At the beginning of your influencer career, start posting about the products you currently use, are familiar with, and are knowledgeable about. The most important thing you want to keep in mind is that influencers are expected to promote and review the newest products on the market and present the latest beauty trends for their audience.
Don’t waste your time writing/posting about old cosmetic or makeup products or outdated beauty tips/tricks. Influencers are trendsetters, especially when it comes to beauty products!
Here are several starting points on how to become a beauty influencer in the creator community.
1. Find Your Niche
Decide on what it is that you are going to do. Is it makeup that you are great at, or styling hair maybe? You should choose one aspect of the beauty industry that interests you most and focus your efforts there. We must mention though, that you need to have a strong skill set in order to succeed in a social media career.You can, of course, broaden your horizons later on. However, the more focused your content creation is in the beginning, the easier it will be to gain attention from the right target audience.
You can choose to do makeup, skincare, haircare, nails, or even a more narrowed down topic if you can come up with an original idea. An example would be coming up with new nail techniques using a famous nail product.
Becoming a trusted and possibly sole influencer in your specific niche will help you gain recognition and a lot of curious followers
2. Create a Concept
With such a vast ocean of content creators online posting photos, reviews, and opinions on products and beauty trends, you’ll need to find a way to stand out.In order to be recognized as a social media influencer, especially at the start, you need to create your own unique concept. Here is where creativity steps in. Being another girl online posing in a bikini looking attractive with cat eyeliner just won’t cut it as a successful content creator.
Creating your concept around your persona is a smart way to go, as it’s important to be natural and authentically yourself. You should use your best and unique character traits to form the basis of your persona.
Easier said than done, right?
It can be hard to come up with an original idea these days, and there are many unsuccessful lifestyle bloggers out there who weren’t able to do so.
To avoid meeting the same fate, create a unique concept. This can have something to do with the place you film your videos at for video content, using unique humor, new concepts for a tutorial, or including a completely irrelevant skill along with your beauty-related ideas.
Remember the “follow me to” photographer? He has become quite famous using a unique idea for his amazing photos.
3. Learn From the Most Famous Influencers in Your Niche
Although being original is important for success, you should do a thorough analysis of your future competitors before starting out. By this, we mean finding influencers with millions of followers or a strong follower base that started out as regular people, not as an actor or musician.Study their actions, their photo and video aesthetics, how they communicate with their audience, etc. Additionally, browse for followers’ opinions on their favorite influencer on instagram.
Try to understand why they are so attractive to people and what you can take from their practices to help you succeed.
4. Choose a Platform
To reach followers and potential followers, you need to build a strong social media profile. To achieve this, you should focus on one social media platform and start building up your profile with content.Your content should help you gain attention, and show that you’re active, useful, and engaging. Most influencers start with Instagram as it is said to be the most influencer-friendly platform.
You should come up with original, personal hashtags for different types of content you post. Use your concept, the one we talked about previously, to craft your brand. This way, even people who haven’t started following you yet, will recognize you on the “trending” or “suggested” pages.
When you start out, you will join a great group of micro – influencers. Many of these are posting amazing content in the influencer space and are grabbing the attention of brands and other online communities.
Find a way to encourage your followers to share your tips and videos to gain more followers through their profiles by continual posting of outstanding images.
Paying for followers or buying profiles on instagram can sure seem like an easy shortcut but it will most likely end up failing for being inauthentic.
Once you’ve established yourself on Instagram, make sure to experiment with other platforms or work on your Youtube channel. Having several profiles on different platforms will help you reach more people. However, each platform requires a different approach and a lot of work.
Being constantly present and posting regular content on all platforms is important on the road to success but it can be taxing if you are doing all the work yourself. It’s advisable to always stick to quality posts even if that means having consistent presence on one or two social media platforms.
In the end, it’s advisable to create your own website. This adds to your credibility and becomes an extra personalized channel to promote yourself on and use to engage with your followers.
5. Use Guest Blogging to Promote Yourself
A good way to up you marketing strategy and build your follower base in your target audience is guest blogging your beauty knowledge. Showing your knowledge and expert tips through guest blogging as it is excellent for exposure and building your newly created blog/website.Guest blogging will bring organic visits to your website and help you promote yourself to the right audience with your knowledge base. Many great online magazines are lifestyle and beauty oriented with a great deal of readership. You probably already have your own list of favorites, so don’t hesitate to reach out to them.
Most websites or bloggers with similar goals as yours will accept a guest post on a certain topic and give you credit for it once it is posted on their website. Even if you do not have a lot of experience in writing or incredible writing skills, you can use a conversational tone and talk about things you do in your videos or social media posts.
With guest blogging, you get to divert your target audience to your website or social media profile and convert them into followers. This also builds your content influencer credibility. It is worth putting in the effort to write useful creative content for a popular lifestyle, fashion, or beauty blog.
6. Other Ways to Promote Yourself
Marketing is everything these days. There are times you may look at a certain influencer or celebrity and can’t come up with a single reason why this person is so loved. Part of it is the money and effort they put into promotion.
If you do have a budget available, you could pay for sponsored posts on the platform you are based on. But if your budget is not enough to make a difference, you could try other marketing techniques and tactics to get seen.
- Interact with your followers – Along with sharing tips, interaction with followers is key if you pay attention to your followers. You become a relatable influencer by asking for their opinions or just thanking them for their compliments, you will get a huge boost and eventually attract more followers. People online can make you famous simply by writing or talking about you, or simply clicking one button: Share.
- Analyze your audience – Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube can give you an insight into your audience. Data analysis can help you determine the target audience that is most interested in your content. This can help you customize your content with brands to make it even more appealing to a certain audience and gain a bigger following.
- Interact with other beauty influencers – Interacting with other influencers, especially macro influencers, and collaborating with them on giveaways is also a great method of exposure. By collaborating with influencers that post similar content, you might win over some of their followers who are interested in the niche and the type of content you promote.
- Form relationships with makeup & beauty brands – Many beginner influencers post reviews and opinions on certain beauty or makeup brands they have been a loyal customer to and have extensive beauty knowledge on. This is a great way to get noticed by that beauty business brand. You can also give your feedback on their products, tell them your personal experience with their brand, and offer to collaborate with content in exchange for their products. The worst thing that can happen is they refuse the offer. After several rejections, you will eventually find a brand to send you products for a review, and from there on you can look forward to an influencer marketing career.