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When A Luxury Beauty Brand’s Social Media Strategy Starts To Fail
Submitted by Macala Wright on 10/22/2009 – 8:17 AM13 Comments | 2,807 views
Through social media and word-of-mouth marketing, Beauty Bio Sciences hopes to spark interest and drive consumer sales of its new product, Lash Allure MD, by staging a contest with a $100,000 cash.
About The Contest
The company used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Online Video Contest Sites to launch the contest. Entrants must write a story or post a video describing what they would do with the prize money.
The most compelling story, to be determined by public vote, will be announced by January 1, 2010. Lash Allure MD encourages contestants to post before and after photos of their lashes, but no purchase is required in order to win.
About The Product
Lash Allure MD is said to be an eco-friendly, partially organic product that grows longer, darker and thicker lashes for most people within two weeks.
Lash Allure MD Twitter Contest
A Social Beauty Campaign Going South
So how’s the campaign going? Not so well. A few beauty bloggers have picked up the contest and written about it on their blogs. Launched almost a month ago, the brand has 38 followers on Twitter, 70 fans on Facebook, a YouTube channel that has no videos and a website that offers no community. The website traffic appears stagnant after 9/20/09 with an estimated 52 views per day beforehand.
For such a lucrative prize, $100,000 is nothing to sneeze at. Why is there so little engagement and virtually no awareness? Hopefully this campaign will change course. Otherwise it would have been better to spend the money on traditional advertising, as it would have had a better ROI.
Turning The Beauty Boat Around
First-year sales of Lash Allure MD are projected at $10 million. How can this campaign be turned around?
Blogger Outreach: Blogger outreach is key in this campaign. The brand wants beauty, fashion and even lifestyle blogs with a beauty vertical writing about the product and the very generous contest. But the brand isn’t going to get all the coverage it wants or needs for free.
Product Giveaways & Paid Partnerships: Lash Allure MD can give the product away on a few select blogs, but Lash Allure MD is going to have to invest in quality promotion. By investing in blogs that lead lifestyle and beauty, awareness will spread like wildfire as the brand is leveraging the credibility of established online leaders. Online websites that would be ideal to lead this would be MyItThings, The Coveted, Second City Style, LadyLux, Refinery 29, Total Beauty and Meg’s Makeup. A clever collaboration with a great PR pro would also obtain online placements on Style.com, Glamour.com and Allure.com to garner interest from other web audiences.
Community Monitoring: While the contest is running, the brand needs to assign a community manager to monitor and respond to comments, questions and videos posted on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. The community manager should also be monitoring blogs and websites that write about the contest, leaving comments on every single post. These posts could also be linked to on the site’s press coverage page, if it wanted to be very social. Tracking tweets, facebook engagement and online write-ups will help establish the campaign’s effectiveness and reach.
Capitalize positive qualities and price points: The green and holistic attributes are selling points of this product and should be promoted in reviews and to contest entrants. As most of us know, green is an major trend in every industry now. The product’s price point, $49.50, is also ideal against its competition; Latisse is $89.50, LiLash is $139.95 and Revitalash is $150.00 (these are the brands with the highest online awareness).
A Word of Advice: Please don’t abandon the community that’s been developed through the campaign. Continue to interact with the audiences the brand has built, they’re an ongoing source of information and revenue.
Our Video Nomination: Why isn’t this on the Allure MD website? It’s the best one!
Lash Allure MD is launching this month at 300 units of Dillard’s Department Stores and Nordstrom and through its Web site. Beauty Bio Sciences also sells its Organicare line of USDA-certified organic skin treatments through the same retailers (WWD).
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[...] and harness the social space, they’re starting to see limited results and sometimes complete failures by the agencies implementing social media [...]
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Great advice! I agree there is so much potential to generate buzz here, but what many companies don't realize is that having a huge prize doesn't guarantee your campaign to go viral. They have to support it with paid media and promotion. It's hard to get bloggers post about contests as part of the editorial, because we don't want our blogs to turn into constant free promotion channel. Buying few targeted placements on key blogs or their email lists are the best ways to get guaranteed feature.
Besides that I feel Twitter should be the place campaigns like this one get buzz. How about creating a fun hashtag (#100Klash)? Perhaps running weekly Twitter challenges or linking to the funniest video submissions could be a great start. This video alone is the best commercial a brand can ask for!
I think Lush Allure still have time to fix their strategy and turn this campaign into a success, and will be curious to see if they followed your advice (part of the social media “awareness” is listening, no?).
This is a very solid writeup. I always try to stress that just b/c a campaign has a prize or it's announced on Twitter does not mean it's going to be a success. Igniting the campaign with paid media would certainly help – I'm sure this campaign would have a ton more effect with $75 out of the $100k going into media and a $25k cash prize. Even a $10k cash prize is interesting.
