There’s an art to bringing beauty products to life with the power of influencer marketing. The real faces of beauty tend to be the ones behind your Instagram feeds, freshening your homepage with live tutorials, product reviews, and glamour shots. And we’ve found that more and more of our beauty clients are increasing their budget allocations for influencer awareness activations – because they work.

Influencer recommendations tend to be a reliable source for many followers. These recommendations lead to sales, hence the power of influencer marketing. With this in mind, Brandnation has spent years building a diverse beauty influencer database of over 1 million authentic UK and international influencers. These include those with relatively small but engaged followings through to those with multi-million global reach.  We work with our client brands to create and manage strong influencer outreach campaigns. These campaigns help to support them commercially and hit pre-agreed KPIs.

The Importance of diversity:

There’s a need, now more than ever, for brands to be strategic in finding influencers. Brands need to find influencers that represent their audiences, brand voice, and values. Likewise, influencers are also turning down partnerships with brands that are not a good fit for their audience. It’s important for brands to actively support diversity and inclusivity.

Our beauty brands have been leveraging the power of influencers and diversity during the lockdown. As marketers, it’s important to start influencing people based on a real-life perspective, rather than based on unconscious bias. The Beauty industry can truly be inclusive, and when compiling campaigns, showcasing diversity and encouraging inclusivity should be a prime focus. We also work with our clients in terms of their brand alignment with these goals in place.

Gen Z:

Gen Z is changing the face of influencer marketing (literally). 86% say that they only purchase products from an influencer when they feel that they aren’t being sold to. According to the Mobile Marketer, 85% of Gen Z they surveyed stated influencers should be using their platforms for good. 

The importance of a beauty influencer strategy:

Earned influencer vs. paid: 

Earned media and unpaid collaborations can help beauty brands to be seen as authentic and genuine. This strategy is used by both small to medium-sized businesses and large corporations. Usually, this goes hand in hand with paid influencer marketing in the form of sponsorship, paid mentions, brand ambassadorships and ads. From a brand perspective, this approach gives beauty brands the maximum access to the influencer diaspora. A paid approach gives you the opportunity to work with influencers with a larger number of followers (with your pick of the bunch). Adding paid spend behind your influencer strategy will also enable you to target the influencers that you think can best represent your brand whilst supporting the influencer eco-sphere.

Product review: 

As a beauty brand, whether your product has a mass or niche  appeal – you need to put your proposition in front of the right audience at the right time and influencer marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of doing this. However, any scale of influencer campaign needs strong curation and management as you are dealing with individuals, each with specific requirements, rules and regs and personalities. This is where Brandnation’s Beauty influencer team comes into its own with ready to go, tried and tested relationships and years of experience of successfully managing these types of campaign.

It’s important to ensure that the influencers you choose have an active interest in your product – and for new products this may well require an educational phase. When influencers do have an active interest, positivity can help push your brand awareness and positive perception to new heights.

Get In Touch:

We help educate our clients on how best  to optimise their influencer campaigns. Successfully and actively engaging all ethnicities, genders, ages, and sizes. Millennials and Gen Z are actively looking for brands that represent their core values. We provide a truly diverse array of influencers for our client campaigns, to keep them at the front line of change! Get in touch today: mary.k@brandnation.co.uk