3 Prom Marketing Tricks Required to Dominate Prom 2020

It’s that time of year again — The busy season is right at our heels. In 2020, it’s time for your store to take advantage of the way the younger generation engages with brands and shops for products. Here are three tricks you can do now to ensure a successful #prom2020 for your store.

1.) Show the new collections on your website!

This one is bigger than you might think. I think we can call agree that customers want to look at the latest collections before they buy. No one is buying a prom dress out of a mysterious box and hoping it matches their style and lifestyle.

So where do the customers go to look?

They can go to your designers’ websites. Great! There they will see all the new collections’ imagery and be able to find out exactly which styles work for them. Problem is… If you only rely on your designers’ websites to showcase the new collections, then you’re really putting a lot of hope in the ‘find a store’ button on each one of your designers’ websites. What if your customers find a ‘premier’ store that’s only an extra half hour away? What if they find an online retailer?

Point is.. The designers’ websites are great, but you are not the only store being featured on the store-finders so some of your customers will find your competition.

They can go to your competitors’ websites. Not great! We all know why we don’t want our customers visiting our competitors’ websites.  

They can go to your website.  Yes! Now we’re cooking with gas! 

Other than the obvious, here’s why you want your customers to look at the new collections on your website:

• SEO.  There is a massive benefit to your SEO when you have a dedicated page on your website for every style in each of your designers’ collections.  Better SEO, means more customers find you online which means more customers come to your store (It’s all a numbers game!). 
• Engagement, and Clarity of Call-to-action:  Listen, when prom shoppers go to the designers they have to make a decision on what type of dress they want to go try on and then they have to make the decision on what store they want to go to.  That’s too much decision making to be done for these busy Generation Z shoppers! When you bring their shopping experience to your website, they can focus on the types of dresses they want to try and then all they need to do is type the address in UBER after school!  When the customers browse on your turf, there’s a better chance they’ll make it into your actual turf. 
• Remarketing. Did you know that you can follow people around the Internet after they visit your website?  Go add a product to your cart on Amazon.com and then stroll around Google and you will know exactly what I mean.  Point is, having traffic come to your website gives you a new marketing ability that you otherwise forfeit…. That’s right, it gives you the ability to Remarket.  With Remarketing, you can continue to present your store to your customers even after they leave your website and look at a million different other subjects.  

2.) Run Instagram Ads (Through the Business Manager of Facebook)

That’s right! I said it…. Business manager time.  I implore you to check out business.facebook.com this Prom season and start managing your ad campaigns there, instead of only focusing on ‘boosting posts’ on the Instagram app itself.  

Why? 

You have a much better ability to be specific with your targeting, and your reporting is much better! The targeting capabilities of Instagram are revolutionary and allow you to get very specific on who actually sees your ad. This is perfect, because you actually get an incredible amount of control, making the investment well worth the money! 

Better targeting = better return on investment. 

Better reporting = better improvement over time. 

Don’t just take a shot in the dark this prom season by boosting instagram posts.  Start making targeted ads on the business manager! 

3.) Upgrade your social media 

It’s 2020. It is time for you to retire the Instagram posts full of text that do not mesh with the rest of your feed.  It’s time to retire the boring pictures of mannequins with dresses. It’s time for you to get visual. The goal of social media is to really get visitors to interface with your brand. You want people visiting your page to be able to picture themselves in your dresses and tuxes. Take pictures of people trying on your dresses and put it on your Instagram story! Start scheduling fun events and documenting them on social as they happen. The best way to utilize social media is to generate awareness, which gets potential customers one step closer to visiting.

It’s also important to consider doing away with the “No Cameras” policy that might be implemented in your store. A key to mastering social media is ensuring that you are letting people engage and interact with your brand online. This is called “user generated content”, and it’s an important element of social media strategy. This means permitting them to take photos of themselves in your dresses at the store, and letting them post it. This usually isn’t going to lead to a case of window shopping, but rather allowing customers to express their excitement with your store. Show potential customers your personality in the unique way that you interact with current customers. 

If you really want to drive it home in 2020, you have to promote yourself on social media in a way that truly excites and engages your prom shoppers.  Here’s a tip: Get a tool for Instagram that lets you schedule out your posts…now. 

Tik Tok

Part of mastering social media is keeping up with it’s extremely rapid pace. There are always new platforms coming out, and figuring out the most important ones to adopt can be an overwhelming task. Keep up to date with the SYVO blog, where we review all of the latest digital trends in Bridal and Prom. 

The most recent social media platform that has gained traction with the target markets associated with prom is Tik Tok. This platform focuses on “short-form mobile video”, a mode of entertainment that has gained tremendous traction in recent years. When done correctly, Tik Tok is a platform that really brings out the core of your shop’s personality.

The benefits of engaging with this platform are as follows:

• You will be reaching your target audience
• Your brand instantly becomes more culturally relevant
• It gives your shop extra ways to interface with your younger customers
• Mastering Tik Tok is great way to improve your content on other platforms

Tik Tok relies heavily on humor and music to create short videos that are meant to entertain the viewer. Getting some of your retailing team together to create these videos is a great idea. You don’t have to force ideas, just capitalize on the best ones as they come to you. Featuring dresses and customers (after permission of course) as you see fit is another way to get people interested in what you have to offer.

Allowing customers to create Tik Toks themselves while at your store is another key piece in solving the puzzle of Tik Tok. To get a better sense of what Tik Tok is, download the app and spend some free time familiarizing yourself with the platform. It’s only a matter of time before you become a Tik Tok master yourself!