Small Business Marketing for all Industries: Beauty

Branding
Growth Hacking
Social Media
Author: MASK Digital Solutions
June 2, 2021

Here are 10 actionable tips for all of you in the beauty industry to break into the market with your amazing beauty products and services. Whether you’re in the early stages of launching your business or you’re just trying to revitalize your marketing efforts, we’ve definitely got a tip for you!

1. Figure out WHERE you want to sell your products

Sometimes it might be a better option for you to sell your items at your local retailer’s, to distributors or to sell your products online.

When it comes to selling your products online, you NEED to have a beautifully designed website. You absolutely MUST make sure your website reflects your business branding. We recommend you talk to a designer and create a branding style guide, to make sure you’re staying on brand in the future.

Check out these websites and look into the interesting ways they’re showcasing their products. Make a note of how their branding is reflected throughout the site, whether it’s the filters used for their images or the colours and accents that pop up frequently on their site.

Urban Decay

Urban Decay’s website is 100% on brand, everything from the buttons to the images used throughout fit the purple theme of the brand!

Urban Decay Website
Go for Zero

This local, Australian low waste and toxin-free store has a website that showcases their all-natural products beautifully! They’ve stuck to a neutral color theme and imagery that suits the minimalist lifestyle that they’re promoting.


Happiness Abscissa

Happiness Abscissa has a unique website design with minimal design assets in their branding colors.

Beauty By Rosh

Beauty By Rosh’s website has an interesting feature that displays everything that’s great about their products! It also shows all of it’s retailers to help customers see where they can physically purchase their products from, if that’s what they prefer.

Lowanna Skincare

Lowanna Skincare shows their customers where they were featured in to improve their credibility.

Mented Cosmetics

Mented Cosmetics has done an amazing job of showcasing how inclusive their products are. Not only does their website follow the neutral color theme, their images do too! Taking the time to do a proper photoshoot for your brand really pays off!


2. Social Media is your best friend.

We’ve seen tons of beauty trends popup on Instagram and TikTok recently, like the KVD Beauty Good Apple Skin-Perfecting Balm that’s been all over the internet recently. Whether it’s a different way of applying a product or a new makeup look, join the masses! Create videos showing how you used YOUR product to achieve the makeup look that everyone is doing these days. You can also showcase how versatile and inclusive your product is compared to the other alternatives in the market. The amount of content you can create for beauty products is endless! 

Follow makeup artists and content creators online to get inspiration from (don’t forget to credit them) and put aside a day or two every month to oversee all the content creation!

Afterwards you can use a social media scheduling tool like Later, Sprout Social, Hootsuite or even the Facebook Publishing tool and spend a few hours scheduling the posts out for the month

3. Apply for beauty awards

If your business or products receive reputable beauty awards, you can promote yourself and your company much better! You would stand out from your competitors to your customers and your distributors and retail partners! It’s a sign that you are truly at the top of your game. You can use the winner’s logo to help improve your PR material and bring in new customers and reassure your current customers that they are purchasing the best products.

You also get a feature in a news article or on their website itself, so you’ll be improving brand awareness as well! But make sure you’re applying to awards that are related to your business or product and that the company is well reputed and has values that you agree with.

Here are a few well known beauty companies and fashion magazines that host beauty awards.

4. An innovative logo

The right design should be able to communicate what your business does and how it makes people feel. The perfect logo is timeless and easily recognizable which can help sell customers on your company. Your logo becomes an important part of creating an emotional connection with your customers.

Here are some examples of innovative logos in the beauty industry!

5. Ask experts to review your products

The beauty industry thrives on recommendations, so reach out to some of the makeup artists and skin specialists you follow to get their expert opinion on whether your products actually work or not! 

Once you start getting some good reviews, and have a bit of a budget to spend on marketing, you can reach out to content creators in the beauty industry and get them to review your products and endorse them on their social media pages. Make sure you do your research and find content creators that have the same values as your business does. This is super important because your brand should stay away from controversy whenever possible!

Here are a few things you need to do while working with content creators:

  • Track their engagement and audience demographic (look for organic followers, it’s very easy to pay for fake followers these days)
  • Monitor their posts and reputation.
  • Monitor payments. How much are you paying them for each post?.
  • Ensure their posts comply with legal requirements. (i.e., FTC disclosure rules).
  • Ensure they follow your brand’s guidelines and formatting requirements.

You can also use the Right Fit to find content creators, influencers, videographers, photographers, hair & makeup artists & stylists for all your content creation needs.

6. Offer some great deals on important days

Everybody loves a good deal! A good way to get people to buy your products sooner by running an offer for a short time. A good deal could be a discount code for a holiday, buy one get one free, a gift for purchasing an item, and even a discount code given to an influencer for their audience to use! You can also offer VIP, early access or exclusive codes for a certain number of people to purchase a new product. Marketers use these tactics to motivate customers to buy their products and promote them.

7. Draw up a customer persona to help you identify your niches and marketing message

Establishing a niche in the beauty industry is a fast way to break into the market. You need to identify what problems your product is solving for the customer. It’ll be much easier for you to craft a marketing message that speaks to your ideal customers. 

A customer persona can also help you create a marketing strategy that will help you blow the competition out of the water! If you’re not sure how to create a customer persona for your brand, you can check out our Growth Accelerator Series, where we help you come up with 2 customer personas along with other great one-on-one sessions to help you create a sustainable business strategy.

8. Keep up with regulations

If you’re in the beauty industry, you absolutely have to keep up with the regulations and make sure that you are following them. It’ll keep you out of legal trouble and also build credibility with your audience. Nobody likes buying products that might give them a rash or something worse!

9. Make sure your packaging is on brand and unique!

The latest trend (should be a standard, really) is eco-friendly, minimalistic packaging! Make sure your packaging reflects your branding at all times and is unique. We’ve seen loads of brands create absolutely stunning and imaginative packaging for their brand launches. These are just a few of the MANY beauty products out there with eco-friendly, sustainable packaging

Izzy Zero Waste Mascara
Lush
Elate Beauty Unify Loose Powder
Upcircle Beauty

 10. Network, network, network

Reach out to people in the same industry through Facebook groups, Instagram and reach out to local professionals in your area. Attend beauty events that you can find online on Facebook and Eventbrite.

Another tip is to carry business cards with you. Even though it’s the age of the internet, you don’t know when you might meet someone that still networks the old-fashioned way! You can create a business card online, but it’s better to get a designer to create one that is both aesthetically pleasing, eye-catching, and on-brand.

Networking is a two-way street, so you need to create a healthy partnership with them that is beneficial to both parties.

It’s tough to break into the market even with a product that could be the best one in the industry. It’s all about marketing your products to the right audience. If you need help curating a marketing strategy, you can always book a free appointment with us and we can help you create a lasting digital impression!

Are you ready to make a lasting digital impression?
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