Avant Habit - Increase Brand Awareness
- Sustainable Fashion
Increased brand awareness for a sustainable fashion brand through Instagram hashtag strategy only
The Brief
Avant Habit is a sustainable athleisure brand whose designs are led by independent, fine artists. One of their biggest selling points is that their product journey (from seed to shop) is completely transparent. Careful Feet Digital (CFD) was brought in to increase their online presence and grow their followers organically. Our social media services focused on posting three times a week across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, setting up UTM parameters for each post, as well as developing a hashtag strategy.
Approach
From our industry research, we found that ethical clothing companies mainly use social media as a way to showcase their products. They occasionally share lifestyle and educational content that enriches their story. The posts also tend to be static imagery and video content isn’t used very often. As for the captions, they are friendly and informal to mirror the relaxed attitude of many casual fashion brands. Having completed this competitor analysis, we were better positioned to construct a successful social media strategy for Avant Habit by comparing the best practices and different approaches of other green businesses.
First, we established that our main content pillars would be product promotion, seasonal content and topics related to sustainable fashion. Then, we designed a color palette and created branded templates for each content pillar – using Avant Habit’s style guide as reference. For quotes or facts, our text-based templates incorporated the brand colors and font. For stock photos or product images, our templates had branded background colors. It goes without saying that a distinctive visual style is an integral part of a business’s content marketing strategy, as it ensures that the social media accounts are professional and consistent. We wanted to forge a strong, cohesive identity for Avant Habit which would soon become immediately recognizable for the audience.
Avant Habit’s Instagram feed before CFD
Avant Habit’s Instagram feed after CFD
We increased the number of product posts on the feed to really promote their clothing. We used a mix of their professional photos, as well as stock images to add a personal touch. The captions had strong and clear calls to action (CTAs) that drew attention to the IG shopping feature or their link in bio, which led to their website and online store. We wanted to facilitate customer purchases as much as possible by ensuring that each product post was tagged on Instagram.
For the lifestyle and educational posts, our CTAs centered on encouraging followers to share their thoughts on sustainability topics. We wanted to start a conversation and grow a community. Over time, we found that followers were happy to share their opinions and the engagement rate for these posts were generally high.
One of our posts generated a high engagement rate among the followers
Furthermore, of the thirty maximum hashtags that can be included in Instagram posts, Avant Habit previously used a limited and generic selection of words. So, we not only built their hashtag strategy to include more industry-specific terms, but more importantly, tracked which keywords were the best performing of the week to include in the posts. In doing so, the right audiences were able to find and engage with our content.
Avant Habit’s post (before CFD) with a few hashtags
Avant Habit’s post (after CFD) with thirty hashtags
Results
By creating a cohesive brand look and feel, posting regularly as well as building out a full hashtag strategy, we were able to grow Avant Habit’s following organically. In our eleven months of collaboration, we increased their Instagram following by 18.6% (461 to 547 followers). Had community management been added to our scope, we anticipate that this number would have been even higher.
Avant Habit’s follower count before CFD
