Beauty marketing: 4 ways to help grow your beauty brand

April 07, 2021 | By: Jun Kopff, Analytics and media manager

Understanding the tactics you need to help grow your beauty brand will help position your business for success, but you might ask, where do I start? To help answer that question, we studied1 over 500 JP beauty brands' media performance from January 2018 to December 2019 to understand what makes some campaigns more successful.

Top beauty brands see success across key metrics

On average, the top-performing brands had a 2.4x year-over-year product detail page view growth and 1.8x year-over-year increase in new-to-brand customers compared to the lower-performing brands.

What contributed to this success? Here are four strategies that differentiate top-performing beauty marketing campaigns:

Insights and best practices to reach your audience

1. Build year-round brand momentum

We found that the most successful brands adopted an always-on strategy with their Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ad campaigns. Always-on campaigns run continuously, meaning your ads will have more chances to reach prospective shoppers year round and help increase the likelihood of your brand being top of mind when they are making purchasing decisions.

Keep in mind that shopping journeys vary throughout the year – with high and low shopping periods, and mapping budgets accordingly may help with maximizing your ROI. You can understand when your audience is most active on Amazon by leveraging an Audience Insights report.

2. Use display and video ads through Amazon DSP to reach audiences on and off Amazon

The most successful brands delivered 22% of total Amazon Ads impressions off of Amazon. With display and video ads through the Amazon DSP, your brand is able to reach unique audiences, in all stages of the customer journey, on and off Amazon across Amazon sites and apps, third party sites and apps, and third party exchanges. We recommend balancing your spend between Amazon properties, like Twitch, and IMDb TV, and off-site inventory to help increase your reach with audiences at scale.

You can also leverage dynamic e-commerce ads which allow you to create display ads quickly and easily, with creatives that automatically update to highlight product attributes, such as price, star ratings, and Prime eligibility.

3. Balance your advertising budgets across multiple ad products

Top-performing brands allocated a balanced budget across Sponsored Products and mid- and upper-funnel products such as Sponsored Brands and display ads, without skewing towards one type of product. Diversifying your advertising product mix helps engage and reengage your audience at different stages in the shopping journey.

While it’s important to reach shoppers who are most likely to purchase, don’t forget to build awareness and increase consideration by using display and video ads, including OTT (over-the-top) ads also known as streaming TV ads.

4. Advertise products that have more customer reviews

Last but not least, top-performing brands had on average more customer reviews for their products. If your beauty products have a large number of customer reviews, shoppers are able to gain insights that will help them make informed purchase decisions. Products with more customer reviews may rank higher in shopping results, which can help increase visibility of your product and brand.

Registering with Amazon Brand Registry gives you access to the Amazon Vine program, which can be helpful to new brands looking to drive the important first reviews of their products.

To learn more about how we can help you grow your beauty brand, please contact your Amazon sales representative. If you're new to Amazon Ads, contact us to get started.

1Methodology: We applied machine learning algorithms to aggregate beauty brands into clusters based on similar advertising and retail insights. Then we looked at success metrics like product detail page view growth and new-to-brand customer growth to identify the most successful clusters.