Branding is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs.

In today’s world, there are so many ways an entrepreneur can use branding to strengthen their business. For little to no cost, entrepreneurs can post branded content across social media platforms to sell product and grow their business.

The Branding Challenge

The challenge with branding, however, is that it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to be creative and come out with unique and differentiated content. As a low-cost strategy, many entrepreneurs are using branded content, and this is saturating the market and creating more competition. Entrepreneurs will publish great content on social only to find that they are only gaining a few likes and not generating the attention and engagement they need to sell product and successfully run their business. To be successful, entrepreneurs need a couple hundred thousand, or millions, of likes to achieve significant business growth.

TikTok is the Latest Dream Machine for Marketers

With global popularity, TikTok is gaining traction as one of the most popular platforms for advertisers. With 15 seconds to capture consumers’ attention, advertisers are leveraging music and parading to something fashionable to develop memorable branded content.

It’s a common human trait that we can receive information faster that we can send it, so in 15 seconds brands have enough time to tell their whole story, brand it, and repeat it umpteen million times. And the best part? It cost literally nothing.

The catch, however, is that to be successful on TikTok, you need to be more creative than the next guy. With so many brands fighting for consumer attention, your content must be differentiated and unique to be successful. So, for all the entrepreneurs looking at low-cost solutions to share their brand message, TikTok is a great option. But you must be that much more creative to succeed.

Fashion is changing rapidly and speed to market is a huge part of this transformation. In the past few years in fast fashion we’ve seen a lot of disruption, decentralization, and Instagram monetization.

Think about the original fashion business supply chain and how it’s been set up with department stores and a push model of the industry deciding what’s available and what we’re going to wear. Everyone was shopping in malls to engage with products.

Today, we’re operating more on a pull model where customers can tell us more about what they want. We’ve seen retailers like Zara, Forever 21, and H&M operate in this model of what we consider fast fashion. The real difference is the speed to market and the time it takes for the production process for that product to make its way to a floor.

Zara has been able to innovate and engage with feedback loops and speed up the process to market. Engaging in smaller batch manufacturing is helpful when you’re competing for space on a manufacturing line. It takes more effort and resources to produce 30,000 garments in one place versus spreading out demand in several factories since you’re competing with other retailers and brands to get manufacturing facility space and capacity.

Using fashion education, you can pivot more quickly when you’re dealing with fewer units. There’s opportunities to use customer feedback to shorten production lead time.There are so many points in the supply chain where, when you’re dealing with less units, it becomes easier for stores to more quickly funnel their product.

In historical department store retail, it could take six to nine months to go through this process. Fast fashion really disrupted that process and we no longer have to wait for the season to end to continue iterating, innovating, and ultimately bring newness on our time.

Today, every brand has a website. They have a web presence of some sort. I believe your website should provide precisely what your customers, or tribe, are looking for.

Many businesses use e-commerce. However, the internet is a bit more educational. You can buy clothes on the web, but first, let us tell you about ourselves. We’ll show you how we sustainably make our products.

It becomes a component of marketing and romancing the customer with who you are and how you conduct business. Nobody wants to be more than a few mouse clicks away from making a purchase. You must make it simple and easy to use.

I believe that user-friendliness is the key. A lot of really high-end corporations, in my opinion, are really good at making attractive visuals. You go to the site, and it’s absolutely stunning, and it perfectly captures the look they’re after. However, if you can’t easily navigate from item to item or see the product’s information, you’ll discover abandoned carts more often than not. Alternatively, they could have simply given up and departed.

We’ve witnessed significant growth in online shopping. Even those I would never expect to embrace e-commerce, such as my parents and people in their eighties, have acclimated to it, and everyone is doing it this way. You’ll want to make sure that your website is simple to use however you put yourself out there.