Intro
In this article, we will explore 5 proven strategies designed to help your skincare brand strengthen its identity, optimize marketing efforts, and ultimately, achieve ambitious growth targets in your skincare branding.
In the competitive world of skincare, achieving steady growth is crucial for brands looking to transform from small players to industry leaders. This leap requires more than just quality products; it demands a strategic approach to skincare branding that can amplify market presence, enhance customer engagement, and drive substantial revenue surges.
By leveraging advanced skincare branding strategies tailored to the unique demands of skincare brands, your brand can achieve significant growth.
Overview of 5 advanced skincare branding strategies for growth
1. Advanced Brand Identity
To develop your skincare brand from hundreds of thousands to millions in revenue, integrating advanced skincare branding strategies is crucial. (1) Advanced brand identity development, such as refining your brand story and visual identity, helps create a distinctive and cohesive image that captures the attention of customers.
For example, Drunk Elephant‘s minimalist and ingredient-focused branding has helped it stand out in a crowded market, and eventually lead to its acquisition by Shiseido for $845 million.
Another fascinating brand story is Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Skin. As one of the best examples, who successfully integrates personal narratives into its branding. The launch of the Peptide Lip Tint cleverly paired each shade with a matching food product, creating a sensory experience that resonated with consumers and enhanced the product’s desirability. This clever approach to branding and marketing has helped Rhode Skin maintain its unique identity and connect with its audience on a personal level.
Instagram creatives with clever food pairings
2. Advanced Social Media Tactics
(2) Strategic marketing initiatives, including ingenious social media tactics and influencer or creator collaborations magnify your brand’s reach and engagement.
Herbivore Botanicals has used Instagram effectively, growing their account to over 1 million followers by consistently posting aesthetically pleasing images and videos. In 2018, they partnered with Sephora to expand their reach, which helped them achieve significant growth. The brand’s engaging and authentic content, coupled with strategic partnerships, led to their impressive sales, reaching $10 million and raising another 15 million in VC funding in 2019.
Herbivore Botanicals Instagram feed
5 Examples of Innovative Social Media Campaigns by Skincare Brands
- Versed Skincare – Versed uses TikTok to create informative ingredient explainer videos and skincare routine tutorials, helping customers understand how to use their products effectively.
- Fenty Beauty – Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty launched an inclusive foundation range with 40 shades, using social media to promote the message of “Beauty for All”. This campaign received widespread acclaim and significantly boosted their brand recognition.
- Murad Skincare – Murad engages followers with educational content from dermatologists and estheticians, offering expert skincare advice and showcasing impressive before-and-after results on Instagram.
- Glossier – Glossier leverages user-generated content by encouraging customers to share their experiences using branded hashtags. This strategy has built a strong community and increased authenticity and trust in the brand.
- Guerlain – Guerlain’s ‘Bloom a Kiss, Save the Bees’ campaign combined social media engagement with environmental activism. The campaign encouraged users to post selfies and contribute to bee conservation, promoting their Kiss Kiss Shine Bloom lipstick range and enhancing their brand’s social responsibility image
3. Maximizing Digital Advertising
(3) Maximizing digital advertising through advanced paid media strategies, ecommerce display network advertising, and collecting and using first party data (smart email sequences, highly targeted offer campaigns or sms marketing) significantly boost ROI and drive sales.
The Best Display Advertising Solution for Lifestyle Brands
Criteo is a leading eCommerce display advertising platform known for its advanced targeting capabilities and high-performance results. Leveraging the world’s largest open commerce data set, Criteo enables brands to deliver highly personalized ads based on real-time buying intent. This ensures that your ads reach the right audience at the right time, significantly boosting engagement and conversions.
Criteo’s powerful AI-driven solutions and comprehensive display network make it an essential tool for any lifestyle brand looking to enhance its digital advertising strategy.
Usually, we can achieve a 3-4x ROAS on Criteo within three months. We recommend this platform most of the time to our ecommerce lifestyle brands.
Criteo screenshot from one of our clients: After 9-12 months of optimization, a 15+ ROAS can be achieved as well.
High Potential in Pinterest
One of the most underrated advertising channel for your skincare brand is Pinterest. Many thinks that Pinterest is only for fashion brands. Thats simply not true.
2024 share of spending and average ROAS data
As you can see from a 2024 Triple Whale eCommerce report, Pinterest’s share of the advertisers’ spending pie is only 0,59% (!!). This implies a few things:
- Banner blindness is less likely on Pinterest than on Meta or Google.
- Skincare products are usually visually appealing, making them a perfect fit for a visual-first platform.
- The cost of impressions is likely to increase, so the best time to start advertising on Pinterest was yesterday; the next best time is now.
For skincare branding, Pinterest offers unique opportunities to reach a highly engaged audience. Advanced techniques include using high-quality, vertical images with a 2:3 aspect ratio to ensure your Pins stand out. Text overlays on Pins can help convey your message quickly, even with the sound off. Video Pins should be between 6-15 seconds and start with a clear hook to capture attention.
The other powerful ad type is collections. Collections allow you to feature one hero image followed by up to 24 secondary images. This format gives users a full-screen view of your products and a detailed overview, which is ideal for showcasing a range of skincare products in one ad.
In this Pinterest case study, we also share some advanced techniques from our 25x ROAS campaign for one of our clients.
