LONDON/NEW YORK: Digital and social have profoundly changed the way people shop for beauty products and the response of The Estée Lauder Companies has been to develop an extensive content marketing program for all its brands.

Speaking at a recent NewsCred event, Alicianne Rand, Executive Director, Global Content Marketing at The Estée Lauder Companies Inc, outlined how the business is harnessing content, social and influencers to drive revenue and growth.

Every day the content the company produces reaches 83m people on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram – and that’s just the top 13 brands in a 32-brand portfolio – and generates 1m interactions in the US alone.

“It mirrors the way that people shop for beauty,” Rand said. (For more details, read WARC’s report: How content fuels everything at Estée Lauder.)

The content creation process begins with an understanding of consumer needs. “We spend a lot of time thinking about social listening,” said Rand. “The methodology, how we scale it, what we can learn from all of the things people are talking about online.”

This work informs not only content strategy but product innovation and how quickly products are brought to market.

Product is no longer simply created in the lab, she stressed. “Now you think about how will this product live in the world of social.

“Is it shareable? Are people going to Instagram it? Is it going to be picked up by influencers?”

These questions have to be asked because “nobody is loyal to make-up any more. People choose a lipstick here, a lipstick there, but what is fuelling this is being able to share”.

Tapping influencers is an essential part of the process, not least since their user-generated content generates almost seven times higher engagement than brand-generated content.

In an example of successfully combining social, content and product development, the MAC brand last year worked with ten influencers in different regions around the world, each creating their own personalised lipsticks and launching them at the same time.

With global synchronisation and a huge amplification strategy, the products sold out everywhere within a week, Rand reported.

Sourced from WARC