03 May White Paper: Social Outbound Engagement and the Beauty Industry
White Paper: Social Outbound Engagement and the Beauty Industry
Executive Summary
All major beauty brands today have digital marketing strategies in place, yet they are still not doing enough to keep up with consumers. Despite significant discussion regarding social marketing, there still has not been sufficient focus on delivering comprehensive social marketing strategies, leveraging its true word of mouth potential, and tracking its Return on Investment (ROI).
The percentage of time Americans are spending online has more than doubled over the past few years, while time spent on other communication channels has dropped or remained flat. People now spend more time online than engaged in any other media activity. Concurrent with the rapid increase in time spent online has been the recent dramatic rise of time spent on social media channels. Today social networking is the number one online activity, with people spending more than six and a half times the amount of time on social media as they do on internet search. And it’s not simply about quantity of time, but also degree of influence which social media possesses for consumers in their purchasing decisions. These trends are even more pronounced in the beauty industry, as women are even more likely to spend their time using online social media, and refer to it when deciding which products they wish to buy.
Beauty brands today need to evolve from simply maintaining a social media presence, to one of Social Outbound Engagement, in which we meet consumers on their terms, in a compelling, interactive manner. The ten best practices for successful Social Outbound Engagement are:
1. Recognize the need for separate social marketing strategies for your brand loyalists as well as independents.
2. Understand how you are represented in social media today, and how you could shape that to look tomorrow.
3. Prioritize your social marketing efforts to ensure you are maximizing your net impact.
4. Engage your audience through your social marketing strategy to facilitate discussion with, and amongst, your target audience.
5. Leverage constructive feedback to both improve your products and services, as well as the perception of your brand amongst influential social channels.
6. Develop consumer brand ambassadors who can speak in formal and informal online channels where you might not have a presence, to independent consumers who are primarily interested in the opinion of other consumers.
7. Design your social marketing strategy to create a strong, ripple effect to reap the benefits of positive online word of mouth.
8. Align your marketing resources based on what truly influences consumers purchasing behavior.
9. Integrate your social marketing program with your traditional and other online programs, to ensure a cohesive and compelling customer experience.
10. Measure and deliver ROI through clear metrics to track and enhance your social marketing efforts.
Through a comprehensive social marketing strategy employing these ten best practices, beauty brands can cost-effectively realize significant improvements in awareness, spend, and customer loyalty. The brands which catch up with our consumers through social media will be the ones to reap the maximum ROI through the positive word of mouth they will achieve.
For more info, see below or email Ron or Nate directly at Nate.Myers@beautystat.com or Ron.Robinson@beautystat.com
Click on the link to read the entire paper White Paper Social Outbound Engagement and the Beauty Industry
Erica Chism, Stream Distributor #1054
Posted at 13:51h, 02 NovemberI am SO glad I found this site! I recently left corporate marketing in the last 2 years and now run my own independent business in the beauty industry. Ironically the SEO and marketing vendor management that I did for my former company actually does work at the micro level for my distributorship with my personal company. This is just the info I need to keep me going with my marketing plan and to help teach my team what I do to get page 1 results and internet traffic that has brought me customers out of the state, and even out of the country.
I agree “there still has not been sufficient focus on delivering comprehensive social marketing strategies, leveraging its true word of mouth potential, and tracking its Return on Investment (ROI).” A few cosmetics companies within direct selling have jumped on the bandwagon but with a short leash and many restrictions. But, even fewer have given the online leeway to it’s distributors that I have with Stream. This is one of my favorite things about Stream, I can really dive into the internet marketing that I know works well and works in an honest way. I timidly created the 1st Stream distributor FaceBook page, concerned of what corporate would think… they LOVED it! That is exactly what they wanted us to do! Same with my YouTube videos.
I am sharing this white paper with my team. I call what I do “Big Girl Business”, meaning that I will not downplay the power that a work from home business has and I will treat them with the same respect that I did my corporate teams. This information was well presented and not over anyone’s head. LOVE IT! I am signing up for the newsletter!