Eau Thermale Avène México: TikTok Influencer Marketing Case Study

It’s well known that the best influencer marketing strategies are data-driven, and highly tailored. There is no one pathway to success, which is why it’s critical to devise a strategy that is specific to your brand and competitive landscape.

This is what the team at Eau Thermale Avène Mexico set out to achieve in 2023. 

Avène is a sensitive skincare brand that has been a consumer favorite for over 30 years, and is part of an extensive portfolio owned by leading pharmaceutical and dermocosmetics group, Pierre Fabre.

That being said, the sensitive skincare industry has seen a boom over the past few years. As a result of this expanding industry, the competition amongst brands to stay top of mind with consumers has become fierce. Because of this, even longstanding, prestigious brands like Avène need to stay agile and innovative in their marketing tactics. 

The good news: Avène has already had a proven track record of building winning influencer marketing programs, as evidenced by its always-on influencer strategy in France. The Mexico team’s goal was to continue this trend of success by building its own specific influencer marketing plan for its market. Here’s how they did it with the support of Traackr.

“With Traackr, we were able to gain insights into which influencer marketing strategies were working well for our competitors and delve into the VIT metric to understand key areas of opportunity for Avène Mexico. This led our team to focus on TikTok in 2023. We were able to confidently adopt this new strategy thanks to the groundwork we laid in previous years: building strong relationships with relevant creators, embracing an always-on influencer program, and aligning our teams around unified goals and KPIs.” — Ilse López, Avène Digital Marketing Manager

The Influencer Marketing Goal

The Avène team’s goals were simple — adjust its influencer program in order to generate more brand awareness among online target audiences, and demonstrate marked improvement against competitors. More specifically, in 2023 the team aimed to:

• Increase its overall Brand Vitality Score (VIT) and VIT ranking among competitors to boost Share of Voice (SOV) and brand visibility
• Enhance its TikTok strategy by collaborating with dermainfluencers and macro, mega, and VIP creators
• Enhance its "success formula", by selecting the right influencers, creating native content, and investing in media with boosting in order to amplify results

Avène’s Influencer Marketing Strategy and How It Used Traackr’s Influencer Marketing Platform

Setting Goals, Strategy, and KPIs with Traackr

The Avène team uses Traackr’s Brand Vitality Score (VIT) as a framework for measuring the impact of content generated from its influencer marketing program. Not only does VIT help the Avène team evaluate its own performance, it provides them with an easy way to benchmark their performance against their competitors. Using VIT, the Avène team could easily see how their influencer marketing programs ranked amongst competing brands.

In 2021, the Avène team was ranked 8th in VIT amongst its competitors. After reworking its influencer strategy to include evergreen and always-on campaigns, the team was able to move the brand up to 6th place in 2022. In 2023, Avène’s goal was to continue this momentum and break into the top 4 in VIT amongst its competitors. 

“Using Traackr, we were able to analyze which platforms, influencer partners, and campaign types gained the most VIT. During that analysis, we discovered that TikTok was a key area of opportunity for our brand, especially if we added a boost to dynamic, native content on the platform with relevant creators and dermatologists." — Ilse López, Digital Marketing Manager at Avène

Pro tip: Learn more about the Brand Vitality Score (VIT) and the metrics / methodology behind it here.

Finding and Vetting Influencers with Traackr

As with any influencer marketing program, the first step for the Avéne team was to find the right influencer partners. 

“Traackr made finding and vetting influencer partners so much easier. We made sure to evaluate standard performance data like reach, engagement rates, video view rates, etc., but we also checked for things like brand safety (do they align with our brand values), and organic brand affinity (had they organically posted about our brand before).” — Ilse López, Avène Digital Marketing Manager

Some of the different elements that the Avéne team assessed included:

• Quantitative and qualitative performance metrics. The team had specific performance benchmarks that they wanted their potential partners to match (e.g. influencers with a 3% - 7% average engagement rate). They also paid attention to more qualitative aspects like sentiment, making sure to check each potential partner’s posts to see if their community wrote positive comments and showed signs that they believed that the influencer had true brand affinity with Avène.
• Influencer tiers and audience demographics. Generally, the team looked for larger influencers in the macro (250K+ followers), mega (1M+ followers), and VIP (5M+ followers) tiers. The goal was to find influencers that reach both consumers and other creators — this type of audience breakdown is something that the team was able to easily evaluate using Traackr. The team strengthened their strategy with an ambitious organic plan, opening their selection process to micro-influencers (10K+ followers) as long as they had audiences interested in skincare, specifically focused on daily basics, sun care, and products aligned with Avène's offerings to maintain constant communication about product usage.
• Brand affinity. Using Traackr, the team searched potential partner’s past content for mentions of its brand and products. The goal was to find influencers who already had an organic affinity for the brand, and then build a long term relationship with them (not just reach out to them for one-off campaigns).
• Diverse platform presence. While the team was mostly focused on increasing its influencer marketing presence on TikTok, it made sure to seek out multi-channel creators. This meant finding partners that didn’t just create content on one platform, but had an active presence on two or more platforms.

