Why are beauty brands building their customer community in 2023?

Posted by Quentin Lebeau on February 21, 2023 Quentin Lebeau

Beauty brands are creating some of the strongest customer communities out there today. They have passionate customers who love to create UGC, discuss their favorite products and co-create: everything a brand needs to start building its owned community. 

Let's look at how these brands are going about it:

What are the objectives of a beauty brand's community?

How do beauty brands build their communities?

What kind of results are beauty brands seeing with their communities?

 

Kicks beauty community


 

What are the objectives of a beauty brand's community?

Most of the beauty brands I’ve talked to in the last years, mention four objectives behind their need to develop their customer community.
  • Owning their community: rising cost of ads and diminishing reach on socials is making beauty brands more and more eager to secure a direct access to their best customers.

  • Increasing repeat purchase: many beauty brands see the majority of their D2C customers buy once and not come back. The goal of the community is to allow them to connect & interact with these customers to retain them.

  • Scaling review/UGC generation: most beauty brands have now understood that a minority of their customers write the majority of their UGC (reviews, pics, videos...). The goal of the community is to gather these content creators and continuously engage them to scale review (and UGC) production.

  • Scaling advocacy on socials: beauty brands know that they have nano/micro influencers among their customers. The goal of the community is to spot these highly-valuable advocates and leverage them to produce regular content on their own socials.

Overall, these beauty brands see building a community as the quickest, cheapest and most efficient way to boost revenue, reviews and advocacy all at the same time.

Community-building is often part of a wider vision from the brand leadership to leverage their customers to drive scalable, organic growth.

 

 

How do beauty brands build their communities?

Let's dive into some more concrete elements about how community-building is done in the world of beauty brands.

  • Recruitment: in our experience, the quickest way for a beauty brand to grow a community is to leverage its CRM and socials to invite customers to the community. Finding the right target and message is the key.

  • Animation: the most popular experiences amongst beauty communities members are:
    • Getting invited to a product test
    • Participating in UGC contests & challenges
    • Chatting with the brand and other customers about beauty tips & concerns.
    • Attending masterclasses, live shopping and round tables with beauty experts.

  • Resources & organisation:
    • The customer community is almost always owned by the brand’s CMO/marketing director.
    • The project itself is handled by CRM and/or advocacy teams.
    • On a daily basis, community management and animation is often handled by BAs and/or outsourced to an agency.

 

 

What kind of results are beauty brands seeing with their communities?

Like in any sector, results depend mainly on how visible, engaging and rewarding the community experience is. That said, in beauty on average, after 12 months we see:

  • Revenue: + 50 to +80% sales for beauty members compared to equivalent non-community member segment. (Depending on community size this can amount to +4% to +8% global revenue.)

  • Reviews: Community members generate between 30 and 50% of the brand’s reviews ad UGC.

  • Advocacy: impact on socials is what varies the most between brands. Depending on how they’re recruited and engaged, beauty communities generate a few hundred social posts per year to several thousands.

 

 

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Topics: Community building Brand community community trends

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