Social media has certainly become a key medium for new-age beauty brands. Enabling them to deliver highly individualised content targeted at niche audiences, the medium has written multiple success stories in the recent past. Ergo, at least 70% of marketing budgets for companies such as SUGAR Cosmetics and Belora Paris is allocated to social media channels.
Why does that matter? It matters because these brands are shunning hard-sell in favour of a more consensus-based approach. That has assured brands, which do not have the deep pockets to stand up to well-entrenched competition, better conversion rates, and eventually better returns on the ad spend. Says Akshaya Vijayalakshmi, associate professor (marketing), IIM Ahmedabad, “Most B2C companies have realised that if they are not present online, they might as well not exist.”
Currently valued at $26.8 billion, the beauty industry in India is poised to surge to $37.2 billion by 2025, according to Statista, catering to 122 million online beauty shoppers by then.
For a bigger share of the pie
Kaushik Mukherjee, COO and co-founder, of SUGAR Cosmetics, says “The beauty category is a lot about building trust and educating customers. At the top of the funnel, you really want to build awareness, for which we have social media marketing or influencer marketing at our disposal.”
Beauty brand Plum has observed growing engagement with its audience so it has increased the volume of educational content on various platforms. While its Instagram strategy is highly focused on community interaction with high engagement, on YouTube it takes the route of consumer education. The brand has crossed the Rs 300 crore-mark in annualised revenue and hopes to close this year with Rs 500 crore. Credit for about 25% of its revenue goes to social media and influencer marketing. Shivani Behl, CMO, Plum, says the audience is looking for human interactions with brands they follow — a behaviour change observed especially during the pandemic.
To create engaging and informative content for its target audience, MyGlamm uses in-house content experts and an inorganic creator network, says Manan Jain, group chief growth officer, The Good Glamm Group. Content dissemination is done by in-house publishing arms. Creator recommendations and suggestions are an integral part of the content-to-commerce journey of MyGlamm.
A key element of a brand’s social media strategy is influencer marketing. Ainara Kaur, co-founder, Belora Paris, shares that the brand works with a bunch of micro-influencers who add credibility and reach in the most cost-effective manner. The brand is looking to cross `100 crore annualised GMV this festive season. Social media gobbles up a whopping 70% of its marketing budget, which includes both spends on influencers and inorganic performance marketing. “Choosing the right fit of influencers is most critical in building the right context around the brand,” she adds.
For Plum, influencer marketing consumes 10-20% of its marketing budget. Its dedicated influencer affiliate programme, The Plum List, has grown from around 1,000-plus to 2,000-plus in the last three months. Behl says influencers with specific domain expertise seem to work better in building consideration and driving purchase because they tend to have cult-like following and a much higher level of credibility. That translates into a much higher conversion rate compared to that seen in pure reach-driven campaigns.
Experts agree that at some point enlisting the support of mass media channels will be imperative. IIM Ahmedabad’s Vijayalakshmi notes that the main reason brands hesitate to use mass media is the massive budget required for advertising on TV or print. Mukherjee, of SUGAR Cosmetics points out that these new brands have to hit a certain scale before going down the traditional route or enlisting celebrity associations.
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