30th September 2021
Bossing the beauty landscape
There’s no doubt the pandemic has raised consumer reliance on, and expectations around, ecommerce. Makeup – a category that is notoriously difficult to get right online – is no exception. And yet, succeeding online has never been more important. With this in mind, it’s crucial that brands understand what might make consumers choose their brand over another.
Building a winning website is no mean feat, even in today’s day and age. It takes a fine balance of many factors to create one that stands out and does well, and It’s much more than just ranking and visibility scores. Beauty brands looking to succeed online must have a clear understanding of opportunity and risk if they are to create – and sustain – a successful site.
Combining consumer research with in-depth site performance research has allowed us to uncover not only the challenges that makeup brands and retailers are facing online, but also how to solve them. We surveyed 1000 nationally representative consumers, to help paint a clear picture of who is shopping for makeup and what their shopping habits are.
Customers should always be at the heart of any online approach, so it’s vital brands understand their audience to ensure they are meeting their needs and targeting them with messaging that resonates. Keeping this in mind, we used the research to explore which makeup brands are truly winning online and their associated routes to success.
These insights helped us build a fail-safe route to success for brands, one that puts the consumer at the heart of the process and can be boiled down to 5 top tips for launching a beauty brand website.
- Understand your market
Know who you are competing against. Be aware, they may be different to who initially springs to mind. It is vital to really understand them and then use this knowledge to develop effective strategies and target terms that will help you capture consumers attention in a crowded marketplace.
- Understand the opportunity
After finding out who your competition is, you need to understand what the opportunity is, how you perform, and where to put your resources. To win in any category, brands must beat competition on high-value terms. You also need to identify where you are not going to win. Partnerships/collaborations which make sense to you and your customers should be used in the spaces where maximum impact can be achieved for your effort/money.
- Understand the customer
Know what your customers want, how they think, their journey, and how they view your brand. Utilising this information will allow you to develop your digital strategy to meet your customers and their needs better.
- Be where the customer is
This is about being there throughout the purchase funnel, providing relevant and interesting content to help consumers along the way. Being visible in the middle stages of a funnel can dramatically improve your chances of winning a customer.
- Create an amazing environment
Brands need to help customers find what they’re after on their site. This means really reviewing what they want to do and ensuring that the site does it as effectively as possible.
So, to have a winning website means more than having the highest domain level visibility. You must know who your customers and competitors are and how you perform against customer needs and competitor pages. Be smart with your resources, only fight battles that your brand can win.
To get to this position, beauty brands should evaluate every level of their site to understand their strengths and lean into them, as well as analyse their weaknesses with a view to turning them around. Those that do will win, and those that don’t will be left behind.
As seen on Cosmetics Business.