It’s never been more critical for skincare marketers to have a 360° skincare marketing campaign. Why? Because the advancements in algorithms and possible advertising placements have provided us with many more customer contact points. Ensuring that your strategy is consistent with your brand image and what you’re selling has never been so important.
Not only have the tech advancements changed the way skincare and beauty companies can advertise, but so have the amount of beauty and skincare bloggers that are ready and willing to promote your products for a small fee. In fact, according to research Forbes conducted with beauty experts Poshly, 65% of millennials would rather listen to their favorite YouTuber than an in-store beauty advisor.
How to create a 360° skincare marketing campaign
Providing a 360° experience is about creating a cohesive campaign with focused messaging across multiple customer contact points. This can be through print, in-store, digital, and social media; Marina Karasellos, a digital creative director at Ultra Beauty, puts it as, “the customer will experience communication no matter where they are, so you have to think about leading them through the journey.“
As digital marketing is on the rise, the importance of developing a unique 360° marketing strategy for skincare businesses has never been more critical. Here we will talk you through how to make the most of every moment of the conversion funnel.
How to ensure you’re covering all bases in 2021
SEO & Content: Lay the groundwork for organic rankings
SEO stands for Search engine optimization. Essentially, it’s a set of rules for optimizing your website so that you can achieve higher rankings on search engines’ organic results. The first aspect of your 360° skincare marketing campaign for 2021 is to understand that investing in SEO is crucial for a website’s success; where do you start?
Understand your audience
Conduct data analysis on your target audience, understand what makes them tick in terms of what they are searching for, and responding to on your website, social media, in-store, etc. A good example of tailoring your website to your user’s needs is how the beauty brand L’Oreal has made their site easy to navigate. The layout consists of a simple banner menu at the top of the page, which compliments the eye-catching video showcasing the most popular L’Oreal products.
Conduct keyword research
Begin your research by learning the competitive keywords used within your industry and noticing what keywords your competition is using.
You can do this by making a list of relevant topics, for example, skincare, beauty products, cleanser, exfoliator, moisturizer, etc. You would then use a keyword planner tool to create a second list of keywords with a low keyword difficulty and a high volume to give yourself the best chance to rank. Once you have this list, you can start creating content, page optimizations, and product descriptions around these keywords.
Improve your beauty brand’s site architecture
There are quite a few factors that will always affect your site ranking among SERPs (search engine results pages), one of these being your site architecture – or site structure. Still, of course, these SEO ranking factors deserve some attention.
Optimize your product pages
You want your product page to be fully optimized and to have just as much love as the content you are posting on your homepage or in your blogs. Make sure these product pages are fully optimized and are delivering your brand tone.
For example, three different companies have optimized their page titles and meta descriptions to rank for the term ‘skincare.’
Develop a unique and exciting content strategy
Skincare businesses not only need to stay on top of their SEO efforts; they also need to focus on their content marketing. Content marketing in the skincare industry can be anything from beauty brand Fenty featuring a video of Rihanna performing a morning skin routine to promote Fenty products or releasing articles on what it’s like to work at the powerhouse L’Oreal in London.
Some businesses approach SEO and paid advertising with completely separate strategies, while they are different in many ways. When SEO and paid advertising are used together, their efforts can complement each other and lead to a more successful search strategy.
Google Paid Advertising: Reach new audiences and target people searching for your business online.
Paid advertising puts your brand in the most shoppable position – at the top of the first page of Google. Paid advertising will allow you to reach new visitors and target your existing audience more effectively. It’s essential to use both SEO and paid advertising to ensure you’re laying the groundwork for long-term rankings and attracting new visitors to the site.
Paid advertising is commonly referred to as pay per click (PPC), including bidding on placements such as Google Ads and Facebook business. Where you advertise depends on your industry and what type of conversion you hope to attract: leads or sales. Google and Facebook have two of the most popular advertising platforms, which work very well for different reasons.
