BEAUTY + SOCIAL MEDIA

Bare Minerals starts to pair digital with event marketing as the makeup brands travels to six different cities to drive brand awareness and introduce new customers to it's product line.  The company has launched a digital campaign to go along with the tour that includes a YouTube video series and a Twitter vending machine that rewards customers that tweet using the #GOBARE.  Bare Minerals says "The idea is that we start the conversation online but ultimately, with that mainstream interest that we're seeing in the marketplace, we're able to push you out to the right physical doors where you can have that high-touch experience with a beauty ambassador."

Companies like Givenchy and Sephora are including to further integrate technology during the shopping experience as they bring in the X-Rite Spectrocolorimeter, a scanner that analyzes skin tone to assign the ideal pigment for each person's skin. 

Dove's on-going 'Campaign for Real Beauty' has seen tremendous successes specifically in the digital and social media realm.  The latest component of the campaign centers around an intriguing video that has been very successful in virality.  Dove is a company that continues to use digital media (videos, photography, etc.) to present creative ways to tell it's brands story and communicate the 'Campaign for Real Beauty' and then uses social media to spread that unique content.  Whether the ads are right or wrong, by combining the above three elements, as well as truly understanding their target consumer, Dove succeeds in using digital and social platforms to enlist buyers, gain new stakeholders, build intrigue around it's brand and to increase customer loytaly, which all contribute to a higher revenue.

The prestigious L2 Digital IQ Index has named L'Oreal Paris, Aveda and Redken 'Genius' hair care brands for their command and use of the digital and social space.

Johnna Marcus, Sephora’s director of mobile and digital store marketing, talks about how Sephora is using digital technology to blur the lines between the in-store and online shopping experience and how being customer-centric is key to Sephora’s digital strategy. 

Some of today's most popular brand's discuss how they leverage real-time social media to build their brands and promote their products.  Additionally, those who rely on real time marketing, captilizing on emerging new business models and successfully innovate will be the brands of the future.

To introduce a new shampoo, Dove partnered with Indiblogger, an Indian bloggers community, to introduce a new shampoo.  Facebook was folded into the campaign as well, by driving the blogging community to the Dove page for an additional contest and ways to share the Dove brand by sending friendship messages to those in their network.  This case study shows how powerful creative bloggers can be in selling and marketing a product.

Roisin Donnelly, P&G's Corporate Marketing Director explains why digital marketing is integral to growing brands and complete marketing strategies.  While not every brand needs to be in every media, every brand should be incorporating digital into their strategies for it's unique two-way communication, to build brand trust and sentiment and to quickly and cost effectively learn what works and doesn't work.

The most important part of Facebook's latest News Feed update?  Bigger pictures, which could result in attracting more advertisers to Facebook.  Since Facebook's photo application is the most engaging throughout the platform, companies using the Facebook platform for their business could take advantage of higher click through rates, higher engagement and better performance that comes with optimizing photos.

For your beauty or cosmetics brand, it's important to remember that photos are the most engaging piece of content you can include in your Facebook strategy.  Remembering to place a photo with 90% of your posts is even more important, now that Facebook will be optimizing their news feed for them.

Revlon Inc. chairman Ronald Perelman, who has admitted that he never uses a computer and that "We at Revlon never used social media" recently stated in an interview with Women's Wear Dailiy that “In 2013, we will be 30 percent social media, digital."

Their plans also include cutting print advertising by as much as 25%.

Coming off the success of their latest digital ad campaign, Dove explains how marketing in the social media age depends more heavily than ever on speed, authenticity, spontenaiety and creativity.

Super retailer, Target, adds bloggers and social media gurus as a new powerful asset to their digital and social marketing efforts.  As these beauty bloggers become sounding boards for Target executives, they also become powerful brand ambassadors, already having the ear of thier respective large, captive audiences.  Using famed bloggers, tastemakers and influencers enables brands to reap the benefits of leveraging that large captive audience, also happening to be Target's demographic, who are ready and willing to purchase based on what these beauty, fashion and lifestyle bloggers say.

I always recommend that growing beauty, cosmetic, fashion and luxury brands incorporate bloggers into their social media marketing strategy.  It's a great way to grow your brand and initiate buzz about your products.

A few upcoming trends to be aware of for this Spring/Summer season!

In new research published by Piper Jaffray, social media is becoming increasingly LESS important to teens. Additionally, it's important to notice that while many teens agree that social media has "an impact on their purchasing behavior" (53% of female teens and 52% of male teens), "teens prefer to shop in-store rather than online" (78% vs. 17% in case of female teens and 75% vs. 19% in case of males).

This could be due to the fact shopping for teens is often a social activity and a way to spend leisurely time with friends outside of the house and away from parents - they prefer the experience as opposed to the activity.  The article goes on to explore various trends in the mobile shopping world, as well as fashion, food/restaurants, video games as well as beauty and personal care where teens are increasing the amount of spending they are doing in this sector.

What really sells luxury cosmetics?  A 2013 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index found that "brand", "personal identity" and "character" exerted the strongest influence on consumer decision-making and engagement with brands.  Hitting all of these touch points during the consumer experience is what will ensure clients' lasting relationship with luxury products.  

'Showrooming', a consumer purchasing trend that greatly impacted technology retailers like Best Buy may now be hitting the premium beauty sector.  The process of 'showrooming' may be gaining popularity due to the wide embrace of social media and digital technology by cosmetics brands.

With the recent introduction of Pinterest Analytics, the Pinterest team cleans up the social platform revamping it's look and making a few changes to enhance the user experience by making it easier for users to pin and navigate.

Publisher CondeNast Taps into social platform YouTube to expand their ad dollars. The publishing company has begun taking content from it's failing print magazine and pushing it to video in hopes to expand reach and engagement.  Capitalizing on the continued growth of beauty and how-to-videos, the fastest growing categories of online videos, they have allocated more of their budget to producing videos, as vide ads produce higher margins than any other type of digital advertisement.

Others would have liked to have seen the move sooner, signaling that YouTube is still an important platform in the digital social media realm.

An exciting announcement from Pinterest today, as the social media platformed, debuted it's Pinterest Web Analytics tool that will measure traffic, see which pins resonate better with audiences and, as a result, could increase the chance for the social network to generate revenues.  While there have been resources that have provided similar metrics on Pinterest, the platform hopes to see it's own analytics tool become more trust worthy than those sometimes unrealiable 3rd party applications.