Top 5 Marketing Strategies for Beauty and Cosmetics Brands
The global beauty and cosmetics industry has grown tremendously over the years, and so has its marketing potential. Valued at an impressive $532 billion industry in 2019, it can seem intimidating to get your foot in the door of such a saturated market for many upcoming and less established brands. However, when it comes to marketing strategies for beauty and cosmetics brands, there are no limitations. There is so much growth potential in the beauty industry.
Prior to the pandemic, brick-and-mortar stores like Sephora or Shoppers Drug Mart’s Beauty Boutique dominated beauty sales with 85% of beauty products being purchased in person.
Luckily, with a shift in consumer shopping habits, particularly a shift to online shopping and the growth of e-commerce businesses since the beginning of the pandemic, newer and smaller brands have had the opportunity to grow their businesses and compete with more established brands through digital marketing.
Cosmetic and beauty brands play a major role in the e-commerce industry and there are many beauty and wellness trends in the e-commerce sector.
As of 2021, 87% of beauty shoppers spend the same or even more online than they did in-person prior to COVID-19, and 57% of consumers claim that over 1 in 4 of their beauty product purchases in 2020 were done with brands they had never bought from before.
Top 5 Marketing Strategies for Beauty and Cosmetic Brands
Bold x Collective understands the importance of marketing in the beauty industry. In this blog, their creative and performance team has put together a list of 5 marketing strategies for your beauty and cosmetics brand.
1. Build a Community
Fortunately, the beauty industry is quite large which means there is a huge demographic interested in this market. However, this also means there are a lot of competitors and brands need to work twice as hard to set themselves apart from all the others.
Building a community across your different channels is what will ultimately grow your brand and increase customer loyalty. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as:
- Conduct frequent Q&A sessions whether on Instagram stories or in the comments of a post, to make your brand a helpful beauty guide for consumers. While this is frequently done through social media, another example would be Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community on its website. Sephora beauty insiders are real employees, in real-time, who are readily available to chat and help any customers shopping through their e-commerce site.
- Create fun and engaging content for your social media. Rather than constantly displaying and promoting your products with graphics and images, consider incorporating your products into more lifestyle-related content. This includes showing the product(s) in its proper use through a skincare or makeup routine, or even a tutorial on how to create or do something unique with your product. Since Instagram is centered around beautiful and aesthetically pleasing content, beauty companies tend to have a large community on this platform. Now just make sure your content is also entertaining.
- Incentivize your one-time customers to become repeat customers. There are many different forms to incentivize customers, but two common tactics include: offering a discount or sample to customers who sign up for your newsletter, where you can further strengthen your relationship with consumers. Email marketing is crucial for this, and some of Bold x Collective’s favorite tools are Klaviyo and Privy. In addition to email marketing, creating a points system that rewards customers for their purchases with a free product after reaching a certain number of points is also a fantastic incentive
2. Create a Flowing Omnichannel Experience
Successful beauty brands are active on numerous distribution channels, including but not limited to:
- Ecommerce site
- Blogging
- Email newsletters
- Social media platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest
- Paid promotions & advertisements
Without utilizing different forms of digital marketing and cross-promoting, it can be difficult to grow brand awareness and drive traffic; as the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Be active on numerous platforms and integrate all your marketing channels to make it an effortless experience for consumers.
Every company site should include the option to sign-up for the company newsletter and your newsletters should include buttons to direct subscribers to your other channels.
Your company website should also include your blogs in your header and be able to direct site traffic to all your brands’ social media platforms.
Likewise, every social media platform your brand has should direct traffic back to your website by including the link in every bio. Essentially, every channel should be connected and able to direct customers to your other channels with ease.
3. User-Generated Content and Reviews
Regardless of the size and popularity of your brand, word-of-mouth marketing will always remain one of the most important methods to increase brand awareness and lead to sales. Luckily, it’s also free.
Any videos, pictures, reviews, etc. about your products that are created by customers can be reshared on your own social platforms and showcased on your website.
Content that is 100% authentic rather than content made by your brand is an impactful method for building trust among customers because they know user-generated content is genuine, not a sales tactic.
4. Collaborate with Beauty Influencers
Influencer marketing is growing by the month and its success can largely be attributed to the beauty and cosmetics industry.
Beauty influencers have a huge impact on what is trendy, and the purchase decisions consumers make, and one of the best marketing strategies for beauty brands is having the right influencers represent them to speak directly to their customers.
Partnering with influencers who connect with your brand and are a part of your demographic will help you increase brand awareness and specifically reach audiences that are more likely to purchase and be interested in your brand.
There’s also a common misconception that having an effective influencer marketing strategy is unachievable for smaller businesses because they can’t afford to partner with the biggest names in the influencer world, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Micro-influencers, which are influencers that have under 50k followers, are drastically less expensive to partner with (many even accept to partner for free so long as they are provided with the products) and have shown to often have a high ROI due to their focus on a specific niche, as and their community engagement.
Diversity and inclusion are also very important factors to consider when selecting both models and influencers to represent your brand, particularly in the beauty industry.
Having a diverse group from different ethnic backgrounds, body shapes, and even gender identities can be a great way to showcase your brand’s inclusivity.
A great example of a brand that’s focused on diversity and is continuously growing in success is Fenty Beauty, which heavily focuses on including people of all cultures and looks, which is amazing to see and experience, from a consumer perspective.
5. Promotions and Giveaways on Instagram
Sometimes, it can be difficult to get consumers to commit to purchasing a product from your brand, especially for the first time in such a saturated market.
However, offering special promotional discounts on occasion, allow for those consumers who were on the fence prior to being further motivated to purchase what they previously had their eyes on.
Giveaways are also a great way to increase exposure and engagement by setting up specific rules to qualify. For instance, to be considered the winner, a consumer just like the post, follow the brand, tag a friend in the comments, and post the giveaway on their Instagram story.
All these requirements work to increase your brand’s engagement which will reward your brand by being boosted by the Instagram algorithm, and work to increase brand awareness by bringing new viewers to your brand’s profile.
After all, the end goal is to build a community!
Wrapping Up
We’ve established that the beauty and cosmetics industry is quite large; there are many competitors, but there are also just as many opportunities. The Bold x Collective marketing team is here to help beauty brands in need of some further guidance.
By specializing in digital marketing, and having years of experience in the industry, Bold x Collective understands the importance of growing your brand’s digital presence.
You can also browse other Beauty and Cosmetics Marketing Agencies in Canada for comparison and find the best partner for your business. While reviewing the agencies, we strongly recommend you examine the work they have done for other brands in this sector in order to better understand their experience in Beauty and Cosmetics Marketing. If you want to learn more about marketing tactics and strategies for beauty, we suggest you have a look at Dove’s digital marketing strategy and explore how a famous brand challenges societal beauty norms while promoting beauty products.