The 3 main reasons you should include Google Ads in your 360° marketing strategy are:
Increases leads and sales
Google Ads is currently the number one tool for effective lead generation. If your campaigns are set up properly, it has the potential to send extremely targeted leads to your website, opt-in form, or other online property. Secondly, Google Ads will allow you to focus on the people searching for what your business offers. This means you can continually refine your searches so that only people who want to buy your products or services are sent to your websites through this platform.
Fast results and easy to analyze
Google Ads is an extremely transparent and intuitive system, which means that it’s easy to analyze the progress of your campaigns because the dashboard gives you all of the information related to each campaign, such as the ads clicked, the keywords that website visitors entered, and the cost of clicks. Google Ads is an easy to use the platform and provides an optimization score for each campaign. When this optimization score drops below 100%, Google will offer recommendations on how to improve your campaign performance. This is why Google is known for delivering quick, straightforward results and reports of your campaigns.
Flexible marketing platform
Anyone who uses Google Ads regularly will tell you that it’s a very flexible marketing platform. You can easily customize campaigns to focus on specific types of online users. For example, you can target people by location, the type of device they’re using, and the Google-owned website they’re accessing (e.g., Google search, Google Maps, YouTube).
For example, you can see below how skincare brand Olay are advertising on both Google Search and Google Shopping:
Are you interested in improving SEO and advertising on Google but want to see proof that it could work for your industry? Please have a look at our case study on Skincare Jungle. In just seven months, they achieved incredible results.
And if you want to learn more about the importance of advertising on Google and how to start, check out our Google Ads guide.
Facebook Paid Advertising
It’s important to remember the key differences between advertising on a search engine and a social media platform. The difference is that though people on Google may be actively searching for a product to purchase, your target audience is using social media regularly and engaging with your skincare brand; this is why social media is great for brand exposure. Facebook, similarly to other social PPC platforms, uses audience targeting rather than keywords. Here are 2 reasons why you should be using Facebook ad campaigns:
Reach a wider audience
As of July 2020, according to Statista, Facebook had more than 2.6 billion users worldwide. That is more than any other social media platform and second to perhaps only Google’s search users. Facebook is no longer just for a younger audience, with 38% of its users aged 35 to 65+. For the skincare industry, Facebook provides the golden opportunity of reaching a wide audience, all of whom have shown an interest in Skincare.
Full-funnel targeting
Facebook’s ad formats, targeting options, and measurement capabilities align well with any marketing strategy. It is useful whether a user is in the later stages of the conversion funnel, casually browsing, or in a mindset to convert.
Facebook tracks users through the conversion funnel, which provides a greater level of audience transparency. Audience transparency gives marketers a better understanding of who is engaging with their ads and a higher level of control of targeting them.
- Fans: Your Facebook followers.
- Friends of Fans: Users who are friends of your followers.
- Behaviors or Interests: Users who meet the criteria you selected based on self-reported criteria.
- Remarketing: Users who have previously visited your site.
Here are some skincare brands that have run successful campaigns in the past:
As you can see from above, both Briogeo and HUM Nutrition have displayed their products in entirely different ways. Briogeo is trying to get consumers to take a quiz to determine their hair type – which they will then sell specific products based on the answers. At the same time, HUM Nutrition has laid out its tablets and pills in a quirky way to entice consumers. Both brands have used emojis in their copy to make the ads seem organic and relatable to a younger audience.
Remarketing funnel
Remarketing is what will bring your skincare marketing strategy to life. Remarketing is a tactic that involves showing ads to people who have visited your website or engaged with your business in some way before. This strategy is an incredibly cost-effective way to increase your sales conversions because you’re reaching out to potential customers who have already expressed interest in your beauty products.
Still not convinced? Here are the top 3 reasons why you should be remarketing in your skincare strategy:
Stay engaged with your target audience
Remarketing helps you follow a user from site to site to re-engage them with your brand and bring them back to your site.
Attract your competitors’ customers
Jump on the coattails of your competitors! Remarketing allows your ads to pop up on a customer’s browser after they have visited your website or searched for a particular keyword, for example, if you’re selling a product that promises to get rid of wrinkles, then you could include keywords in your Google Search campaign to target a product like ‘Kiehl’s Wrinkle Remover.’ Doing this with the right bid and budget could mean that your wrinkle remover product appears before the brand itself.
