While creating a beauty brand and products to sell in the cosmetic market, it’s never too soon to think about marketing campaigns, marketing materials, and other marketing efforts to boost your brand to potential customers.
As you know, the beauty industry is a very competitive market with small brands and large beauty companies competing against each other for a similar customer base on pretty much the same social media channels.
So, what’s the best way to promote your beauty business and cosmetic products online?
Also, how can you market beauty products online that will increase the ROI as a small business (return on investment)?
Basically, it’s not just one thing that you have to do to market your beauty brand cosmetic business. It’s a teamwork of strategies, such as:
- Engage with Content Marketing
- Collaborate with Influencers (Micro – Influencers)
- Utilize User-Generated Content (Happy Customer Experience)
- Target and then Retarget with Ads
- Create a YouTube/TikTok Channel
- Strategize Email Marketing
- Build Social Proof with PR
Let’s delve into these best strategies that can boost sales in your beauty business and take your online marketing efforts to the next level.
Engage with Content Marketing
One of the best ways to engage with your audience niche in the beauty industry is through writing blog posts. While it may seem easy, it takes a lot of planning with marketing materials that need to be lined up to write, optimize, edit, and promote on social media posts.
Content marketing usually relies on blog posts that your audience can learn from. This type of digital marketing essentially involves organic marketing (marketing that you don’t have to pay for.)
So, by strategically putting out content in a blog post (or even a blog series) about what people are searching for when it comes to anything beauty, such as the “latest trends on beauty routines,” you or your content marketer can build content around what the latest trends on beauty routines are to help people who are searching for this exact keyword phrase on the internet.
Plus, this is a great, FREE way to rank on the Google search engine when it comes to targeting keywords that you think describes your beauty brand completely. If people find your blog content educational and helpful, they may linger longer on your website to see what you have to offer to help them with what they were searching on that made them find your blog in the first place.
And, they may even make a purchase. It’s a win-win.
Collaborate with Influencers (Micro – Influencers)
Influencer marketing is an essential part of beauty marketing campaigns because these are people who have a lot of pull with their particular audience.
However, you may be asking yourself, “I’m not that big of a beauty brand. Who’s going to promote my brand that is an influencer?”
This is where micro-influencers are super helpful to marketing your products.
While they may not have that much reach like top influencers, they are very engaged with their followers, which helps their followers trust them with certain product choices. Especially if some micro-influencers have a following in your niche customer base, this is a great place to start as you are growing your cosmetic product business.
Many influencers have ways to contact them and have certain terms of agreement or contracts that can be negotiated when figuring out the best way to promote your beauty brand’s products. So, make sure you keep this in mind when reaching out to potential micro – influencers if you have a limited marketing budget.
Utilize User-Generated Content (Happy Customer Experience)
Along with influencer marketing as essential marketing campaigns, this is also a great opportunity to use user-generated content. Basically this type of content is very helpful because it’s mainly a customer’s experience that has been shared on social channels without costing you anything.
A good amount of regular people have social media channels like Facebook and Instagram that want to give a shoutout to their favorite brands and products. If you are tagged (mentioned by your username) by a customer that just bought your product and just fell in love with your brand, you can then repost that same post on your business page and give them love right back.
This is an awesome way to have a free promotion to not only build your customer base, but to show that real people are getting real results from your products and that there are people out there who love what you are doing.
Plus, it will make that person who tagged you feel special that you took the time to give them that attention in return. In that way it shows authenticity in multiple forms, which only continue to make you look legitimate as a beauty brand business and increase brand loyalty.
Target and then Retarget with Ads
You can’t have marketing materials without having to do some paid advertisements. Now, if you aren’t at this stage yet in your beauty brand business, that’s ok! Just continue with the other strategies until you have more of a budget to use for a paid advertising campaign.
The first time you run a paid ad campaign, it is usually to target particular people in your niche that would probably be interested in what you are selling. This is usually based on demographics like age, gender, and location, but it can also be what they have been searching or liking in certain social media feeds. This digital strategy is then used to tailor who you want to target initially when running your campaign.