Pro tip: Looking for some help in finding your next partner? Here is a guide for finding influencers for your brand.

Developing Campaign and Content

One of Avène's stellar campaigns in 2023 was the launch of the Hyaluron Activ B3 range. The main objective was to create awareness about the launch of Avène's innovative anti-aging range: Hyaluron Activ B3, while also educating users about its revolutionary mode of action, which focuses on addressing the cause of skin aging. For this campaign, they faced the challenge of translating a technical and complex concept, like cellular senescence, into something that was interesting and understandable for consumers.

First, the team conducted a thorough analysis of activations within the skincare category, and a review of user-generated social media content about anti-aging and skincare products. Armed with this intel, the team devised a three-phase creative strategy for TikTok that rolled out in three phases:

• Phase 1: Start with a bang. In order to ensure the campaign got off to a good start, the team decide to start with a TopView TikTok video with a VIP influencer. This specific content type allowed for greater reach, and their VIP creator partner was able to help maximize visibility thanks to her community and credibility in the skincare industry.
• Phase 2: Focus on education. After the campaign's initial launch, the team decided to quickly pivot to specific content focused on product education. Content for this phase of the campaign highlighted the textures, active ingredients, and proper application methods for he Hyaluron Activ B3 range. This helped to build a narrative around the tangible benefits of the products and their innovative mode of action. Sponsored influencer partners for this part of the campaign were selected based on their engagement rate (ER) and community demographics — in addition to this, there was also an ambitious organic plan involving product seeding from various spokespeople.
• Phase 3: Emphasize expertise. The final phase of this campaign brought in one of the most powerful influencers in the skincare space — dermatologists. These skincare professionals detailed and explained the concept of cellular senescence in an accessible manner, and highlighting how this launch addressed the cause of aging in a unique way. The goal of this phase was to emphasize Eau Thermale Avène's own expertise, and set it apart from any other brand in the market.

This campaign positioned Avène at #3 in VIT in October, and achieved the following results:

• 344% growth in VIT compared to the 2023 annual average
• 1675% growth in VIT compared to the same period last year
• 675% growth in engagements compared to the same period last year
• 3368% growth in video views compared to the same period last year
• 326% growth in SOV compared to the same period last year

Boosting Organic Content 

“In 2022, we began exploring the boost of organic content. After some trial and error, we discovered that macro influencers on TikTok were the best partners for this type of strategy. By partnering with them and promoting their content, we not only saw an increase in video views and VIT but also were able to recruit new consumers and increase brand awareness by leveraging the context of TikTok, a platform that was developing its potential and advertising options in Mexico.— Ilse López, Avène Digital Marketing Manager

In addition to their standard strategies of product seeding, creator collaborations, and sponsorships, the team also decided to invest in boosting content on TikTok.

Boosting, or the act of putting paid media advertising behind an influencer post (which often starts as organic), is still a relatively new strategy that many brands are still trying to get a handle on. The Avène team wanted to get ahead of the competition by experimenting early and getting its strategy ironed out. 

While the details of its specific strategy is proprietary, the team shared a few key learnings:

• Boosting can be expensive, so start small. Given that they were new to this strategy, the team decided to limit the amount of budget allocated to boosted content. Because of this they were only able to boost content from ~15 influencers in 2023, but it was enough to give them the insights they needed to optimize their strategy. 
• Boosting impacts certain KPIs, so stay focused. For the most part, the team found that boosting helps expand reach. This means that it’s a good strategy for increasing awareness/visibility, but may not be useful for other goals like engagement, product consideration, etc.
• Boosting works best with certain content styles. The team found that the best performing boosted content on TikTok was short, highly stylized for the platform, and mentioned the product or brand within the first few seconds of the video. 
• Boosting works best with a certain influencer tier, for the most part. The team found that influencers with larger followings worked well with boosting (which follows, since the main benefit of boosting is expanding reach). They decided to focus their boosting efforts on macro influencers (250K+ followers) and mega infuencers (1M+ followers), because it helped them expand their awareness beyond their existing community. That being said, smaller influencers would still be considered if they had a highly engaged audience or had a highly relevant, niche audience (e.g. athletes). 

Avène México's Influencer Marketing Results

When it comes to its overarching goals around VIT, the Avène team truly nailed it. They were able to break into the top 5 on the competitive VIT rankings, landing at #4 in 2023. This was due to a 193% year-over-year increase in total VIT, much of which was thanks to the team’s focus on TikTok. 

Because of its focused strategy on TikTok in 2023, the team also managed to:

• Earn 126% increase in engagements
• Earn 187% increase in video views
• Earn 101% increase in impressions
• Earn 24% increase in SOV

So what’s next for the Avène team? They are going to double down on some of the success they saw in 2023 by:

• Investing more budget in organic content boosting on TikTok
• Enhancing their always-on influencer strategy with monthly themed campaigns 
• Focusing on building strong partnerships with macro influencers in order to impact visibility

If you want to stay up to date on the amazing work that the Avène team is doing, follow the brand on:

• TikTok
• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube