Influencer marketing in the beauty space isn’t new, but its popularity has soared recently. Naturally, beauty companies are latching onto the trend, hoping influencers can inspire their followers to buy. The question for brands is: How can you translate social media influence into needle-moving revenue?

The Rise of the Influencer

With lockdowns limiting traditional cosmetic counter testing and demonstration options during the pandemic, many consumers turned to social media for beauty advice, tutorials, and recommendations — with influencers holding significant sway on buying decisions. 

But you won’t see these social media personalities walking the red carpet or in the pages of fashion magazines. Today more and more consumers trust regular, everyday people, or “micro-influencers,” for authentic recommendations. To maximize the reach of these influencers, many brands are now turning to services like an event staffing agency to help connect them with the right influencers for their campaigns or even influencer platforms that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Brad Fay, co-founder of marketing research firm Keller Kay Group, described the appeal of micro-influencers by saying, “Our research shows that real-life influencers who are passionate about what they are recommending have significantly more buying conversations, and consumers are more likely to act on their recommendations."

Brands Hop on the Influencer Trend

Brands have seen the outsized impact influencers can have on their followers, and they’ve adapted to add sponsored social media posts to their overall marketing mix. Both direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands are using both external links or influencers on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to build awareness and drive traffic to their sites. 

In turn, influencer marketing budgets are growing rapidly. According to Statista, the influencer market was valued at a record $13.8 billion in 2021. Today, beauty micro-influencers make hundreds or even thousands of dollars from every sponsored post, with the amount increasing as their follower counts grow.

Fashion and Beauty Monitor notes, “Almost 60% of fashion and beauty brands have an influencer marketing strategy in place, while a further 21% plan to invest in it over the next 12 months.” To capitalize, brands are looking to recruit influencers across a broad spectrum of follower counts (some with fewer than 1,000 followers) to promote their products.

Personalization and the Need for Customer Data

Along with identifying the impact of influencers, brands also recognize the emerging necessity of another factor in digital commerce — personalization. 

Influencers help boost awareness and traffic, and personalization helps convert that traffic. In fact, according to Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when recommendations are personalized to them. 

The issue with personalization within digital channels is it relies heavily on customer data. But due to the phasing out of third-party cookies, customer data will soon be much more difficult for companies to obtain. 

To personalize customer experiences, brands now must prioritize first-party data (information collected directly from customers) and zero-party data (which customers proactively provide). This is a big change for beauty brands, but fortunately, they can leverage influencer marketing to aid in this data acquisition. 

How Influencer Marketing and Personalization Work Together

The challenge for beauty brands is that they don’t know how to best convert all the traffic that influencers drive to their properties. When an influencer promotes your brand and sends followers to your website, what are you doing to identify those users, collect their zero-party or first-party data, and personalize their experience (and any future experiences)? How does that influence directly translate into revenue?

This is where an integrated marketing platform (like Listrak) can be a game-changer and unlock hidden revenue for brands. With an all-in-one platform, brands can more easily and centrally capture data from customers sent by influencers, and thus, customize their journeys.

The Path to Personalization

An integrated journey hub enables you to take data from disparate channels and create personalized offers that give modern customers the experiences they crave. 

For instance, the next time an influencer sends traffic to your site, an integrated platform like Listrak provides a variety of methods to gather their information. These include on-site popups, email acquisition points, and quizzes. All can be customized to fit your brand and trigger new users into a strategic, personalized welcome series or nurturing campaign.

But what about when customers don’t provide that zero-party data? That’s why it’s vital to also have an identity graph (which is not based on cookies) that recognizes anonymous traffic. Listrak’s integrated hub uses continuous machine learning to create a linking identity path before an email or phone number is provided. So marketers don’t have to start each interaction from scratch without any data. 

Plus, Listrak’s platform helps marketers automatically identify unique users across devices without a repeated sign-in. So customers can pick up their personalized journey right where they left off on their other device.

More Personalized Customer Journeys (and Better Conversions) with Integration

An integrated B2C marketing automation platform transforms influencer marketing from a scattershot approach to a systematic conversion framework. Influencers send followers to your site, you collect their data and identify them, then you create personalized customer journeys that increase trackable conversion rates and lead to higher sales.

And when all of your marketing systems (email, SMS, social, push, etc.) are managed with a single platform, you create a unified customer profile — so you can capture critical customer signals across every touchpoint. You can then use potent behavioral triggers, like browse history and cart abandonment, to generate high-converting offers personalized by your customer’s engagement.

The integrated hub gives beauty marketers a direct, trackable connection from the influencer marketing at the top of their funnel to the conversion at the bottom.

But it’s difficult to collect all the data you need on one dashboard without the use of APIs. APIs allow two software components to communicate with each other. A social API connects a social media platform to your analytics software, allowing you to use actionable data for marketing.

If you use multiple social media platforms to capitalize on influencer marketing, this collection of recommended APIs by Rapid should come in handy. The more APIs you use, the more data you can collect, which will help you sell your products and services to the right target market.

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Conclusion

Influencer marketing is only going to grow, and brands must prepare to compete with this as part of your marketing mix. But to optimize each influencer marketing dollar, you need the capability to customize offers and deliver personalized customer journeys, not just attract eyeballs. 

As other beauty brands have experienced, having an integrated marketing solution helps you make the most of all your marketing strategies, so you can succeed and scale. 

If you’d like to optimize your influencer marketing with Listrak’s integrated platform, begin your journey here and explore the various components that leading retail marketers use to grow their revenue, engagement, and loyalty.