If you are starting out in the clothing business it’s important to establish your target market from the beginning. Doing this accurately can help increase your profits, cut out unnecessary expenditures, and get your business running efficiently from the beginning. The clothing business is a pretty crowded market, but that doesn’t mean that, with the proper research and marketing plan, you can’t bring something new and fresh to the market. 

Understanding your target market should be a primary goal for your clothing business. Let’s go over some of the key steps you should take in order to collect the best data for your potential clothing business. 

Conduct Market Research

Collecting market research is one of the most accurate ways to find your target market because you get information directly from the potential source. You can complete your market research by sending out surveys, interviewing potential customers as well as experts in your niche, participating in focus groups, and observing your potential customers and their buying habits. 

This will give you a lot of data early in the process that you can take in, go through, put all of it together, and then see how you can use it in order to make your business successful. This is a great time to use charts, graphs, and other visual aids to help you see the data and visualize how to use it to your advantage. There are so many great options and tools out there with today’s technology that you might as well put them to good use! 

Narrow Down Demographics

Demographics, by definition, is statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it. When you are working on narrowing down the demographics for your potential clothing business you will want to really pay attention to the details of your potential customer. 

A few specifics include

• Where do they live? Is it a rural, suburban, or urban environment?
• Is there a specific time zone you are trying to reach? (You don’t want to release your best ads and other information while they’re sleeping!)
• Common weather patterns in the target area
• Preferred language used (this can be English, Spanish, or even a specific slang that they will relate to the best)
• The target age range of potential customer base

Watch for Trends on Social Media

The majority of people have at least one social media account. This means you need to join your customers where they are at. Depending on the data you collected from the prior two steps will kind of determine what social media avenues you want to focus on the most. Some of the most popular avenues would be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok. You want to follow the accounts that a lot of your customers tend to follow so you can see what catches their attention and makes them stop and drop a “like” or gets them to engage with your brand.

You can also use hashtags to find out what is trending. There is a number of ways to do this. You can just search hashtags on the platform of your choice. Most of them will begin to suggest other relevant hashtags once the algorithm recognizes the type of content you are looking for.

There are also hashtag tools that will make finding trends easier. Tools like TaskAnt and Tagstagram can help you find trending hashtags. With TaskAnt, you can enter a keyword in their search engine and it shows you all of the hashtags associated with it. Tagstagram allows you to find and copy trending Instagram hashtags based on either a keyword or a specific category.

It goes without saying that you should be doing this if you have an Instagram clothing company. However, even if your clothing brand is one that operates online and offline, watching these trends will undoubtedly help your brand grow.

Consider the Income of Your Buyers

If you are a high-end clothing line there is no reason to spend a lot of marketing dollars on a lower-income customer base and vice versa. Not only do you want to take into consideration their overall income, but you also want to gather information on how they spend the money that they bring in. This will help you decide on products and services to add to your brand to make it the most relatable and appeasable to potential customers. 

Look to Fill a Gap in the Market

You don’t want to try and start a clothing business by offering similar products as everyone else in your niche. There are only so many jeans and t-shirts that the target audience can purchase. When you’re completing your market research (Step 1) be sure and include some questions in your surveys about what the customer is looking for, but not finding available in the current market. This will give you a heads-up from the very beginning about what gaps are out there that you can work on filling. 

Conclusion

Starting any clothing business can be a very daunting task. The most important thing you can do to help you, in the long run, is to take your time and complete all of the necessary research before you just jump into the market. Doing this helps to give you a wider lens regarding what is working, what’s not, and what you can bring to improve the options available on the market.

Katie Budd

Team Writer: Katie Budd is a full-time 8-5er in the commercial insurance industry and works on building her freelance writing business. She enjoys creating engaging content for people to read. She also enjoys working out at home doing Street Parking programming, encouraging her kids to chase what they are passionate about, and spending as much time on the farm with her extended family as possible. Follow along with her on her blog and Instagram as she continues to put thoughts into words.