How Apparel Brands Are Leveraging Body Data to Optimize Channel Spend
by Rhett Heryford with WAIR
As today’s omnichannel marketing landscape continues to grow increasingly complex, the question on every marketer’s mind is, “Where can I effectively place my (usually limited) budget?”
This can be one of the most challenging yet essential questions for any professional establishing (or attempting to improve) a paid marketing strategy. In this day and age, the true customer’s journey is far from the traditional funnel we’ve become accustomed to over the past several decades. In reality, the sheer number of touch points your potential shoppers will have (with both your brand and your competition) and the number of decision-makers you will be interacting with can be dizzying. This makes the availability of actionable data absolutely essential in your quest to engage your customers effectively.
For a select few marketers operating in the world of apparel, the script has been somewhat flipped when it comes to identifying which campaigns and platforms are showing the most promise. This is due to the emergence of the modern sizing solution, WAIR, which has successfully leveraged shopper body data to better understand the consumer, their preferences, and how their unique body type influences their purchasing habits.
Before we dive into this new phenomenon, let’s look at what optimized channel spending looks like, why it’s so essential for brands in 2022, and finally, how WAIR leverages body data to help marketers accomplish their goals.
Why Having Optimized Channel Spend is So Important NOW
For those who haven’t heard the bad news, the global economy isn’t looking too hot right now. Shopper demand is shifting heavily from consumables to non-discretionary goods like gas and groceries, and the resulting impact on customer acquisition costs has been staggering. While established brands have been covering the spread by leveraging sales from existing shoppers, brands still in the growth stage are up against the wall, desperately trying to make every ounce of advertising spend worth its weight in gold. To ride out the potentially rough waters ahead, making the most out of one’s marketing budget and resources will be critical in Q4.
Another noteworthy reason why optimized channel spend is becoming increasingly important is that consumers now more than ever are dealing with marketing fatigue. Everywhere they go, they see ads for products they don’t care about; whether it be Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn, the constant bids for their attention impact their capacity to engage with your brand. The harsh reality is there are certain channels or social media platforms where your brand will struggle to cultivate a meaningful audience, and that’s okay, as long as you aren’t losing money in the process. Learning how to identify the channels your target audience is engaging with and leveraging your budget to deliver highly relevant paid content is the quickest way to break through the noise and drive ROI from your marketing efforts.
What Does Optimized Channel Spend Look Like?
Channel spend optimization is a continuous process. Strategies that worked brilliantly in the past might perform horribly in the present, depending on a plethora of external factors that you, as a marketer, must take into account. This includes divulging into the latest consumer behaviors, macroeconomic conditions, the list goes on and on. While the strategy is ever-changing, the end goal remains clear, allocating your brand’s budget to the most promising marketing channels.
So what does optimized channel spending actually look like in practice? That depends wholly on your specific KPIs and what your brand seeks to achieve through its paid marketing efforts.
For example, if your brand is looking to drive increased brand awareness, success could come in the form of new channel followers, unique site visitors, impressions, time on site, etc. On the contrary, if your brand wants to increase lead gen efforts, measuring the number of clicks on a piece of paid content would be a method to gauge success from that specific campaign.
Determining ROAS (return on ad spend) can be difficult when you aren’t dabbling specifically in sales. That said, driving high-intent leads, boosting brand awareness, and continuing to nurture existing leads are all efforts that are worth pursuing, despite the difficulty in linking these efforts to one’s bottom line.
How Apparel Brands Leverage WAIR To Optimize Channel Spend
Now that we’ve established a foundation for effective channel spend. How specifically does WAIR come into play?
For those unfamiliar, WAIR is a data-driven, eCommerce apparel sizing solution that provides shoppers with personalized and accurate size recommendations for their favorite clothing. Backed by the world’s largest and fastest-growing database of 3D body scans, WAIR can predict the body dimensions of any shopper and factors in the brand’s specific fit data, ultimately creating a sizing experience that both the brand and the shopper can be confident with.
On the surface, the applications of WAIR seem unrelated to optimizing one’s channel spend, but size recommendations are just the tip of the iceberg. As shoppers use WAIR to order their best-fitting sizes, their body data is seamlessly captured in the background alongside campaign UTMs, opening up a veritable treasure trove of actionable insights for marketers.
With WAIR, marketers can determine:
- Which campaigns are selling specific hero products
- Which campaigns and platforms are attracting certain body types
- And most importantly, which campaigns to pause or alter because they are actively driving shoppers to a product that is out of stock
The applications here are apparent. Determining which campaigns are selling hero products helps marketers decide which channels to double down on when it comes to ad spend. Identifying the body types interacting with your ads across different channels helps with both personalized messaging and product placement, further increasing your brand’s chances of driving conversions from paid efforts. Finally, altering or pausing campaigns that drive traffic to a product that is out of stock helps reduce or eliminate wasted marketing spend. This step also ensures that your shoppers don’t search on your competitor’s website for a similar product that you just paid for them to get excited about.
When asked about WAIR’s applications surrounding paid marketing, their founder and CEO, Greg Moore, had this to say:
“At WAIR, we like to say that sizing is an all-encompassing factor that affects every aspect of apparel eCommerce. Sure, our foundations are in sizing and fit technology, but having clear and continuous insights into the body types of your shoppers can be the determining factor in running a successful (or unsuccessful) paid marketing campaign.”
Final Words
While factoring in shopper body data into one’s channel spend efforts may initially seem unorthodox, the opportunities this approach presents for apparel brands are not to be ignored. Having the ability to identify which body types are interacting with one’s brand across all marketing channels is a competitive advantage few brands have the ability to leverage. In the current eCommerce landscape, rife with competition and limited demand, one would be foolish not to leverage this information stream to their advantage.