The draw of social media is also its drawback: there’s always more you can do with it. If your social media strategy includes everything from detailed hashtag research to meticulous content calendars to effective user-generated content to strategic affiliate marketing, there could still be one element you’re missing — custom apparel.

Branded merchandise is an effective but often overlooked social media tool. If you’re considering getting started, keep in mind this strategy isn’t as simple as posting a bunch of custom t-shirt photos and waiting for influencers to magically come flooding in.

Here’s how you can use customized apparel to boost social media engagement in a way that maximizes your investment.

The Power of Branded Apparel in Social Media Marketing

When most people think of social media marketing, custom apparel probably isn’t among the first things that come to mind — but maybe it should be. These items give your brand a much needed physical presence in an otherwise digital environment, in turn giving your followers something tangible to associate your brand with.

Here’s what that can do for your social presence:

• Incentivize Engagement: Your followers already like your brand, and by showing them branded apparel you can prompt likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Try asking for feedback on designs, promoting new items, or sharing giveaways.
• Increase Brand Recognition: By offering branded clothing on your channels, you can promote your core visual brand elements across audiences.
• Create Opportunities for Sharing: By offering giveaways or promotions that require followers to share your posts or tag your profile, you can get your audience to promote your brand to their own followings.
• Engage Influencers: Influencers don’t promote for nothing. You can offer your branded apparel to influencers so they can create dedicated posts about it or wear it in an upcoming post.
• Establish Revenue Streams: Branded apparel isn’t just good for tradeshow giveaways and corporate gifting — you can also sell it through your social profiles to bring in supplemental revenue.
• Promote Goodwill With Followers: Everybody loves free stuff. By offering your followers custom company swag like free branded merchandise, you show them that you value their presence and want them to continue supporting your channel.

How Branded Merch Creates Sharing Opportunities

Of all the benefits custom apparel offers a brand’s social presence, the biggest may be enhanced shareability. Keep in mind that the value of social media lies in user engagement — particularly if you can leverage that engagement to have your followers do the heavy lifting of promotion for you.

Organic social promotion is particularly powerful for reasons you probably experience yourself. People trust their friends’ recommendations and engage with them far more effectively than they do with companies.

Let’s say one of your followers posts a photo of them wearing your branded clothing. Their followers are more likely to see your brand as valuable and trustworthy because they’ve seen someone they trust actively, voluntarily promoting it. Plus, these organic posts spread your brand across networks of people who don’t already follow your profile.

However, people aren’t just going to share a photo of one of your signature custom beanies for no reason. To maximize shareability, your products should:

• Be high-quality so they represent your brand well
• Be well-designed so people want to be seen wearing them
• Incentivize sharing so people are more likely to actively promote them
• Have every-day utility so people can wear them and display them organically
• Visually stand out while obviously — bot not excessively — showing your brand

To those ends, here are some strategies for ensuring your branded merchandise drives social media engagement across channels.

Turn Customers into Content Creators with Branded Apparel

You could painstakingly fill out your social media content calendar with thoughtful, timely ideas and then write multiple posts formatted for each of your channels for every single day — or, you could have your followers do it for you.

User-generated content (UGC) is, as the name suggests, content that’s created voluntarily by individual followers rather than by brands. This is powerful for a few reasons:

• It’s authentic
• It’s more trustworthy than brand-created content
• It’s actionable
• It reaches networks beyond your followers
• It requires a fraction of the resources of brand-created content
• It’s scalable

The only drawback is that UGC can be hard to come by organically. Fortunately, branded apparel is an easy way to make it happen. Strikingly designed clothing can naturally gain user promotion from users who buy said clothing.

However, the more strategic (and effective) way to do this is to promote shares by incentivizing content. You can do this by offering free items or entering users into raffles if they post photos of your products and use a specific hashtag. Gifted apparel is even more likely to be publicized than purchased apparel because people tend to feel genuine excitement about free stuff, plus they may feel compelled to post about it as a kind of quid pro quo to show their appreciation (or in hopes of earning more free stuff).

Partner with Influencers to Grow Your Brand

Another way to get more publicity from your branded apparel is to enlist influencers. It’s worth noting first that influencers come in a spectrum of popularity, ranging from those with small but dedicated followings in the thousands (or even hundreds) to those with massive followings in the millions.

It might be tempting to DM the flashy pseudo-celebrity influencer with 20 million followers asking them to wear your custom hoodie during their next Twitch stream, but odds are your message will never even get read if you’re just starting out with promotion.

Instead, consider finding less popular but still highly relevant users who post a lot of content and get regular engagement from their modest followings. These users will be more likely to respond and promote your brand in exchange for some freebies (possibly including a small fee) to their highly engaged followers.

