Raw or polished content? Influencer-led or consumer-centered? Scripted or spontaneous?
Beauty brands are facing a flood of tough choices in their efforts to create memorable, efficient and relevant marketing in a multi-modal environment. At Beauty Independent’s trade show BITE New York on Sept. 10, which featured over 80 beauty brands at the Metropolitan Pavilion, the right marketing choices to capture market and mind share were a hot-button topic.
Two panels explored these challenges in depth, covering everything from choosing influencer partners wisely to activating communities for authentic content and deciding whether to hire agencies or handle marketing in-house.
The Ctrl + Alt + Market: Rebooting Beauty Marketing panel was comprised of AKT London founders Ed Currie and Andy Coxon, Maesa chief brand and marketing officer Oshiya Savur, and Caldera + Lab founder Jared Pobre. Meanwhile, the Creator Confidential: Driving Influence in Beauty panel brought together Imaraïs Beauty founder and CEO Aaron Hefter, Ogaki founder and CEO Renee Ogaki, and Brooklyn Blonde creator and editor Helena Glazer.
Ahead, we gathered five of the best takeaways from the panels.
Not Every Influencer Is Your Influencer
Ogaki emphasized that not every influencer is a good fit for a brand. She recommends reaching out to creators for three primary objectives: Content for outlets like social media channels, websites and newsletters; awareness for a brand just starting out or looking to build a new target audience; and for getting customers down the purchasing funnel. Each of these objectives requires unique skills.
She said, “People think they can go to any content creator that’s creating beautiful content and they’re going to convert for them and that’s not quite the case.”
Glazer stressed that patience is essential when it comes to finding the right partners that net results. “There are a lot of times when brands will gift me something and think that sales will happen immediately,” she said. “It takes somebody seeing something seven times before they’re going to think about checking out.” She underscored, “Brand awareness has to come before sales.”
Time INFLUENCER Partnerships for Maximum Impact
When Hefter was ideating vegan ingestible brand Imaraïs Beauty, he knew he wanted a front-facing big name aligned with wellness and fitness who could help open the doors of retailers like Target and Ulta Beauty. He landed on Sommer Ray, an influencer with over 40 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. “There’s a lot of value there for a retailer,” he said.
When Imaraïs Beauty launched at Target and Boots in the United Kingdom, the brand held experiential events where Ray and other influencers and celebrities were in attendance. Hefter recalled, “There were hundreds of millions of impressions all leading back to our retailer and to our brand.”
Sephora and Ulta Beauty have several brands tied to famous personalities, but Hefter pointed out such partnerships may be even more valuable for other retailers such as CVS, Walgreens or smaller independent retail players. He said, “When you offer that to someone like them, that really moves the needle.”
Ogaki believes it’s beneficial for a brand to bring on a communications, marketing and public relations agency shortly before entering retail to optimize influencer tactics. If a brand is considering entering retailers like Sephora, Ulta, Credo or Bluemercury, she said they’re going to examine its approach to influencer marketing and how that might propel a retail launch.
Don’t BE AFRAID TO GO IN-HOUSE
For brands with little or no budgets for agencies or big influencer partnerships, Ogaki suggested they start out contacting influencers via direct message to start developing rapport. “Take them out, maybe grab a coffee so that you can get together,” she said. “Building that human-to-human relationship still works.”
When Pobre realized that the agencies he hired for Caldera + Lab weren’t paying off, he hired an in-house team with a director of growth marketing and video editor. Pobre worked with the director of growth marketing on “identifying the market, the ads that are running from our competitors and what are those value propositions, what are those hooks, the problem solution.” The video editor helped put together scripts.
“You have to have the right words,” said Pobre. “The content is truly what sells.”
Customers Are The Best Marketers
Pobre admitted that Caldera + Lab has never had much success with influencers. Instead, what has been effective is finding customers who use, love and post about the brand and incorporating their content into ads. With that strategy, he said, “The business exploded. Our ad performance, the click-through rates started increasing significantly.”
Currie and Coxon had a similar experience at AKT London. The pair spent 25,000 pounds or over $33,000 to pay influencers to create content for the brand, and it bombed. They also experimented with creating premium visuals to match the premium positioning of AKT London, but that didn’t resonate either.
Leveraging AKT London’s community, however, has been fruitful. “We have an ambassador network across the world that we just tap into and say, you can get free products, create content for us and, if it performs, we’ll continue to pay you, give you products,” said Currie. “The authenticity has been the No. 1 thing that has changed the entire dial for us.”
DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR TOp-performing CHANNELS
Data drives Caldera + Lab’s marketing and advertising. “You want to diversify, you don’t want to only be dependent on Instagram, you don’t only want to be dependent on TikTok, but the reality is, once you start opening up these other channels, it’s a distraction for your team,” he said. “You’re starting to build creatives and all these things for these other channels and it’s hard for them to do all these channels well at once.”
By focusing on its top-performing channels, Caldera + Lab has drawn the highest quality customers profitably at scale. Pobre said, “It’s easy to get distracted with new marketing apps, and then all of a sudden you’ve now put all these resources that were on your best channel on these new channels and then you have to recalibrate and come back, and that’s happened to us a few times.”
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