Whenever a company wants to do overseas business, the question that must be considered is: should we apply the mature marketing methods of the local market to foreign markets? Despite the effectiveness of fancy marketing at home, overseas has been playing the same old game: offline advertising, digital media, and KOL promotion. With the emergence of the epidemic, the sales of enterprises turning to live broadcasting to sell goods have soared, but in the U.S. market, for example, the ROI brought about by conducting a live broadcast can't make the slightest splash.
“According to publicly available data, only 5% of U.S. e-commerce sales for the entire year of 2022 will come from live-streaming e-commerce (compared to nearly 16% in China). Another Coresight Research survey shows that 74% of Chinese consumers have placed an order in a live stream in 2022, while 78% of people in the U.S. have not been in a live shopping room.”
If Chinese fast fashion brands want to gain a foothold overseas, they need to do the same old thing to the extreme. Take the Chinese version of “ZARA” fashion giant Shein as an example, with “small single fast return”, the length of only 7 days of the strong supply chain system as the foundation of the brand, Shein for the brand's digital marketing strategy, every penny is used in the “blade”. Shein's digital marketing is well-planned and every penny is spent on the “knife's edge”. “According to Earnest statistics, Shein began to account for 13% of total fast fashion sales in the U.S. in 2021, trailing behind H&M, a brand that has held the top spot for years. since January, Shein has continued to expand its market share, accounting for 28% of the market in six months. Of the brands in the same period, Zara is the only one still growing its share.”
Shein's huge commercial success is no accident. Take social media marketing for example, Shein has 30.05 million followers on Instagram alone, which is more than Amazon, Walmart, and AliExpress combined. In this article, we will explain in detail how Shein's overseas social media presence has made it stand out from the crowd of cross-border e-commerce companies.
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Shein is very fast in adding new products almost every day, so the overseas social media operation model of mass advertising and matrix account operation is the most suitable marketing method for Shein, which is known as the “model of the industry”, and its products and postings are updated very fast. Take Facebook posting as an example, Shein has 22 times more posts than ZARA and 8 times more posts than H&M in the same period, and the most daily posts are 13 in total.
Not only that, Shein doesn't continue the tradition of other fast-fashion women's clothing brands to tell their own brand story as the main content, but it emphasizes the user experience, starting from the user, telling their own story. Create beautiful and real UGC graphics, more persuasive than the traditional promotional post, but also more able to move the hearts of consumers in the Z era. New products will increase the frequency of consumer purchases, promote users to create more exciting UGC content, and ultimately spread virally to larger digital media platforms to gain more potential purchasing groups to form a closed loop.
Shein has its own website and application. Through its 25%off offer to app users in May 2022 it replaced Amazon as the most downloaded app in the US. “According to Semrush* estimates, Shein gets 50 million visitors per month through natural search globally.” The additional coupon pickup that pops up immediately upon entering the site is another marketing ploy to make new users feel like SHEIN is a good value.
Within the product design pages, Shein reduces the font size of product descriptions to emphasize their low prices, again echoing Shein's brand positioning of affordable goodies. In the process of selecting styles, Shein even thoughtfully filtered out popular styles for consumers, guiding uncertain customers to make a purchase decision.
Shein's “get the look” approach to website design is truly a lazy person's delight. The homepage displays the micro influencer's entire outfit, and once you click on the image, you're taken directly to the purchase page without having to search for it again. Cutting down on the process increases the purchase rate, which is why there's a “no secret payment” option.
“It is estimated that Shein spends over $3 million per month on global search advertising. It is estimated that this spending will allow them to attract approximately 1.8 million visitors per month”
Shein's founder Xu Yangtian himself is doing SEO foreign trade started, for the application of SEO has a remarkable borrowing ideas, such as keywords to do anchor text, with other fast fashion brands directly with “pink” “denim” such as seemingly Simple keywords, but neglected to tell the search engine that the link and the content is relevant, so that the content and the link is equal.
Overall, Shein has a large budget for search ads, and optimizes ads by testing the click-through rate of images on a large number of ads A/B. A large number of beautiful images is the magic weapon of their ads.
At Shein, the search for celebrities is never limited, and is spread across digital media, with large, medium and small celebrities working together. Redditors with relatively few followers do the traffic and outreach, central redditors carry the goods, and the most influential head redditors do the brand communication in an organic traffic ecosystem.After Shein initiated the marketing affiliate application, any blogger who passes the application and promotes Shein through their own social media posts will receive 10%-20% commission for each deal, while followers can also enjoy additional discount codes.
With countless users engaging with the hashtag #Sheintryonhaul on Tiktok, the paid promotion from the beginning to the massive influx of free review consumers has once again advertised Shein.
At the same time, Shein also regularly organizes Reddit activities, such as try-on sessions, raffle giveaways, and themed challenges, to increase reddit fans' engagement and willingness to buy; in addition, Shein has invited international celebrities to build a positive image for the brand: singer Katy Perry was invited to participate in Shein's live broadcasts of a public service nature; actor Madelaine Madelaine Petsch from the American TV series “Riverdale” was invited to shoot Shein's summer campaign.
The success of Shein's overseas campaign is of epoch-making significance. Overseas markets have always had a stereotypical view of Chinese brands, and Shein has been under public pressure because of this. This is also a problem that many overseas brands still need to think about and adjust. The success of every brand is unrepeatable, and it is necessary to always absorb new information, keep up with the times, and consolidate the foundation in order to be successful.
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