Increase brand awareness
Remarketing allows you to establish brand awareness in the early stage of the purchase process and become your product’s authority. Establishing this authority with visitors early should bring your customers back when they are ready to purchase.
Overall, when it comes to remarketing, there are different strategies you could use, and each has unique benefits. For example, standard remarketing through Google AdWords shows ads to your past visitors as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps. On the other hand, dynamic remarketing uses ads that include products or services that people have viewed on your website.
Social Media
In addition to advertising on social media platforms, it’s essential to understand that organic and paid social media are needed to be truly successful. In fact, social media not only builds trust that your business is legitimate to potential customers and contributes to your business’s presence or following, but it also supports your SEO efforts too. Since social media indirectly influences the factors that impact search rankings, it is important because it can drive quality web traffic to your blog. However, social media is not an SEO ranking factor. Instead, it correlates with the elements that influence SEO rankings, such as how many likes, comments, or shares your blog posts are getting.
Social media uses the free services and tools that each platform provides to its users. The purpose of organic social media is to build a community of loyal followers and customers through posting relevant content and interacting with those who interact with your brand.
Here are the 4 top reasons why you should be including organic social:
- Organic social boosts validity
- Social media is a good way to truly connect with potential customers once they’re followers
- Organic social media is cost-effective and a long-term solution
- If you don’t start your organic growth now, you’ll always be behind
Social media offers massive opportunities to drive success, as well as being a minefield for potential disasters. Whatever level you operate at, we’re here to help. Our experts are here to help every avenue into digital marketing or whatever query you have about social media.
Beauty powerhouse L’Oreal Paris demonstrates how to connect with their audience organically and give your content a personal touch – rather than just posting to promote products. Their product pictures and influencer marketing content connect with real-life issues and share their work with charities in their organic content. See the image below for their post about managing water sustainability and preserving forests.
Email marketing
Email marketing is also a very personal way of reaching your target customers. Messages from your friends and family are sitting next to email updates from your company. That’s why email marketing works at its best when it is personalized. Email can be tailored to customer actions so that every communication is relevant to their interest. You can cover topics like personalized offers, beauty and skincare tips, links to videos, or even reviews!
6 reasons why email marketing is an essential part of your marketing strategy
- Email marketing is more effective for customer acquisition than social media
- Email marketing is economical as it doesn’t cost anything to run
- Emails are both personal and customizable – meaning that you can build up a list of people to remarket to via email
- They are action-oriented, email is transactional by nature. You can use it to direct traffic to your website and ultimately drive sales
- Email marketing is measurable; when you use any email marketing software, you can track who opened your email, who clicked links, and the number of people who unsubscribed
- Mobile devices allow people to check their email constantly
Email marketing is a powerful tool, even more, powerful when partnered with a 360° marketing campaign. Make the first step in improving your email marketing conversion rates and re-design your email template. The skincare brand Moon Juice has a very simplistic email template that actually replicates their website (a smart branding move).
Conclusion
In conclusion, to cover all bases in your skincare marketing strategy, you need to include SEO for organic rankings and long-term organic results. The better you are at ranking on Google with SEO, the less you’ll have to spend on skincare advertising.
Paid advertising should be used primarily to reach new audiences and to target your existing audience appropriately. Once you have gained new audiences, it’s crucial to remarket to them. Always keep in mind the rule of 7; a consumer will interact with your brand seven times before converting.
Once you’ve done the heavy lifting on SEO, PPC, and remarketing, it’s key to not forget about the importance of having an organic following on social media. Organic social media is what will keep your audience engaged and able to relate to your business.
Finally, no skincare marketing strategy is complete without email marketing – a crucial aspect of your strategy which will allow you to engage with your new targeted audience more effectively.
At Zima Media, we are passionate about offering a comprehensive 360° marketing strategy customized to your needs. Get a free consultation for your business today!
