Objective:

The beauty industry is growing faster than retail shelf space can keep up. New brands are entering the market, ecommerce is earning a bigger share of the category, and micro-influencers are attracting thousands of consumers to their owned properties. In their 2016 study, Euromonitor International estimates 8% of beauty sales in the US happen online, up from the previous year. Additionally, Pixability performed a study in 2016 that highlighted 45 billion video views happened on YouTube, of which only 2 billion were from brand owned assets.

The beauty space is becoming a very difficult space to stand out, create an audience, and get your product in front of the right consumer, at the right time. Our client was no different; a primarily ecommerce brand focused on earning organic growth through new product development, quality ingredients, and empowering their voracious audience. Our client was not present in big box stores, and relied almost exclusively on their own website. This meant that audience acquisition remained paramount. However, Shopping ads and other advertising mediums could only get them so far. They needed brand buzz, they needed the attention of key influencers, and they needed their brand to be associated with quality, so they can spark trial.

With their SEM campaigns in full flight but increasing in cost-per-acquisition, our strategy needed to increase revenue from non-paid channels, as well as utilize influencer marketing to get their product in front of the right audience, with trust signals in place.

Overall, our goal was to improve rankings for mid to lower funnel queries, improve entrances from organic search, but ultimately acquire high volume exposure through influencer marketing, relevant placements on high trafficked publications, and telling the story of their brand, to improve awareness and recall.

Strategy:

With the site technically sound from our previous efforts, we looked to ensure content on their owned assets would provide linkable assets to fuel our Digital PR initiative. With a full portfolio of owned assets and relevant content, our next step was to identify the placements frequented by their target audience, and ultimately would improve awareness. Additionally, we built a list of relevant micro-influencers who we would work to help tell the brand story to their audience of loyal subscribers.

With such competition present, we knew that placements wouldn’t be easy to come by initially, so we worked to earn trust, confidence, and relevance through thoughtful and detailed content. From there, success lead to more success and our placements reached a larger and larger audience.

The influencer campaign continued to put the brand and products in front of the right audience and the feedback from the audience expressed that authentic truth, the quality of the products spoke for themselves.

Results:

Not including the direct referrals garnering success from influencer’s properties, we were successful in increasing our client’s revenue from organic traffic by 75%, compared to prior year. This increase was well over $2.5 million, when compared to prior year. The overall improvement in sessions equated to more than 1.5 million more unique sessions, originating from organic search.

Not only did revenue improve, but also transactions improved and conversion rate from organic sources improved. Conversion rates from organic search continue to remain well above industry best practices.

As it pertains to our overall goal of earning them higher rankings for mid-bottom of the funnel queries, our campaign was successful in earning them 41% more queries in the top 20 positions, when compared to prior year. This improvement equated to over 1500 terms, including top 3 positions for some of the most competitive and valuable queries in their space.

Case Study Highlights

Industry: eCommerce – Beauty

Goals:

  • Increase quantity of queries in which they rank in top 20 positions
  • Increase revenue from Organic Search
  • Improve brand awareness and audience acquisition from Organic Search

Results:

  • Increased unique sessions from Organic Search by 38%
  • Increased revenue from Organic Search by 75%
  • Improved quantity of queries in which rank in the top 20 positions by 41%