Why Influencer Marketing Triumphed in Beauty Industry
Influencers bring beauty products to life by bridging social media and ecommerce.
People get influenced easily nowadays. More and more people checked Instagram or Facebook to see what style or outfits are currently trending. Thanks to that, various retail and fashion online websites begin to pop all over the internet, vying for the attention of these fast-shoppers. It is no secret that fashion market has grown in parallel to social media consumption rate. A lot of fashion brands also adopt influencer marketing strategy in the hopes of increasing sales and conversions.
But more than everything, when it comes to the implementation of influencer marketing, beauty industry easily takes the cake. With big budgets and less tangible product than fashion, influencers easily bring products to life and help to create a connection between social media and ecommerce.
We all Want to Look Cool
One of the reasons why beauty brands and influencer marketing works is the nature of human as a social creature who likes to be the center of attention. Remember the time when you watched celebrities on television and wished you look like them? Yes, in exchange for celebrities, today, we have influencers. They are the ‘cool’ kids and their audiences looked up to them. Naturally, this creates a certain expectation for the influencers to look ‘good’ for their audiences. This is where beauty brands come in.
Having realized the opportunity to tap into this niche market, it’s only obvious that beauty brands with keen business sense approach these influential people for endorsement opportunities.
Awareness is More Important
In the pre-social media era, sales is always the number one goal for beauty brands, if not any brands. But interestingly, that opinion has changed today. Most beauty brands cited that building brand awareness is their priority and that is why the support of digital influencers is deemed extremely valuable.
Why brand awareness? The reason is due to the various factors that can affect customer’s purchasing decision. Today’s customers are more digitally-educated and often made purchases based on research, reviews, even personal recommendations. With information easily accessible, it is only natural that more beauty brands emphasized on brand awareness instead of trying to advertise their products endlessly. Since influencer marketing is extremely efficient to increase traffic and build awareness, more beauty brands begin to leverage influencers into long-term contracts.
Gen-Z Driven Market
You do realize that 65% of social media users are digital-born consumers, right? Also known as Gen-Z, this group of customer is highly dependent on social media reviews when they are about to purchase beauty products. One of the characteristics of Gen Z is that they value authenticity above all. As a result, beauty brands are striving to create more personalized and authentic content by working with influencers.
Be it creating creative topics such as veganism and eco-friendly products to appeal to socially-aware audience or involving audiences into their content creation process through contest and giveaways, influencers are the perfect candidates as brand advocates to tap into these young audiences’ mind.
Seeing is Believing
Remember the time when you passed through cosmetic counters in department stores, sometimes, you can see stools with customers sitting on it and the sales representatives are busy putting on makeups on them? Indeed, beauty brands promote products and services that can be easily demonstrated for other people to see. The reason why influencer marketing works effectively for beauty brands is because influencers can easily create content using the products and showcase the results in real time through video or live-streaming, two of the top trending digital contents in social media.
If you scroll through the feeds in YouTube, you can see countless of makeup tutorials made by influencers. They usually list the products and brands they use. Such content is a great way for beauty brands to showcase their multiple products at once, all while having the possibility to increase their audience base as well.
Key Takeaways
Audiences are constantly looking for the most authentic content and influencer recommendations are the new currency of transparency to build customer trust. At such, partnering with influencers help to sustain the momentum of publishing new and authentic content that resonates with the brand’s target audiences and to reach the right demographic and niche audiences.
It is a fact that beauty brands have adopted influencer marketing more fervently than any other industries. With the correct approach and marketing strategy, there is no denial that digital-influencers will still play critical roles in propelling beauty brands to the next level. But at the same time, that power may also shift back to anonymous consumers that hold influence. In other words, consumer-led communities can still rise above famous personalities for brands to capitalize on the collective power of advocacy.
