Now that your campaign has launched, it’s time to spread the word about the awesome shirts you’ve designed! The first step of planning your promotion strategy is evaluating where your largest audience is. What social media platform or communication tool has the largest following, or has provided the most support and engagement in the past? If Instagram is a prominent platform for your community, follow this list of helpful tips to help you maximize your promotion and increase t-shirt sales.
- Create a Promotion Calendar
- Prepare Engaging Visuals
- Pick a Unique Hashtag
- Utilize Link-In-Bio With Linktree
- Vary Your Content
- Post on Instagram Stories
- Ask Your Followers for Photos
Create a Promotion Calendar
The easiest way to manage the promotion of your campaign is to create a Promotion Calendar. Choose dates throughout the length of your campaign and mark these dates as ‘promotional content days’ in either a physical or digital calendar. Prepare all images and captions that you want to share for each of these promotional content days. Getting promotional materials ready to go ahead of time will save you time and stress in the long run! Don’t know how to create your promotion calendar? Read more about scheduling your promotional posts here.
Prepare Engaging Visuals
Instagram is a visual social platform, and therefore, you’ll need a varied collection of rockin’ images of your t-shirts to use in your promotions. We highly recommend ordering shirts ahead of the start of your campaign so you can take some photos of your shirts to use when promoting. With Bonfire Supply, you can order as few as 1 shirt so that you can have a real tee to photograph. Also, it’s proven that photos of real people wearing products end up selling more shirts than photos of a shirt laying on a surface, so enlist some volunteers to be models for your apparel.
Pick a Unique Hashtag
When used correctly, hashtags can be an incredibly powerful tool. By choosing a completely unique hashtag that’s easy to remember and connects to your campaign or cause, you can collect all of the posts about your campaign all in one place. Use your chosen hashtag in the caption of your photos so others can click the link to find other posts related to the campaign, from you, and other supporters of your cause. It also becomes a great way to keep track of photos your supporters post when rocking their tees, but we’ll get into that later.
Utilize Link-In-Bio With Linktree
Using simple links that prioritize the user experience will make it easy for your followers to directly access your merch store. We recommend using a link-in bio tool like Linktree so you can link to your profile across all of your platforms.
Bonfire has partnered with Linktree on an integration that allows your community to shop your top campaigns or even visit your full store without ever leaving your profile!
This integration is a free and easy way to create a seamless buying experience across all your platforms – Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
Once you’ve enabled the Linktree integration, add your unique Linktree URL to all of your bios and be sure to tell your community to visit your “link in bio” to check out your Bonfire store!
Learn more:
Vary Your Content
Think strategically about what you talk about in each post. If people start seeing the same appeal in their feed over and over, they tend to lose interest, so be sure to change up your content to keep your supporters engaged. You can do this by varying the images and written content you share in each post. Make sure you have a collection of awesome Instagram-worthy photos of your shirt and use different styles of photos.
Post on Instagram Stories
Because of Instagram’s algorithms, there’s no guarantee that all of your followers will see your posts about your campaign. Instagram stories are a great way to break through the noise of an Instagram feed since it’s at the very top of the app. It’s also been found that hopping on an Instagram Story video to explain a bit about the campaign and show off the shirt sometimes even converts to more sales than an Instagram post.
Ask Your Followers for Photos
One of the benefits of promoting your campaign on Instagram is that there’s natural virality built into the platform. During the promotion of your campaign, you’ll likely find that some of your bought-in supporters will share about the shirt with their own followers by using one of Instagram’s sharing features.
But, the greatest benefit of promoting on Instagram is asking your community to post photos of themselves rocking your tee once it arrives! This will create even more excitement and a sense of community amongst your followers. And it will also create demand for a relaunch of your campaign for those who missed out on purchasing the first time. The easiest way to collect images of your community rocking their new tees is to ask your buyers to either tag you in the photos or use your unique hashtag when posting.
Hundreds of people and organizations use Bonfire every day, and each of their promotion strategies is unique to their goals or cause. You know what will work best for your audience. Trust your instincts as you plan your approach. To help you get started, we’ve created a Promotion Checklist that will help you create a framework for what a strong promotion strategy will look like. If you still need help, our Customer Support Team is here to help every step of the way!