Long-Term Profitability of Your Customers
Recently, I listened to a DTC Podcast episode where the founders of a U.S.-based skincare brand shared their big “Aha” moment on the topic. In their early days, they focused solely on CAC (customer acquisition cost), considering a campaign successful if the CAC was acceptable. However, they later measured the lifetime value (LTV) of customers acquired through those campaigns and were shocked to discover that most customers purchased only once and didn’t respond to upsell offers.
They then shifted their targeting strategy and eventually found the right audience with high LTV who were responsive to offers.
If you consider the LTV aspect, you’ll realize that the success of campaigns isn’t determined in weeks but over at least 2-3 months.
PRO TIP: Measure your LTV. If your customers aren’t buying again, check the cohort they came from and adjust your targeting. Conversely, if your new customers are making repeat purchases, identify which campaigns brought them in, create lookalike audiences, and scale up.
Cohort: A batch of users who came to your site within a specific period. GA4 typically shows cohorts and their retention numbers, indicating whether they returned in the following weeks and in what percentage. To get the full picture, you usually need to analyze this data in your CRM or Shopify as well. Here is a ‘how to’ to your cohort chart setup.
Also, if you don’t have a big budget for pricey analytical tools, there are alternatives. A great tool for segment analytics is Tresl.
This tool provides ecommerce brands with advanced analytics tools to transform their data into actionable insights. Their platform, Segments, integrates seamlessly with Shopify and allows businesses to segment customers based on behavior, LTV, and purchase patterns. This enables more personalized marketing, improved customer retention, and higher ROI.
4. Launching New Product Lines
(4) Expanding market reach by exploring new demographics and launching new product lines ensures continuous growth.
Tatcha has also demonstrated the impact of strategic expansion and effective branding. By leveraging its unique product offerings and aesthetic appeal, Tatcha expanded into various skincare categories and international markets. For example, the launch of their Luminous Dewy Skin Mist and The Silk Canvas primer became viral hits, with the primer generating $20.1 million in earned media value (EMV) in 2018 from 763 influencers. This strategic product development and marketing helped Tatcha achieve reported annual sales of $70 million, contributing to its acquisition by Unilever for $500 million.
The Silk Canvas product page on Tatcha.com
The Silk Canvas Story from Tatcha
Tatcha’s The Silk Canvas primer became a standout product thanks to several key marketing strategies that skincare brands can learn from. First, Tatcha emphasized the product’s unique blend of skincare benefits and cosmetic functionality, positioning it as a multi-purpose primer that blurs imperfections and enhances makeup longevity. This dual benefit was highlighted through engaging content and influencer endorsements.
The brand’s collaboration with well-known beauty experts like Daniel Martin, who praised the primer’s formulation and effectiveness, added credibility and attracted a broader audience. Tatcha also leveraged visually stunning and luxurious packaging, which helped convey a sense of premium quality and justified the product’s higher price point.
Daniel Martin with model Chiharu Okunugi – Photographed by Stefan Ruiz
Additionally, the strategic use of social media platforms and partnerships with makeup artists created buzz and drove significant traffic to their website and retail partners. For example, the product’s launch included detailed tutorials and before-and-after visuals that demonstrated its benefits.
5. Bet on UGC Creators
(5) Building a strong community through customer engagement and user-generated content (UGC) creates a fresh look on your social profiles. A new trend involves brands sharing UGC creator-made videos on their own channels, using ‘actors’ or mainly enthusiastic youngsters who lend their faces to the brand for the sake of storytelling in these videos. This trend is particularly prevalent on TikTok.
Trend graphs and keyword indicators in Exploding Topics trending tool
‘UGC Creator’ or ‘UGC ads’ are exploding in search volume, which clearly indicates an opportunity you should seize if you don’t yet have content from UGC creators. When considering the (1) price-value ratio, (2) quantity of content, and (3) general content trends on TikTok and Instagram Reels, UGC is often the best solution compared to higher-priced influencers or static product-focused content for skincare branding.
Brands using UGC see a 29% increase in web conversions and a 73% boost in email click-through rates. Moreover, UGC posts have a 4x higher click-through rate compared to traditional ads, demonstrating their effectiveness in capturing audience attention. The data also reveals that 79% of people say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions, underscoring the importance of integrating UGC into marketing strategies. By leveraging UGC, skincare brands can enhance their skincare branding efforts, build stronger community ties, and drive significant growth.
Meet UGC on steroids: IGC
Influencer Generated Content (IGC) is a powerful blend of user-generated content and influencer marketing. Unlike typical UGC, where content is created organically by users, IGC involves influencers who produce content specifically for your brand. These influencers act in your branded videos or posts, lending their credibility and reach to your marketing efforts.
Youth to the People x Segen Misghina collab
Youth to the People x Zoe Kimkenealy collab
Drunk Elephant x Amelia Szczepaniak collab
Conclusion on Skincare Branding
Effective skincare branding is crucial for differentiating your brand in your niche and achieving substantial growth. By refining and evolving your brand story, enhancing visual identity, and ensuring consistency across all channels, brands can build strong, recognizable identities. Strategic marketing initiatives, including leveraging advanced social media tactics, effective influencer collaborations, and comprehensive UGC content marketing, drive engagement and customer loyalty.
At Evolut, we work exclusively with lifestyle brands, particularly in the beauty, fashion, and supplement categories. Our accumulated know-how, extensive UGC creator portfolio, and well-structured Omnipresence content strategy enable us to excel in this space. Let us know if you want to talk.
