Ross Glick on approaching activation and ownership in social media
Social media is an integral part of all marketing communication activities today. If you’re in the beauty business and not actively engaging in social media then you, as a company, are behind. Thankfully, for most in this multibillion-dollar market that’s not the case.
Contrary to popular belief social media marketing isn’t free. It’s a common misunderstanding among some businesses because social media requires skill which in turn requires investment. It not only requires skilled people, it requires content. We read a lot of articles on beauty industry CMOs and brand managers and everyone talking about content being king.
Our perspective is that while content is king, it is not free. Yes, you can hire a 20-something writer or a college student to blog and write stories with some level of authenticity that will be engaging and that does work, and there are those writers out there that have that passion. But the ability to create a mechanism for a large beauty organisation to publish, produce, distribute and optimise content through the social ether requires skill and financial investment. It also requires technology for reading behavior, for tracking activity and providing insight into what is resonating with your customer base so that a brand manager can amplify certain communities that connect with certain brands or messages.
While I don’t want to be stereotypical, I believe that most beauty brands and companies are playing catch-up. Some still look at social media as having a Facebook page where they post press releases and a campaign video or some photos. That’s not social media - that’s just an extension of posting a news release; there is a role for that for PR but it’s really a small part.
I think that cosmetics and beauty, and fragrance in particular, is still very much rooted to a traditional retail model. And as the world is moving deeper into e-commerce, starting to tap into m-commerce (mobile commerce) and then f-commerce (Facebook commerce), social media marketing is starting to become more mainstream in the conversation and should be part of the construct of the marketing, sales strategy and retail strategy for all brands.
I like to refer to the strategy of social for any brand or beauty company as the 80/20 rule. This theory dictates that no more than 20% of your social media effort should be corporate information. The distribution of news releases that PR agencies use is a very traditional model and it’s not bad, it just shouldn’t be the leading strategy. We suggest to clients that 80% of their social media content be fresh, unusual and attention grabbing... content that is made specifically for capturing the hearts of the online consumer.
Related to this I think that what beauty brands do well is understanding passion. This is an industry that sells product that connects to people’s visceral identity, which ultimately connects to their vanity and how they want to alter their own reality through fragrance, through beauty, through cosmetics or even in some cases medicines that change or alter their appearance or their being.
So from a social media point of view I counsel brands and companies to look at the social media platform as the epicentre of their outreach and the platform for their passion - an ecosystem if you will. In today’s beauty marketing world it’s about thinking of social media as an ecosystem because social is a living, breathing organism. Here you have an opportunity for dialogue with the customer and to provide them with more content, more access to you as a brand, where a company can convey its passion for both its customers and product lines.
This is where social media activation and ownership comes in. We define social media activation as the process whereby consumer insight is leveraged to ignite enthusiasm and dialogue with a brand. The word activation is key here - it’s not enough for a brand to simply use social media to interact with customers; it’s about compelling them to buy the product or service that’s being offered. Often marketers forget to develop campaigns that revolve around points of passion and instead simply opt to focus on pushing product and sales. But social media is about creating a dialogue, gaining trust and then driving sales - and it’s not about the quantity of promotional messages but the quality of the engagement.
A company like MAC Cosmetics (Estée Lauder) is a great example of an innovator in the social media realm because it is a content rich company. Everything it does is interesting - from the celebrities it brings in to the causes it associates itself. These elements add up to an intriguing online marketing narrative to share with customers.
Some of MAC’s social media stories centre on it developing a collection and then visualising it and manifesting it into something interesting for online visitors. It’s a story that is not confined to a 30-second block of time or a certain space in a certain magazine, which is why it doesn’t do traditional advertising - thus the beauty of social media.
Smashbox, also now owned by Estée Lauder, was an early mover in the social space. In the early days it created really progressive My Space appearances and now it’s on Facebook in a strong way.
Sephora works with many brands and produces amazing content. It also works with celebrities. Most importantly it should be commended for harmonising its retail, traditional bricks and mortar channels with its e-commerce channels.
From an advertising-brand-awareness point of view, social media enables companies to amplify a brand’s message in a very powerful way. Social media not only activates and complements existing advertising campaigns, it can also be utilised as a brand’s ongoing focus group giving a company vital and sometimes astonishing feedback from its customers because they will unabashedly share with you their feelings about what you’re saying about your products.
If you believe these one-on-one social media conversations provide an opportunity for you to build a vibrant community with your customers, will you embrace their forthrightness and start the dialogue?
