On the second day of the Glossy Beauty and Wellness Summit in Santa Barbara, beauty and wellness executives gathered into working groups to discuss the challenges they’re currently facing. In a session about marketing challenges, candid discussion included how to demonstrate a return on investment across marketing initiatives, how to create more substantial relationships with influencers and how to navigate affiliate percentages.
Below are highlights from this conversation, led by Glossy beauty and wellness editor Emma Sandler. Quotes are in the executives’ own words and have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Measurement of ROI across marketing initiatives
“How do you understand the consumer journey and where they may have interacted with your brand along that journey that helped them make the decision to make a purchase? We can’t necessarily draw a straight line, so it’s hard to justify the spend to the team.”
“We’re struggling with the same thing. We have been doing a lot of events and getting big influencers to cover us, but we can’t exactly track when we have a spike in sales where that’s coming from. We do really well on Amazon, so when we see big spikes there and we don’t know where it’s coming from, that’s very tricky for us.”
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“Anyone who was in business school 10 years ago will remember that it was taught that it takes five to seven touch points before a purchase is made — but now it’s 22. I think it’s something to keep in mind when trying to track the impact of these marketing events. … This is just a new marketing chapter.”
“We struggle to link our own data, and what we know about our customers, to social data. It’s something we want to unlock next year.”
Creating better relationships with influencers
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“We do a lot of influence gifting, and we noticed a large increase in success in our organic gifting campaigns when the outreach started internally. We had worked with an agency and saw moderate results, nothing spectacular, so we decided to bring it in-house and have our team do outreach on the social channels or through email. We have three people who handle it: one on TikTok, one on Instagram and one person managing the program. We start with micro gifting, and if they create really great content, we follow up with potential paid partnerships.”
“When we went through an agency, we felt that the influencers chosen were not the right fit for the brand. We tried a few agencies, but after four years, we brought It in-house, as well. We found that our internal team was always more powerful when driving engagement and sales with our influencers. The relationships [with influencers] were deepened as well.”
How to navigate the growth of affiliate marketing
“Now that everyone is moving to affiliate marketing, I’ve noticed there is a race to the bottom with everyone increasing their affiliate commission. I’ve seen brands going up to 100% or 150%, and I am just wondering if we should all start raising our percentages just to attract influencers to post about us. We normally do 10%, but I think we’re below average.”
“Our average is about 20% to incentivize influencers. You have to be strategic so you don’t lose out to your retailers. I’ve also found that a holistic annual marketing calendar is what helps to determine the strategy around percentages.”
“We’ve found that, unless they’re an exception, a flat fee is easier from a contract standpoint to iron out with an influencer.”
