Men's innerwear brand XYXX Apparels to go aggressive on content marketing

Premium men's innerwear and loungewear brand XYXX Apparels is set to increase its content marketing spend in the financial year 2020-21. The brand currently invests 30% of its digital spends on content marketing and is planning to revamp its content strategy in a big way this year.

For the digital-first brand that aims to be innovators and disruptors in the innerwear category while talking to millennials in their language, a mix of witty content and videos has worked best.

Petal Gangurde

In an interaction with BuzzInContent.com, Petal Gangurde, VP Marketing of XYXX Apparels, said, "We are focussing on micro-campaigns and will later go for larger campaigns and more interactive content. We plan to collaborate with content creators this year."

The brand has a very strong BTL (below the line) presence. The budget is split 50:50 between digital and BTL, which would soon grow into ATL (above the line) as well, said Gangurde.

Founded with a vision of changing the innerwear culture in India, the brand has been receiving excellent customer acceptance, which is very difficult in a category like innerwear.

For better content marketing strategies, Gangurde advised brands to have credible data around their target audience and then build content plans. 

Gangurde attributed the growth in the organic traction on social media and increased brand awareness to user-generated content, which is amplified via micro-influencers.

Having the right kind of influencer associations, which help in the amplification of UGC campaigns, is key to fetching authentic and quality UGC.

"From the strategy point of view, content marketing is the key for us. We believe that just doing an ad is not the solution. Today, the consumer is far more informed and can see through paid marketing. That is why brands should first know their personality, USP and accordingly associate with influencers who can resonate with them."

She said unrelated association with influencers comes from the insecurity brands have when they think the campaign, idea or product is not strong enough.

Gangurde said that the brand fetches good quality UGC when it has partnered with micro-influencers. She said in such collaborations, influencers first try products and curate content by themselves, which in turn garners stronger engagement.

In November last year, the brand associated with FitZUp, an online lifestyle and fitness community on International Men's Day and launched the campaign #CelebrateYou. For Halloween, it partnered a few known influencers like actor Kunal Thakur and Pocket Aces' Andre Borges for the campaign #NoUnderwearHorror.

Through its campaigns, the brand promotes wearing comfortable innerwear. Gangurde said that the brand saw a significant jump in sales of around 20-30% on the website after the campaigns.

Predicting trends in the content marketing space for 2020, Gangurde said curated or user-generated content is going to become significant. Over the last few years, UGC had gained momentum, but brands were not able to leverage it because of its poor quality, she said. 

She added, "The industry will also witness a lot more micro-campaigns, and brands will also go after smaller, everyday moments to create shareable, snacky content. While the video content will, of course, be the winner, interactive content-led by AR and VR will grow as well."