These Beauty Brands Are Straight Up Owning the Selfie Trend

Taking a snapshot of the industry

Since the term was first coined in 2002, selfies have become an Internet staple. For cosmetics marketers, the selfie trend is a natural way to encourage user-generated content across the board, and has become a common theme in cross-channel campaigns from beauty brands like Sephora to popular celebrity apps.

Seemingly every brand has tried to capitalize on selfies, and it’s no wonder why: Over one million selfies are taken daily. Depending on the city, women take anywhere from 55 to 82 percent of those selfies, according to a recent research project, Selfiecity, supported by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Global beauty retailer Sephora offers over 15,000 different products from 300 different brands across its 2,000 stores and online. In response to the way women were posting and tagging pictures of themselves and their favorite cosmetics on Pinterest and Instagram, Sephora launched its own platform last year, the Beauty Board, for its biggest fans.

The Pinterest-like photo-sharing platform allows Sephora’s logged-in loyalty program customers, or Beauty Insiders, to tag cosmetic products in selfies. Using this data, the Sephora marketing team pushes consumer-driven content across its Web, social, email and in-store channels. Most companies use only 12 percent of the data they collect. By contrast, Sephora centralizes it all and tracks what brands and channels consumers prefer. With this data, Sephora might send a consumer a personalized email featuring products that match her skin tone and type, or launch video tutorials dedicated to certain products that are proving to be popular.

For other cosmetics brands like Clinique, selfie shots are a means of weaving a broader narrative through the various consumer touchpoints, including mobile features, in-store displays and customer service. In order to figure out what types of campaigns resonated with its customers, Clinique began examining real-time customer searches on Google for several years—and found that beauty customers enjoyed reading product recommendations and information that addressed dermatological concerns.

Armed with this knowledge, Clinique got way ahead of the curve when it began using makeup video tutorials from its ongoing Clinique Insiders campaign in 2008. Each year, the company chooses 20 beauty junkies and sends them flip cameras to record themselves trying on new looks. Clinique’s most recent iteration of a self-centered campaign, #FaceForward, continues the trend with advice from top bloggers on its website, alongside related campaign messaging on its social media channels. Its more than 8.2 million Facebook and nearly 300 thousand Instagram followers are encouraged to take photos of themselves and tag Clinique with a written description about what they’d like their future selves to accomplish.

Creating consumer experiences that move continuously from one touchpoint to the next requires an efficient data attribution and management system that most marketers don’t have access to. In fact, only 21 percent of businesses use an attribution model that accounts for each touchpoint, and 38 percent don’t use an attribution model at all. Tracking how consumers travel from channel to channel with real-time tools and turning that collected data into insight can help marketers create meaningful, seamless stories, as well as loyal shoppers.

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