Try-On Hauls for Influencer Marketing
What Is A Try-On Haul?
A try-on haul is when an influencer has received a broad range of clothing items or accessories from a particular brand, or a variety of brands, and creates a video showcasing the products and unique features to share with their community. Within the video, they discuss each item with their followers while also trying the outfits on and doing a quick styling session to demonstrate how each outfit fits and what fashion accessories might pair well with that specific outfit. Vloggers have a great relationship with their followers and audience, and this type of collaboration hones in on that relationship and trust.
What Are The Benefits?
If you aren't sure how this way of collaboration creates value for your brand, here are ten benefits of a try-on haul collaboration that will add massive amounts of value to your brand. Not only will try-on haul's add value, but when done correctly, a try-on haul should pay for itself due to a direct increase in sales by viewers watching your try-on haul video.
Negotiate price
Many top-tier influencers will have a relatively high rate that they charge companies for any promotion on their YouTube channel. However, you may be able to negotiate a lower price or waive the fee entirely with them, simply by allowing them to choose a number of items for consideration. This is an excellent opportunity to collaborate with powerful influencers who have a strong and engaged following and drive brand awareness as well as product sales. Your influencer will be spending time speaking with your team, recording her unboxing of the products, recording herself trying on each product, editing all of the content, creating a final video, then publishing the video on her social media account, and then finally the right influencer has individual connections with feature pages and collaborators. Once the video has been published online, the influencer will reach out to her network and collaborate with other influencers to help get her try-on haul video featured on a higher traffic site to increase the view counts and reach as many fans as possible. A majority of the time for the amount of work that goes into creating a try-on-haul video that gets over 100,000 views the influencer would make more money if she charged by the hour then charging a set price of $300-500.
Demonstrating the items
Another significant benefit of try-on hauls is the ability of the influencer to showcase your products to the world from a first-hand perspective. This allows the customers to see the products as if they purchased the item themselves. With how fast the fashion industry is changing and more and more brands are converting to selling their products strictly online, and technology is changing so quickly that it's hard for the consumer to tell if a photo was photoshopped to make products look much better then they do in person. Consumers are no longer taking advertisements from the brand as valid proof that products will be delivered as described online. They are now reading tons of reviews and doing extensive research before buying products online. Followers react very positively to this as it allows them to decide whether the product is right for them, rather than only seeing the piece on a 2D model in the catalog.
This can also help if your products can't be advertised on platforms like amazon because they are too "sexual" or revealing. As a partner of iVibed, a clothing line sold exclusively on Amazon, we had a hard time displaying the full fit of our bikinis because the bottoms were made to be "cheeky" and shows too much of the models booty. It wasn't until hours of shooting, editing, and creating listings for these products until we found this out. Amazon shut down the photos and listings, and we had to develop a new strategy to display the products that were too "sexual" to consumers. One of the workarounds we had was try-on haul videos. I was able to model each product on video and then advertise through my social media accounts and put the video in front of hundred of thousands of people without worrying about my video being too "sexual" while also giving consumers the full details with a 360 degree view of each product and how they look and fit.
Sizing
Seeing items on an actual person often helps consumers make a purchase decision and can tend to convince them to make the purchase when they can see all of the details of the garment. Vloggers will move around and demonstrate the way the clothing sits on them, usually mentioning the size they are wearing, which gives consumers an indication of what size they should get themselves.
For fashion apparel brands that sell a vast majority of their products online, there is no more significant loss then returns. Returns can make or break an online business.
Working alongside with iVibed Apparel, I was able to showcase each of their products demonstrating the size and fit for others to reference before making a purchase. Once others seen how the items fit, they were able to match their correct size to the item they would like to order, before randomly purchasing and ending up with a product that doesn't fit.
On the products that I implemented this process on, iVibed was able to reduce returns from 38% down to 7%. No matter how hard you try, you will always have a customer who buys products, wears them once, then returns them even if they loved the outfit. You will never be able to prevent this from happening, but if you can implement this process and then take things a step further by adding try-on hauls and live stream videos to every product you have listed online. The amount of money you spend paying models to create the content needed, it will pay for itself in the amount of money you save not having large amounts of returns.
Styling
These try-on haul videos are an excellent chance for the influencer to style the outfits for their followers. A good influence has a massive collection of designer fashion apparel and accessories. This makes it very easy to pair your products with the best accessories. Where a customer may not have purchased your product because they didn't think it would look good with anything they owned, your influencer might give them a style tip that could change their perspective.
Starting Trends
Staring a new fashion trend can be a challenging thing to accomplish. Using the right influencer to help showcase your new trend can be a game-changer. Showing your customers how amazing your products look when paired with the right outfit can be the last piece that tips the scales in your favor. While being the hardest thing to do in the fashion industry, it is also the most profitable. If you can start the trend, you will dominate for those specific keywords while no one else in the industry is bidding on them. By the time everyone else in the industry starts to copy your style, you are already working on starting the next trend.
Influencer's Creative Direction
As with any other collaboration done with an influencer, it is crucial to allow them to express themselves creatively as they usually would with their content. Followers can spot sponsored advertisements from a mile away, so it is excellent when a try-on haul represents their style.
Genuine Authenticity
Similar to bloggers, vloggers, and reviews, try-on-hauls are respected as an authentic source of customer feedback. They often have an extremely loyal and passionate community of followers who trust the influencer's recommendations. These wholehearted relationships that these influencers have developed can play a massive role in building trust with your customer and also expanding your customer base. When you connect with an influencer who has a community like this, you have hit the jackpot.
Engagement
Videos are the best type of content for getting engagement from consumers. This type of content leaves your audiences with a great impression of the brand or product. As video content is like a one-on-one conversation, audiences are captivated and engaged, which is a massive benefit to the brand. The higher your engagement rate, the more social media platforms organically promote your post.
Exposure
Besides running ads or being tagged by existing customers, one of the best ways to get exposure is try-on hauls. Not only do you get featured on the influencers Youtube channel, but more often then not, the models will wear your products to up-coming photoshoots. This typically results in you being tagged and featured in future posts by them and their photographers. The more people who tag you, the better chances you have at growing your social media accounts.
Networking
Networking is always one of the best ways a business can meet unique individuals to help them grow and scale their business. If this is your first time using an influencer to market your products, then you quickly understand how much easier it is to ask an influencer if she or he has any friends that would be interested in working with your brand then it would be for you to try and find other influencers yourself. If you are not willing to do a lot of research and spending hours and hours reviewing influencers' social media accounts to verify if they have legit followers, then ask the influencer you currently use to recommend another influencer whom they have collaborated with in the past.
Try-on-hauls are quickly becoming one of the best investments a brand can make as far as influencer marketing is concerned. A social media wall post holds a majority of its value in the first 24hrs, and within 14 days, the post is almost completely irrelevant. YouTube videos can continue to grow for years, which gives the brand the best ROI on their investment.