Nobody really anticipated just how big influencer marketing would become, especially in the beauty sector.
Looking back on almost a decade, in 2008, Toni Ko told the story of how NYX was on the verge of discounting a specific eye shadow pencil because sales were so bad, when all of the sudden, the product began flying off the shelves.
When she investigated, it turned out a cosmetics vlogger had mentioned the product as part of a tutorial, alongside many other brands, just before sales began to spike. That was the moment the power of influencers became abundantly clear to this beauty executive.
Influencer Marketing is No Longer an Option, but a Reality
While the ever-changing world of influence can be confusing at times, the untapped potential is indisputable.
In fact, over this past decade, there have been numerous examples of “influencer-first” beauty brands emerging and rising to prominence without using any of the traditional tactics that were so essential to success just a few years ago.
To help you explore what’s next for your influencer programs, Traackr and Talk PR combined forces to analyze global influencer marketing practices, using the beauty sector as a model for the B2C community.
Global Influencer Marketing: Insights from Beauty
Introducing the first analysis of its kind, Global Influencer Marketing: Insights from Beauty is packed with rich data and fresh insights to help organizations navigate 2018 and beyond as they continue to up-weight their influencer strategies, including:
- Interviews with global beauty brand leaders from Sephora, NYX, L'Oréal and American International Industries
- Trend analysis of the top 1,000 beauty influencers from around the world
- Insights from senior executives from Traackr and Talk PR’s network of global agency partners
- Identification of the 8 beauty influencer archetypes and ways to engage them
- A showcase of the 36 most engaging posts per tier of influencer across the 4 main social platforms in luxury, premium and consumer cosmetics
- Insights into the top 17 performing independent beauty brands including Huda Beauty, Deciem’s The Ordinary and Milk Cosmetics
- The importance of influencer audience measurement and analysis for strategic influencer identification
Beauty Paves the Way for Influencer Marketing
Our intention with this report was to provide thought-provoking insights and a broad range of experiences to pave the way for global enterprise influencer marketing. Some of the overarching takeaways include:
- Relationships and data are essential for building a strong influencer marketing practice.
- Influence requires in-house ownership, agency expertise and technology in order to scale.
- Earning influence is hard to do and influencers are increasingly hesitant to share content they feel will not resonate with their audience.
- Disclosure doesn’t equal the end of engagement. Creative sponsored content can even outperform organic content.
- Fruitful brand-influencer collaboration requires a shared understanding of business goals, data transparency, and emphasis on long-term relationships to preserve authenticity.
- The next phase of influencer marketing will favor always-on programs in conjunction with time-bound campaigns. Organizations will need to evolve their financial and planning processes to enable success.
- Successful programs are using an outcomes approach to measurement, setting standardized KPIs that align with business objectives and encourage teams to improve where it matters most.
We’ve seen major transformations in the beauty sector where working with the right influencers, in the right way has enabled brands to rise to dominance or even reinvent themselves. For brand owners from other industries, the beauty industry can be a source of inspiration as you develop your own best-in-class programs.
To set your organization up for influencer marketing success, download your copy of the report today. We’d love to hear what you think in the comments.