Marketing Your T Shirt Company – On a budget!

February 12, 2009

Chances are unless you’re starting your brand with an inheritance it’s a ground up operation with most of your funds committed to design and printing. Not a proble. But be realistic, growth is organic, not magical, so have a plan and stick to it.

So ideas for marketing in the early days? Well it needn’t cost money just some of your time out on the web making connections.

T Shirt Recognition Program

Make sure you have a good stats analysis package on your site. Good enough at least to tell where your traffic is coming from. From there on your web site post and announcement for blog owners and web masters inviting them to place a link on your site. Once they have confirmed this is done and they have delivered 100 visitors from their link to you, send them a t shirt as reward for their efforts. Not only is your brand now in front of 100 people who never knew about you but also the webmaster is going to tell other friends about your link “payment” plan and they’ll be along to join the fun.

Now the feasibility of this really depends on your sales conversion —–should be 1-2% so you should sell at least 1 t shirt full price for every one you give away at cost. Not a great profit maker perhaps but again someone is now wearing your clothing who otherwise wouldn’t be. This gives you the chance to expand geographically to other areas of the country and also to target markets and sites that fit your brand.

Bands Program

Nothing original here but a good 2 way exchange. You can sell to bands at a discount, from there the band wears your stuff and you ask them to send you pictures of them wearing it, also in return you ask them to link back to you from MySpace or from their site and you add some of the band’s music to your site. Again this grows the reach of your brand and at the same time makes your site more attractive as it then starts to build into a library of bands with affinity to your brand. This will make visitors more like to buy if they can identify with the type of people who wear your stuff.

The Background Story

So that’s a couple of ideas that on the surface will draw more traffic but behind the scenes they will also pay dividends by providing you with a bunch of incoming links, growing your traffic and improving your search engine visibility.

Feel free to get at me with any ideas you may have.

Posted in Web Marketing