Over the years, the global beauty and cosmetics industry has expanded dramatically, as has its marketing potential.
With an industry worth $532 billion in 2019, it can be difficult for many upcoming and less established brands to break into such a crowded market. When it comes to marketing, however, there are no restrictions. The beauty industry has enormous growth potential.
Prior to the pandemic, physical stores such as Sephora and Shoppers Drug Mart's Beauty Boutique dominated beauty sales, with 85 percent of beauty products purchased in person.
Fortunately, since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a shift in consumer shopping habits, particularly a shift to online shopping and the growth of e-commerce businesses, giving newer and smaller brands the opportunity to grow their businesses and compete with more established brands through digital marketing.
Cosmetic and beauty brands are important in the e-commerce industry, and there are numerous beauty and wellness trends.
As of 2021, 87 percent of beauty shoppers spend the same or more online than they did in-person prior to COVID-19, and 57 percent of consumers claim that more than one-fourth of their beauty product purchases in 2020 were made with brands from which they had never purchased before.
Bold x Collective recognizes the significance of marketing in the beauty industry. Their creative and performance team has compiled a list of 5 marketing strategies for your beauty and cosmetics brand in this blog.
1. Build a Community
Fortunately, because the beauty industry is quite large, there is a large demographic interested in this market. However, this means that there are a lot of competitors, and brands must work twice as hard to stand out from the crowd.
Building a community across your various channels will ultimately help your brand grow and increase customer loyalty. Some ways to do this include:
To make your brand a helpful beauty guide for consumers, hold frequent Q&A sessions, whether on Instagram stories or in the comments section of a post. While this is frequently done through social media, Sephora's Beauty Insider Community on its website is another example. Sephora beauty insiders are real-time employees who are available to chat with and assist any customers shopping on their e-commerce site.
Make entertaining and engaging social media content. Instead of constantly displaying and promoting your products with graphics and images, think about incorporating them into more lifestyle-related content. This includes demonstrating how to use the product(s) properly through a skincare or makeup routine, as well as a tutorial on how to create or do something unique with your product. Beauty companies tend to have a large community on Instagram because the platform is centered on beautiful and aesthetically pleasing content. Now all you have to do is make sure your content is also entertaining.
Encourage one-time customers to become repeat customers. There are numerous ways to incentivize customers, but two common strategies are: offering a discount or sample to customers who sign up for your newsletter, which allows you to strengthen your relationship with customers. Email marketing is essential for this, and Klaviyo and Privy are two of Bold x Collective's favourite tools. Aside from email marketing, creating a points system that rewards customers for their purchases with a free product after a certain number of points is also a great incentive.
2. Create a Flowing Omnichannel Experience
Successful beauty brands operate through a variety of distribution channels, including but not limited to:
Online store
Blogging
Newsletters via email
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest are examples of social media platforms.
Paid advertisements and promotions
It can be difficult to increase brand awareness and drive traffic without utilising various forms of digital marketing and cross-promotion; as the saying goes, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Engage on multiple platforms and integrate all of your marketing channels to provide a seamless experience for customers.
Every company website should include a sign-up form for the company newsletter, and your newsletters should include links to your other channels.
Your company website should also include links to your blogs in the header and be able to direct site visitors to all of your brands' social media platforms.
Similarly, every social media platform that your brand uses should drive traffic back to your website by including a link in each bio. Essentially, every channel should be linked and capable of easily directing customers to your other channels.
3. User-Generated Content and Reviews
Regardless of your brand's size or popularity, word-of-mouth marketing will always be one of the most important methods for increasing brand awareness and driving sales. Fortunately, it's also free.
Customers' videos, pictures, reviews, and so on about your products can be reshared on your own social platforms and showcased on your website.
Content that is 100 percent authentic rather than content created by your brand is an effective method for increasing customer trust because customers understand that user-generated content is genuine and not a sales tactic.
4. Collaborate with Beauty Influencers
Influencer marketing is becoming increasingly popular, and its success can be attributed in large part to the beauty and cosmetics industries.
Beauty influencers have a large influence on what is trendy and the purchase decisions that consumers make, and having the right influencers represent them to speak directly to their customers is one of the best marketing strategies for beauty brands.
Working with influencers who connect with your brand and are in your demographic will help you raise brand awareness and specifically reach audiences who are more likely to purchase and be interested in your brand.
It's also a common misconception that having an effective influencer marketing strategy is out of reach for smaller businesses because they can't afford to work with the biggest names in the influencer world, but this isn't always the case.
Micro-influencers, or influencers with fewer than 50k followers, are significantly less expensive to work with (many will even work for free if they are provided with the products) and have proven to have a high ROI due to their focus on a specific niche as well as their community engagement.
Diversity and inclusion are also important considerations when choosing models and influencers to represent your brand, especially in the beauty industry.
A diverse group from various ethnic backgrounds, body shapes, and even gender identities can be an excellent way to demonstrate your brand's inclusivity.
Fenty Beauty, which heavily focuses on including people of all cultures and looks, is a great example of a brand that is focused on diversity and is continuously growing in success, which is amazing to see and experience from a consumer perspective.
5. Promotions and Giveaways on Instagram
It can be difficult to persuade consumers to buy a product from your brand for the first time, especially in such a crowded market.
However, offering special promotional discounts on occasion allows consumers who were previously undecided to be further motivated to purchase what they had their eyes on.
Giveaways are also a great way to increase exposure and engagement by establishing specific eligibility criteria. To be considered the winner, a consumer must simply like the post, follow the brand, tag a friend in the comments, and share the giveaway on their Instagram story.
All of these requirements work to increase your brand's engagement, which is rewarded by the Instagram algorithm, and work to increase brand awareness by bringing new viewers to your brand's profile.
After all, the ultimate goal is to create a community!
Wrapping Up
We've established that the beauty and cosmetics industry is quite large; there are a lot of competitors, but there are also a lot of opportunities. The Tamilposts marketing team is here to assist beauty brands that require additional assistance.
Tamilposts understands the importance of growing your brand's digital presence because we specialize in digital marketing and have years of experience in the industry.