Historically, the beauty industry has been one of the most competitive retail sectors around. From niche products to varying price points, it is a challenge for even the biggest of brands to market effectively, let alone a small business. Succeeding in this space requires tact, timing, and an iron-clad marketing strategy.
Here are some ways we have run highly profitable beauty product campaigns for our clients online:
1. Tailor the Shopping Experience for Beauty
Every website should be intuitive, easy to use, and conversion optimized – but there are certain aspects of a site that are especially important for beauty sites. Here are some best practices for beauty product websites:
- Create Customer Profiles: When it comes to personal style and beauty, every customer is unique! By creating customer profiles, you can tailor the online experience to each customer. Imagine each site visitor creates their account upon checkout. Then, the next time they log in, they’re easily able to reorder their usual products, see personalized product recommendations, and receive loyalty discounts!
- Showcase Reviews With Photos: The beauty product industry is by nature, visual. On-site customer reviews accompanied by photos will not only provide social proof, it’ll give your site visitors a better idea of what to expect. That way, your audience doesn’t have to go searching for reviews online, they’ll proudly be front and center to help answer any questions a potential customer may have on the product. Feature reviews with photos at the top of your review feed.
- Educate Your Site Visitors With How-To Tutorials: Another unique quality of beauty products is how many possibilities there are with styling and application. Different styles and aesthetics can often be achieved using similar products, with the difference being in the execution. Educate your site visitors on some of the cool ways they’ll be able to use your products by creating tutorials. This will help visitors envision themselves using your beauty line as well.
- Utilize Influencers: When it comes to beauty products, influencers are especially, well… influential! Customers love to see how celebrities and social media personalities are rocking a look. For example, our clients at Pink Dust Cosmetics have tutorials with Christina Anstead so that the brand can better connect with its target audience.
- Highlight Best Sellers: Beauty products are unique in that customers often need to try using it before knowing if it’s what they need or not. Giving high-converting products added digital real estate in the form of a “Best Seller” section on your homepage is a great way to give your potential customers a natural starting point on what to try first. We implemented this strategy for our client, Pink Dust, shown above, and saw an increase in conversion rate.
Creating a website that can convert sets the stage for your overall success as an online beauty product company. It is the foundation to any proper marketing push, and will likely serve as the final destination for all of your marketing promotions moving forward.
2. Ditch Search for Shopping
Google ads are great because you capture people right as they are looking for what you provide. When it comes to promoting visual things like beauty products, Shopping tends to far outperform search. Shopping ads show at the top of the search results page and are photos instead of text – which means higher click-through rates!
3. Get Creative With Facebook Ads
What we love about Facebook ads (and by extension, Instagram ads) is that they allow beauty product retailers to target customers in a variety of creative ways. For example, you can put together an ad that only goes to people within a specific demographic that also have an interest in beauty and makeup. Or target people with interests in similarly-priced beauty products so that your ads are hitting their sweet spot! Alternatively, you could even take a list of your existing customers and create a lookalike audience to find people on the social networking platform that share similarities with your ideal customers.
And the advantages of Facebook ads do not stop there. Facebook has tons of fun options available to advertisers to display visual products, with a variety of placement locations and creative formats like video and even carousel ads to help businesses build the exact campaigns that are right for them. With our client Pink Dust Cosmetics, for example, we consistently see higher conversion rates when we put their products on a carousel slider, thanks to the engaging nature of this ad unit.
With how visual the beauty product industry is, video creatives showing products being applied, styling tutorials, and other relatable content can go a long way. Much like your website initiatives, incorporating influencer marketing is another way to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. Want some extra credit? Try creating a marketing funnel on Facebook to help your efforts go even further.
4. Build Loyalty With Email Marketing
Email marketing has proven to be an invaluable resource for many of our clients, especially in the beauty industry. Why? Because it builds loyalty and creates additional opportunities to share and engage with your audience. It allows for a high level of personalization, which is perfect for the beauty industry.
Instead of sending everyone the same email, identify who your newsletter contacts are and categorize them in ways that make sense for your marketing strategy. If you notice that someone has abandoned their cart, it may be smart to create an automatic trigger that sends them an additional discount code that may get them to complete that purchase.
With email marketing, you’re able to create custom paths and messages for a whole array of scenarios. The closer you can match the needs and emotions of your audience members as they’re in different stages of the purchase process, the more effective your emails will become at closing those leads into additional sales.
Using our friends at Pink Dust Cosmetics as an example, we’ve worked with them to build customized emails that pinpoint what products individual customers have bought in the past, and cater content that plays into their interests. So if someone has an affinity for lipstick, they’ll receive highly visual emails that showcase various images of different lipstick products. Sometimes they even include tutorials of how to use the beauty products that each unique customer likes to buy.
>> Related Article: 5 Automated Emails To Maximize ECommerce Sales
Why Your Small Business Needs An Online Strategy
If you are a beauty product business owner and you want to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts, creating a diverse marketing mix is essential to your success. Every customer has his or her own unique journey, it’s our job as marketers to identify and capitalize on the moments along the way that help shape their final decisions. The beauty industry is no different, and being able to apply these concepts has the potential to make a major difference on your success moving forward.
Promoting beauty products online doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. If you feel like your business needs help better managing (or creating) digital advertising campaigns, let us know and we would be happy to talk about your digital marketing strategy.
