Bags / Shoes & Accessories

A COVID-19 epidemic has reshaped people's lifestyle and changed the global economy and consumption pattern. The rise of indoor sports and the growing demand for outdoor activities are also suppressing, stimulating the market demand for sports footwear and clothing brands. Chinese sports footwear and clothing brands are facing new growth opportunities.

Looking at the development scale and trends of the global sports shoe and clothing industry, focusing on analyzing the social media marketing strategies of the sports shoe and clothing industry and typical brands, gaining insights into the success of brand marketing, and restoring the market opportunities and marketing strategies of sports clothing from multiple perspectives.

Insight into big data in the sports footwear and clothing industry: The post pandemic has given rise to new demand for sports, and consumer behavior is rapidly changing

With the COVID-19 epidemic being relatively controlled worldwide, people have new demands for "movement" in the post epidemic era.

On the one hand, the demand for indoor sports in the home environment has increased, and on the other hand, the demand for outdoor sports has rebounded after being closed. From both indoor and outdoor aspects, people's demand for sports and sportswear has increased.

The demand is increasing, and the demand is also changing. Similarly, due to the impact of the epidemic, consumers' sports consumption is showing a trend of being online and socialized. 70-85% of consumers hope to continue using online fitness, health, and digital fitness, while over 80% of consumers use online channels to search for products.

Therefore, the marketing focus of sports footwear and clothing brands should also change accordingly:

--The trend of online marketing is obvious, and social media platforms have become an important role

--DTC marketing model as the main approach, shortening the transformation path from marketing to sales

--Combining new technologies and concepts such as the metaverse, focusing on enhancing consumers' sense of experience in marketing

Therefore, when we focus on the social media marketing of representative brands in the sports footwear and clothing industry, and gain insights into the four overall characteristics of the current industry in social media marketing:

Feature 1: Sports shoes and clothing brands have all been deployed on mainstream overseas social media platforms, and multi account and matrix operations have become the norm. Facebook and Instagram are the preferred social media marketing platforms for brands in the industry, and 80% of brands have already deployed TikTok.

Feature 2: The regional setting of the brand's social media homepage is highly consistent with the target market. Asia is the continent with the most popular homepage layout for sports shoe and clothing brands, mainly concentrated in Japan and South Korea. The layout of social media homepage in Europe and the Americas is second, concentrated in countries such as the UK, France, the US, and Mexico.

Feature 3: Compared with Q1, the overall social media operation of sports shoes and clothing brands shows the characteristics of more frequent posting and higher interaction volume; The increase in fan base and growth rate have both increased to a certain extent.

Feature 4: Sports shoe and clothing brands mainly post visual posts on social media, Facebook and Twitter mainly post image content, while Instagram and YouTube mainly post videos.

Interpretation of social media marketing strategies for sports shoes and clothing brands

In this report, OneSight provides a detailed breakdown of the marketing performance of six domestic and foreign top and representative brands, Nike, adidas, lululemon, Anta, Li Ning, and Balaf, on overseas social media.

By analyzing the coverage and layout of their social media platforms and interpreting recent successful social media marketing cases, three directions that sports shoes and clothing brands can learn from are summarized:

1. Matrix settings can be diverse and precise

The audience of sports shoe and clothing brands is diverse, but the presentation of sports shoe and clothing marketing content must be "dynamic". Therefore, in the selection of social media matrix platforms, we recommend brands to first choose platforms with more dynamic expression such as Instagram and TikTok, while Facebook and Twitter, two platforms that gather athletes and sports celebrities, cannot be missed. In addition, the matrix setting of sports footwear and clothing brands should also be more flexible. In addition to localized home pages targeting the corresponding market, the "Sports Home Page" and "Function Home Page" matrices can also be built based on product lines or product functions.

2. Humanities or technology? Choose different marketing perspectives to create differentiation

The spirit of sports covers everything, including the spirit of humanism that represents fairness and inclusiveness, and the sense of competition that requires hard work and progress. Therefore, there are many marketing directions that sports footwear and clothing brands can explore, and they can also seize different aspects of sports spirit to form marketing differences and shape advantages. For example, Nike, which emphasizes the quality of athletes, and Li Ning, who creates a sense of Web3 technology, choose to attract users from different perspectives.

3. Online+offline, open a new channel for DTC mode

For sports shoe and clothing brands, Lululemon has created an emerging DTC model of online sales+offline communities, which is also a new path for later generations of sports shoe and clothing brands to learn from and learn from. From a marketing perspective, actively organizing offline activities and conducting online communication simultaneously is a mutually reinforcing virtuous cycle, and also a new method for marketing DTC sports shoes and clothing brands in the future.

According to the latest data released by Euromonitor, the global sportswear retail market in 2021 will reach 666.2 billion dollars, an increase of 22% year on year, ranking first in all clothing categories in terms of absolute size and relative growth.

Macroscopically, sports footwear and clothing brands have ushered in a period of industry prosperity. Chinese brands have shown impressive performance, increased sales, and continued to increase their brand share and influence. Whether it is the gradual improvement of internal self-development or the driving force of external environment, it can be said that Chinese sports shoes and clothing brands have ushered in a good opportunity for rapid development and establishing influence overseas.