Building a community isn’t a new marketing tactic, but it’s definitely something that seems to be on the rise with beauty brands.
Benefits of creating a community for your beauty brand
Wondering if it’s worth building a community around your beauty brand, or whether you can skip that part? Here’s why you should build a community when you launch a beauty business:
- Builds trust, authenticity and peer recommendations
- Builds advocacy with brand ambassadors and messaging
- Diverse user generated content and testimonials
- Real time feedback on products, ideas, campaigns
- Relationship building
- Insights, trends research and consumer insights (without market research costs)
- Product development insights, trialling and testing
- Customer loyalty
- Brand differentiation with an emotional connection
- Customer retention
- Sales, upselling and cross-selling
- Consumer education and expert access
- Cultural relevance
- PR coverage and brand awareness
Which beauty brands do community well?
Let’s take a look at some of the beauty brands and retailers that are doing community well
REFY
REFY are killing it when it comes to community. They have their REFY Group Chat, events and a wealth of customer focused content. Earlier in the year they held a REFY exhibition, and last month they took members of their community to an exclusive retreat in Mallorca.
Sephora
SEPHORA is one of the OG community building beauty businesses. They have a huge Beauty Insider community. They also host beauty festival Sephoria and points = experiences, unlocking exclusive access.
Bread Beauty Supply
Bread Beauty Supply have their own community of breadlettes who get invited to events, launches and content creation opps. They also share new products and testers.
Skin Rocks
While it’s technically not brand-specific, Caroline Hirons’ private FB group Skincare Freaks is a 140k+ community who share tips, reviews, swaps, product reccs and routines. Skin Rocks™ is now a big part of it.
Bubble
Bubble uses the Geneva app – popular with Gen Z – to build their community. They use the chat channels on the app for feedback, insights and decision-making.
Versed
Versed, a Public Benefit Corp is another one with a private FB group – The Good Skin Crowd. The team behind Versed answer questions, host focus groups and share product development.
Beauty Pie
Beauty Pie‘s business is built around membership and community. They have a Beauty Pie FB group, Beauty Pie Insiders and showcase the community on their blog and campaigns.