Social media can be an intimidating subject to talk about and implement for some managers and CEOs.  They hear the news about how companies have lost market share due to negative commentary or how a viral hoax had spread as quick as the company’s brand loyalty dropped.  These can all be major risks involved with social media, however; simply negating it may hurt the company in the near future.

Whether you are the manager, or the employee trying to advocate going social, here are a few imperative reasons for businesses in the beauty industry to consider social media marketing.

Even in traditional marketing, each consumer goes through a process with different touch points for every purchase with the brand. Now that consumers are more inclined to seek information themselves, also known as ‘Pull marketing’, the touch points are slightly different. A basic consumer process goes like this:

1. Consideration: at this preliminary stage, the customer is recalling the set of brands that call to mind or are available
2. Evaluation: the customer proceeds to evaluating the different brands with certain criteria (price, size, etc)
3. Decision: the customer will ultimately make a purchase decision
4. Impression: the consumer will make a positive or negative impression on the overall experience of the purchase
5. Advocate: if the consumer is satisfied with the purchase, they may share their experience and promote the brand by will   OR    Remonstrate: if the consumer is dissatisfied with the purchase, they may choose to antagonize the brand and sound complaints

At these different points of a consumer’s purchase journey, brands could use social media to influence the purchases at the right time and place.

The first and foremost action to take in social media is monitoring.  Listen to what your customers are saying about you, your products, and competitors. Monitoring is necessary in all touch-points of the consumer’s journey.  If your company has just launched a new hair-care product and wants to know the response of the launch, Twitter, Youtube, and community forums are a great location to listen to the conversation.  Perhaps purchasers love the content of the product but find the packaging inconvenient; this would pose as an opportunity of improvement.

After finding a lead through listening- trust me- your company will need to join the conversation and respond back on the same channels. For example, referencing back to the issue of negative complaints going viral, the ‘remonstrate’ stage is a critical stage.  Let’s pretend that one of your organic skin care products start to naturally change colour after 3 months of use. Sally, who bought this product may not be aware that this natural colour change is safe and complain on her own personal social media sites.  Soon enough, one friend will tell another about the faults of this product and so on. Now multiply this by the amount of Sallys in this world.  If your company can respond back ensuring the quality of the product, you could turn things around and have yourself a happy customer.

Now let’s say that you have many loyal fans of your cosmetic company.  Your customers come up to you in the store and tell you much they love your products and how they always recommend your brand to their friends. OPPORTUNITY! Through social media, your business can facilitate engagement and conversation with all your fans.  Your potential customers want to hear those genuine reviews from those customers in the ‘advocate’ stage as much you do.  Solution? Create a community blog or forum. Check out Sephora’s BeautyTalk forum for reference.

Finally, social media can simplify the purchase decision and complete the purchase.  Whether it is using some sort of promotional code on social media sites or discounts for targeted groups of people, the ‘evaluation’ and ‘decision’ stage is primarily where the money is at.  You want your customers to feel like there is no competition and that there is no need to further extend the search. However, if you didn’t even exist on the online search, good luck trying to stay on their consideration set.  Check out my article about How to SEO in the beauty industry if you want to improve on that.

Next time your company decides to re-allocate the marketing budget, you should strongly consider these points when questioning about going social.