Beauty brands can see an ROI of up to $18 for every $1 spent when working with influencers. You may find it surprising that this doesn’t mean using the biggest beauty creator out there. Micro-influencers can be shown to be driving sales, due to their highly engaged audiences.
67% of beauty enthusiasts now turn to influencers before making a purchase, meaning that it’s essential for Influencer Marketing to play a major role in the marketing strategies of beauty retailers.
Unlike traditional advertising methods like billboards or TV ads, which often represent a narrow portrayal of products and our society, Influencer Marketing showcases diverse individuals using products in real-life contexts. Working with influencers allows beauty brands to highlight how their offerings cater to various skin types, hair textures, and budgets. This approach allows consumers to see themselves represented, making their purchase decisions more informed and relatable.
The great thing about having influencers as the face of your product means that engagement doesn’t abruptly stop at the end of the campaign period. Influencer content encourages the creation of user-generated content (UGC) by inspiring their audiences to engage and share their own experiences.
Followers are motivated to try the products themselves and share their opinions, often mimicking the influencer’s style. This creates a ripple effect, as audiences feel a sense of participation and community, contributing their own content like reviews, photos, and videos while tagging the brand or influencer. This cycle of influencer-led UGC will expand your brand’s reach further. Ensuring that the customer purchasing experience is positive will keep them coming back.
To get Influencer Marketing right as a beauty brand, you can take different approaches depending on your goals…
Influencers play a crucial role in generating buzz for new product launches. Beauty brands can create anticipation and excitement before the official launch by giving influencers early access to products or exclusive first looks.
Influencers often unbox, demonstrate, or review the products in real time, sharing their genuine first impressions with their audiences. This type of content builds anticipation, encouraging followers to be among the first to try the new products.
We took this hype-building approach in our campaign with LUSH for the 2023 holiday season. LUSH released three limited-edition product lines from October to December, and our goal was to motivate consumers to choose LUSH during the holiday season.
As a cruelty-free brand that sells handmade, ethically sourced bath and beauty products, LUSH has developed a cult following that aligns with these aspects of the brand and anticipates new releases.
The holiday season is a pivotal period for LUSH, marked by heightened consumer activity and intense competition among brands, so it was essential to magnify LUSH's presence during this period in the UK and North America. To achieve this, we leveraged various influencer verticals including ASMR, lifestyle, and beauty to generate mass awareness of the ‘Lushiverse’ and its captivating holiday gifting options on Pinterest and YouTube.
We achieved:
Curious about how we increased intent to purchase? We’ll dive deeper into that later…
Engagement and awareness are great for brands, but the ultimate marketing goal is to drive sales. Influencers can share exclusive promo codes or highlight time-sensitive deals so that your brand can effectively drive both in-store and online sales. These partnerships often come with targeted calls to action, encouraging immediate engagement.
As well as building hype and awareness around LUSH’s holiday product launch, we set to make sure it was easy for consumers to shop the products seamlessly.
YouTube’s position as a sound-on platform with longer watch times meant that we prioritized it during the campaign. We provided influencers on this platform with QR codes to present on screen, which provided easy navigation to the LUSH website. We wanted this to integrate into their content seamlessly, so briefed influencers with precise messaging to deliver but with an emphasis on creative freedom, for the content to fit their natural style.
LUSH reported increased footfall in stores during the campaign period, as well as an increase in new website users, complementing the 49.74% view-to-cart ratio.
Arguably this is the most important goal of influencer marketing for a beauty brand, excitement around a product is great, but true success is encouraging customers to continue to repurchase from your brand and this means telling a story and getting your audience involved in it.
Influencers’ genuine endorsements and long-term relationships with the brand build trust among their followers, who view these recommendations as credible. This storytelling approach is particularly powerful in the beauty industry, where consumers seek products tailored to their specific skin or hair types, tones, and personal beauty needs.
We took a different approach to promoting a cosmetic product with L’Oréal for Ralph Lauren fragrances where cinematic content took the lead, and the product seamlessly slotted in. Product reviews and daily routine style content are a go-to way to integrate a beauty product into influencer content, but you can also see success in embracing the unexpected.
Our goal with the luxury, legacy brand was to position Polo Red and Polo Blue as must-wear scents for modern, active men through entertaining, and hypnotically beautiful content. From tennis courts to mountaintops, influencers showed how Ralph Lauren fragrances enhance their everyday adventures – one creator even showcased it while skydiving! Their audiences were hooked by the cinematic visuals and stayed engaged to learn more about the product.
The campaign hit 115,100+ engagements, a whopping 337% over the guarantee.
It may seem like the obvious choice to partner with beauty-focused influencers when marketing a beauty product, but diversity in influencer verticals is another way to break through the noise.
Partnering with influencers in verticals adjacent to beauty like fashion, lifestyle, or self-care helps a beauty brand stand out, as their beauty recommendations feel more exclusive and trusted compared to beauty influencers who promote similar products regularly.
Working with creators outside of the beauty vertical was a major part of our campaign with natural skincare brand, Trilogy. The New Zealand-based brand was set to launch in the US, however, the US skincare market is highly competitive, with hundreds of established brands already working with thousands of influencers. Therefore, leveraging influencers across multiple verticals, not just beauty, to tell a story about the skincare’s USPs, and showing their skin before and after using the products was essential to ensure the product made an impact on their audiences.
By collaborating with influencers outside of the beauty vertical, we drove mass traffic, generating 60% of the total campaign revenue driven to Trilogy’s website – which our tech team optimized to increase conversion rates – and 90% of the campaign traffic and revenue to Amazon for Amazon Prime Day. Purchase intent from our influencer traffic was 3 times higher than Trilogy’s website's average.
These case studies and trends highlight a few key lessons for beauty retailers looking to thrive in today’s market:
To learn more about leveraging the perfect, brand-aligned influencers for your next beauty campaign, reach out to us at hello@digitalvoices.com.
