.

Conversion rate: How many of the content consumers become purchasing customers? Use available tools such as the Facebook Pixel to measure this.

Use paid advertising to promote your content: By now, it should be clear to all businesses that the organic reach on social media today has been reduced to a small, little fraction of your fan or follower base. Relying on virality to get more organic reach is a huge “hit or miss” risk. As it is, creating great content requires significant time, effort and investment. Hence, not getting your content out to new audiences and potential customers is a big waste.

A lot of good content created does not reach its intended audience. No reach = No traffic = No new customers = No revenue.

Therefore, on top of your own email list, it is advisable to use paid advertising (Read: Facebook Ads) to help your content reach out to potential customers. You WILL experience a much higher clickthrough rate (Read: Cost-effective new traffic) than your regular product-pushy and brand promoting ads.

With the Facebook Pixel, it has also been possible, since ages ago, to track the ROI (Read: Customer signups, purchases, etc.) on your content creation and marketing efforts. So, you will be able to justify your paid advertising spend.

Use retargeting to convert non-converting content consumers: With your Facebook Pixel, you can easily create different segments of people that have visited your website. You might have already heard of retargeting ads – adverts that are shown specifically to web visitors who did not make a purchase from your online store in the past few days (They might not buy due to various reasons: they were at work or in other inconvenient situations such as commuting, etc).

Applying the same concept of retargeting to consumers of your content can also help you convert non-converting content consumers into purchasing customers. Furthermore, this audience is likely to have higher affinity with your brand as they have been exposed to your compelling brand story.

First, create a custom audience of people who have visited your blog posts, while excluding purchasing customers. Second, publish a product catalog ad and target it at this custom audience. Lastly, watch your cost of customer acquisition fall!

Collaborate with other businesses offering complementary products/services to create content: Ideating for content based on just your brand’s offering is unsustainable as it is difficult to find different ways to talk about the same thing. To overcome this, try partnering with other businesses to create useful content or engaging experiences for your audience. For example, if you run an apparel business, you could partner with a footwear brand to develop a lookbook that gives audiences apparel and footwear pairing tips.

If you sell nail polish, you could partner with a cosmetics brand to develop a colours guide for women to get inspiration on colour matching of their nails and makeup! Besides giving your content team more avenues for ideation, you can also tap on your partner’s audience and cross promote products/services.

5. What do you think is the future of Content Marketing?

GetFash: SMEs will become more strategic with content marketing – We believe that businesses, like the fashion and lifestyle brands we serve, will become more strategic in their approach to content marketing. Content created by their external partners and internal content team will be aligned towards a central direction.

For example, brands, including the up and coming ones, would provide more specific guidelines for influencers during collaborations while allowing space for creativity so that a specific marketing message is communicated. That is why Getfash conducts a creative dialogue with our clients before drafting an editorial concept or storyboard. It helps them organise their thoughts and convey their marketing goals to us clearly.

Businesses will be able to look beyond vanity metrics, such as followers, impressions, likes, etc. – “It’s not about getting the most eyeballs but getting the right ones” will be a common sentiment amongst them. Brands will start experimenting – with different formats of content – instead of just sticking with standard blog articles. Obviously, video is a huge trend, but there are so many more options as well.

6. Besides Content Marketing, what are you passionate about?

Gerald: I enjoy graphics and web design, editing photos and videos. As an extrovert who loves being around people, doing sales and building relationships with my customers is something I can never forgo. Hobby-wise, I love the game of basketball, gymming, fitness, and teaching.

Cherie: Yoga, writing, and traveling. I go overseas between four to five times per year – it’s not that I’m rich, it’s just that I prefer spending my money on experiences rather than Starbucks drinks and branded bags 🙂

7. Give us an elevator pitch of your business.

Getfash.com curates fashion and lifestyle inspiration that are practical and relevant to women aged 25-34 in Singapore. We help brands reach out and appeal to potential customers through our creative content marketing capabilities and digital monthly reach of 140k.