Yuli, I completely agree. They do have time to fix their strategy and the twitter strategy is on the money. I like #100KLash would be ideal, and maybe even result in a trending topic. That's viral. Retailer brands have to understand that social media isn't free media. It's takes some work to develop a great strategy.
Darren, you're also correct. $100K is beyond lucrative. I think $25K is a premium moving price point. If they're giving away $100K, then they should probably spend $200K on execution and implementation. If they spent $100K total, they could spend $75-80K on execution (any decent firm could handle that) and give away $20-25K. There may need some residual consulting work to make sure they continue to utilize the communities afterward. If they didn't want to implement monitoring in house, then an agency could monitor it for reasonable fee monthly.
I'm 2 weeks into latisse… I'm the perfect entry for this and I won't go near it because at $100k someone smarter than me has probably already hired a pro to do their work.
LMAO Jessica! I was going to do the same thing and then thought to myself, nope, someone else is going to pay someone (on trusted spec of course) to make it blow me out of the water.
I would like to try this product..
Hey Sophia – The link to their site is in the post, or you can probably get it via facebook!
Macala,
Thanks for covering the giveaway. I work on the pr team for this event.
To be honest, we’re surprised at the low number of entries so far as well. I’m not sure if anyone saw the amount of money we’re giving away. if not I’ll remind – the prize is $100,000! Seriously! $100,000! So right now, the odds of winning are REDONKULOUS!
We kicked off the campaign getting all our social media accounts up and running under the “Eye On The 100K” moniker. So what you see with the twitter, facebook, YouTube et al is all newly launched for the actual brand – Lash Allure MD. We actually started with all our accounts under the banner of “Eye on the 100k” because we were in stealth mode before launching the product/brand. That may have been a bit of a misstep. We spent 3 months building up the contest in stealth mode by essentially marketing a separate brand. We got about 16,000 email address asking for more information about the contest during that time period. So in that regard the contest lead up was great. However, now (hindsight anyone?) we are having to redo the whole brand launch via all the same channels. Not terribly hard considering we have all these people’s emails. But, we’ll certainly be evaluating that decision later – after the contest has been completed.
Our original focus when it came to outreach, ironically, was social media types. We spent most of our energies connecting with people on twitter, bloggers, video pros, and vloggers. We were able to generate interest, but we’re not seeing the follow-through for some reason.
Now, we have partnered with InStyle.com and are getting lots of attention from that relationship. We’re getting a great number of signups (http://www.flickr.com/photos/theagencyblog/4037…) – just looking for that magic that will get people tactually produce the content. So, with the success of the InStyle.com relationship, we decided a few days ago to completely change our focus to just the types of sites/blogs you mention in your post. We both must be very smart!
On the price-point/marketing strategy – you hit the nail on the head. The is a critical part of our traditional marketing, but not prominently featured as part of the social media campaign. We are spending our social capital promoting the giveaway only – it's important to keep the message simple and direct.
On the community – it’s the entire reason why we’re here! No worries about us not understanding how important the community is and what is necessary to nurture and grow those relationships.
On posting a video to our site that we think is “best” – Hello lawsuit. No thanks.
We are limited by what we do during the contest. If we were to post an individual’s video on our site it could be construed as us promoting that video, giving one or more people an advantage over the other participants. I can’t even tell you if I like the video you mentioned here in your comment.
So anyway, I am chronicling our experience with this event and a couple other I’m working on with other clients. There will be a great case study on all of them when that have all been completed.
Hope some of that “behind the scenes” helps. I’ll keep you posted on our experience!
Thanks again!
@giovanni
LMAO Jessica! I was going to do the same thing and then thought to myself, nope, someone else is going to pay someone (on trusted spec of course) to make it blow me out of the water.
Giovanni – Thanks for responding. I'm glad you're reconsidering the strategy. Tech oriented crowds aren't going to generate the awareness you want. There's only a few that are geek chic. Instyle is a great start, but it's a completely different audience. You're going to have to cast a wider, deeper net and pull from the sites that I mentioned, you're three best returns are going to be LadyLux.com, MyITThings.com, TotalBeauty.com, MegsMakeup.com and Refinery29.com. You have really go in the majorly fashion forward communities that are early adopters of social media. Also, in part of the video: Here's the link I mean. http://www.lashalluremd.com/giveaway-updates.html, the guy's video should be here also. Good luck on the campaign and I hope all goes well, it looks like the post helped a bit.
Take the ideas or the ideas in the comments and hopefully they help.
Good article! I think my video deserves a view too though! Please check it out, click on my name to see the video. Thanks for posting this.
Good article! I think my video deserves a view too though! Please check it out, click on my name to see the video. Thanks for posting this.