Retargeting ad campaigns basically run advertisements to people who already have an interest in what you are selling in your beauty business and you want to get them to look at you again. This can be done either on Facebook or Instagram, depending on where your brand has the most traction.
Even with a limited marketing budget, you can still make retargeting marketing campaigns with Google Ads and dynamic ads on Facebook and Instagram. You can look at Facebook for Business to find out how to create dynamic ads for your business.
For Google, you can go to ads.google.com to get started in running some ads to an audience that you target who would look up those keywords or questions that your beauty business specializes in.
Create a YouTube/TikTok Channel
Another great way to get your cosmetic products and beauty brand to many scanning eyes is to post content on a YouTube and/or TikTok channel.
Usually in YouTube, these are longer videos that you can create content for that could explain the breakdown of your product and even the story of your brand. Many companies will show how to use the product and the behind-the-scenes of how it was made, while one of their main videos may be about how their business got started for that storytelling angle.
And through TikTok, you can create shorter videos that are right to the point. This helps your customer base and potential consumers see how your product can be used on a daily basis and promotes your brand with a simple click and scroll.
As a cosmetics brand, you can even have makeup tutorials (for both platforms) along with product descriptions to help your customers with purchasing decisions straight from a video.
Strategize Email Marketing
This digital marketing strategy is crucial when it comes to building loyal customers for your brand.
By having a newsletter that you can prompt visitors to your site to sign up for (can even give them a 10% of their first purchase if they sign up), you can gather and store email address that you can blast to over and over again to have these consumers keep up with what’s going on in your business. This also helps keep them aware of sales and promotions that you may be running that customers need to purchase in a timely manner.
This is a great way to build your audience and create a community that can feel very exclusive to your audience base. You can even send education information, tutorials, and personal promotions (for a customer’s birthday, for instance).
By strategizing your email marketing with eye-catching graphics and visuals and a clickable call to action, this is a great way to get new and returning customers back on your website to browse through your inventory and buy more of your products that you want to sell.
Build Social Proof with PR
To save you extra time to reach out to potential partners, have them come to you! A well set-up Media & Press page does exactly that. Think of it as your PR hangout.
As Outbrain states, “Your website or online store reflects who you are as a brand, so make sure they include all the information that both your customers and the media need. Build a press page where you can publish all company news and brand mentions, such as interviews, press articles, bloggers reviews, awards, etc.”
Having PR people, influencers, or brand collaborations contact you for partnership can make a significant difference in your marketing tactics. You can even have an online application form that even streamlines the process further.
By doing this, you are building your “social proof” or “the idea of normative social influence, which states that people will conform in order to be liked by, similar to, or accepted by the influencer (or society).” Basically, as consumers, we are more willing to trust a brand or product because of what others have said about their experience via product reviews. It’s the “word of mouth” or “long line” of the digital media age for your target audience.
Be Your Beauty Product’s Best Promoter
Marketing your products or cosmetics brand in global beauty can be an overwhelming necessity that you must do to get your beauty brand and cosmetic products out there. But, once you have an online marketing strategy in place, there are multiple avenues that you can use with different distribution channels to incorporate for you to be your best promoter when it comes to your business.
So, try out some if not all of these strategies to really get your business seen to the right people. It’s important to get your product out there and the only way to make sure this happens is with promotion and marketing strategies honed in for the online digital marketing age.
Of course, this does not rule out traditional advertising campaigns, such as magazine ads, billboard ads, word-of-mouth, or even brochures and pamphlets. But with shopping going towards more of the online realm that is readily accessible to consumers and businesses alike, it’s key to really get a grasp on how these marketing strategies can be employed and taken advantage of for your cosmetic products in your beauty brand.
For even more tips and actionable strategies, feel free to check out StartBeauty’s online entrepreneurship course, where we give you step-by-step tactics to really wow your customers and build your beauty brand to be the best that is offered in the eCommerce world.