Digital transformation and the use of fashion technology have become essential for fashion, luxury, and beauty companies. Covid-19 has accelerated this process at a time where brands were already planning 360-degree strategies and campaigns. And with more than four collections a year alongside capsule collections and exclusivities, the need for a tool that streamlines campaign assets between departments and PR teams is crucial. Digital asset management technologies can optimize the flow from the moment you receive the campaign materials to the moment you share them with the media and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). Season after season, you'll be able to improve your collection launch processes as well as accelerate the time to market.
One of the main challenges a PR Manager encounters is to answer quickly and efficiently to media and editor's requests in order to not miss a potential coverage opportunity. Also, the endless back and forth to effectively sync and coordinate efforts and info when working with global teams can be quite tiring and time-consuming. Additionally, the missing access to a detailed archive or history of past collections performances can mislead you on how to approach your next collection launch strategy.
Even if we are slowly coming back to physical activities with shows happening during Fashion Week or at least getting back to phygital events, becoming a master in Digital PR became a must. In this blog article, we'll show you three different ways you can leverage technology and digital tools to optimize your work and make life easier as a PR Manager when sharing collection launches. This will remove any complexity involved in creating an inspirational market-tailored press release and ensure you do not encounter any issues with your contact database.
In this article you’ll learn…
1. Centralizing your most valuable relationships
Fashion editors and journalists can receive more than 300 emails per day. It is therefore vital to send a tailored email to each recipient to increase your conversion chances to land an article/feature of your collection. However, we all know how time-consuming and complex it can be to keep a database up-to-date due to the never-ending rotation of roles on the media and press side.
Traditional PR was for decades only dominated by a few powerhouse agencies and in-house PR departments. Over the last few years, we're seeing a shift in the system with the launch of several small boutique PR agencies as well as publicists and creatives starting their own ventures as freelancers and other newly formed stakeholders of creatives. As a result, the back and forth when sharing new brand assets between different parties has significantly increased. For this reason, when sharing your brand assets with the media, creatives, or other professionals in the industry, you should not only have an easy and fast format to share all that material, but also you need to track everything being shared in order to analyze your collection performance.
Through a centralized contact management technology that is connected to your digital asset management software, you will be able to collect and track all this data. Forget about looking through your archive on Gmail, wasting hours asking several people within the team to find that right contact, or having one of your colleagues chasing that particular journalist to see if they received your last campaign assets. Every transaction is tracked and centralized in one place, shared with the whole team, and easily accessible from anywhere and at any time.
2. Adapting to digital showrooms to ensure quick exposure
As digital events and presentations have emerged during the last two years, the need to adapt to this new trend is essential, not only because it is safer for your guests but because you are also able to reach a global and bigger audience instantly.
Once again, traditional PR methods are shifting. Industry professionals and KOLs want to be able to find what they're looking for as quickly and as accurately as possible to answer the significant demand for new content being published. To provide this, you need to first implement a digital gallery system that enables your recipients to view right away your latest collections online via inspiring virtual shows and showrooms. This will allow you to unify the way you manage press packs while giving easy access to your latest releases in real-time to the media and KOLs.
Adapting to this new strategy can lead to a bigger chance of getting a news article, help generate the priceless exposure that drives sales and expand your audience reach to new markets in which you may not have the budget to set up a full physical showroom. A digital showroom platform gives the media and Influencers a place to download high resolution images and request samples directly from a single place, making the process a lot smoother and faster for both of you with the simple click of a button. It's a win-win situation for everyone!
3. Convert your metrics into priceless coverage
A digital asset management solution has the power to collect valuable data that reflects the interest and awareness of your brand. This type of technology enables you to track and analyze in detail the views on each image, downloads per image by press contacts or buyers, an analysis on sample requests recorded every season, as well as get a real-time understanding on how your brand is performing against your competitors.
These metrics are essential to understand the performance of your collections and launches and will help you identify what product may need PR support, what asset to focus on for your collections, and which media to target for your next pitches. All these data are essential to improve your future collection launches and get even better results for the seasons to come!
In today's industry, digitalizing internal processes is a must that increases productivity and PR results by reaching global and local teams at any time and anywhere and growing your PR coverage. Therefore, this naturally leads to the growth of the overall return on investment (ROI) for the business. So, how do you foresee your future collections launching efficiently?
If you want to know more about digital asset management, don’t miss our podcast episode with Arnaud Roy, Chief Strategy Officer of Launchmetrics!
By Launchmetrics Content Team
The Launchmetrics content team is always on the lookout for new trends in the fashion and technology sector. We are geeks with style and lovers of good stories!