Grow Your Following with Contests

Branded apparel is perfect for contests because it’s relatively inexpensive to produce and requires fairly little time to set up and manage, meaning they can potentially outperform many of the more resource-intensive traditional marketing tactics.

Start by establishing a hashtag that’s specific to your giveaway but unique enough that searching for it won’t bring up hundreds of unrelated posts. Then, decide on a specific follower action that can drive real value for your brand, like commenting on your posts, tagging other users, filling out a webform, signing up for a trial or newsletter, posting photos and tagging your profile, etc. Finally, offer entry into an apparel giveaway to those who take that action.

For example, you could post a photo of a flashy new branded product and enter users into a drawing to win it if they tag a friend who might also be interested. This enters both users into the contest, which is a win for both of them. Meanwhile, this grows your following when tagged users follow you to see if they won, it provides additional brand exposure to users who are now already interested and engaged with your brand, it promotes goodwill to your followers, and it drives important social media engagement metrics.

Tips for Creating Social Media-Worthy Apparel

Anyone can design an article of clothing, but it takes strategy and a discerning eye to design clothing that really stands out on social media. It requires a thoughtful approach that aligns with your brand, resonates with your audience, and is visually appealing in a virtually endless sea of online content.

Here are expert design tips to ensure your apparel stands out and gets shared on social media.

• Mind Your Audience: The latest Y2K revival aesthetic might resonate with a casual Gen Z following, but custom activewear might be a better choice for Millennial weekend-warrior-professionals.
• Stand Out: Let’s face it, there are a lot of things to look at on social media. What’s going to make your branding stick? Think about this as you create your branded garments, and consider leaning into bold, unique, even risky colors, fonts, and images that are more likely to stick with users as they scroll. Consider enlisting eye-catching colors, impactful fonts, and contrasting schemes.
• Don’t Sacrifice Clarity: You want your design to stand out, but you also want your branding to be easily identifiable. As you design, make sure you don’t get so caught up in aesthetics that you lose track of your core visual brand elements.
• Brand Tastefully: While you need your branding to be easily recognizable, heavy-handed branding can push people away. Find a balance that ensures your brand is obvious but isn’t the centerpiece of a garment.
• Choose Quality: When people share your brand, they take accountability for it. They’re much less likely to do that if your product looks and feels low-quality. Meanwhile, products that hold quality for a long time are more likely to be worn and shared for years to come.

Measure the Impact of Custom Apparel on Your Social Media Presence

Your social media campaign isn’t worth much if you don’t know how it’s performing. Measuring outreach impact can show you what works (so you can do more of that) and what doesn’t (so you can correct the course next time). In either case, the insights are invaluable.

Here are a few ways you can keep an eye on social success so you can improve on and scale your campaigns.

• Track KPIs: If your social KPIs include metrics like clicks, shares, and new followers, you should be able to track these within the platform’s reporting software (or your favorite third-party’s platform) over the duration of your campaign. Pick KPIs that are relevant to the channel, realistic, and lead to real benefits or conversions.
• Monitor Participation: If you’ve associated a unique hashtag, now’s a good time to use them. Look up how many times that hashtag has been used as a gauge for campaign participation.
• Look for Mentions: It’s worth checking each social channel for mentions of your brand and any organic discussions to see if they’ve become more common or more positive.
• Watch Your Influencers: If you’ve enlisted influencers, don’t forget to log their key metrics like likes, shares, reports, and impressions so you can see how effective their efforts are. Don’t forget to map your follower growth to their posting dates to see if their posts lead to new followers for your brand page.
• Check Out Your Website: If your social content’s value is measured in website performance, check referral traffic stats to see if your efforts are leading to valuable on-site performance.
• Update Demographics: You might also want to check on demographic changes in your platform’s analytics dashboard to see if these campaigns are having any effect on the people following you.
• Consider a Third-Party Tool: If you haven’t already, consider enlisting a social listening tool that can help you monitor your brand’s performance across channels and automate reporting.

Designing Custom Apparel for Social Engagement

Creating apparel that effectively promotes your brand while appealing to users and drawing attention in a crowded landscape is no easy feat. As you design these products, it's important to keep in mind that you’re producing pieces that both serve your brand and appeal to your audience. Leaning too hard toward either one of those sides can weaken your ability to reach the other.

When you’re ready to get started, our Design Studio makes it easy to create your next custom product. Test it out today to see in real time what your next design idea will look like.

Further Reading:

• How Custom Apparel Boosts Employee Morale and Company Culture
• How to Make Custom Printed Products Last Longer
• Avoid These 7 Promotional Product Design Mistakes
• How To Personalize Apparel For Different Employee Roles