Building Successful Beauty Marketing Campaigns
“Planning and Implementation are vital to Successful Promotional Campaigns”
Building successful beauty marketing campaigns are an important consideration.
Retailers spend a large proportion of their budget on marketing and as a brand they anticipate you to do the same. Not only do you need to spend money on your own marketing – your brand, your website, your marketing collateral, your packaging, your sampling campaign, your instore fixtures and fittings, your staff training – but you also need to spend money on marketing your brand in their stores across events and promotional campaigns.
A brand joining a retailer will be provided with a sales target for the first 6 – 12 months. The future success of their relationship will be measured on their ability to deliver against this sales target, amongst other factors. Ensure that your promotional plan is a well thought out and well executed strategy that favourably contributes towards achieving your annual sales performance.
Building your marketing calendar
Promotions play a big role in retail, you only need to visit department stores, pharmacies and grocers to see how many promotions take place in-store. Whilst the central idea of a promotion is to drive volume and financial targets, they can also help a brand in driving brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Successful promotional planning is a fine line between balancing margins, profitability and stock levels with no room for error. As a brand, your discussions with a retail buyer will centre around how many promotions you will be running a year and what level of stock is required to manage these, sales planning is key. Retailers set sales targets and margins for each category and buyers are measured on the success of delivering to these KPI’s. They therefore need to be confident that the promotions you are recommending will meet their targets and that you have proven sales history and the inventory to support this. Retail promotions are an essential way of retailers connecting with their end customers.
Ideally you should be recommending promotional events run with similar retailers, where you know what the uplift in sales will be and you know that you have all the elements in place to be able to run with these promotions successfully. When discussing promotional events, outline your sales projections and the expected performance of your products.
They can be about providing value. You could offer a GWP, a limited-edition product, an experience, a competition instead of just another 3 for 2, buy 1 get 1 free or product bundle. Something enticing enough for your customers to enable you to drive sales. Standing out on shelves can be difficult, however when you are in a central promotional space, use impactful POS to highlight your promotion and benefit from the use of consumer claims on your packaging, product reviews online and in-store magazines. Authenticity and measurable claims are important to your end customer, particularly when it comes to beauty products.
Ensure that at the end of the promotion, even if it has been an overall success, that you have sufficient stock levels to meet your sales expectations for the coming months. Whilst a successful promotion is great, a retailer wants to ensure that they are always in stock.
If you are looking to build a brand in the beauty and wellness industry, come and join our beauty accelerator program, and work on a 1-2-1 basis with our founder Janet Milner-Walker to make this happen.
Having developed and launched brands for companies including M&S, Body Shop, Boots and Crabtree & Evelyn as well as working with clients across the world, you will be learning exactly what it takes, to turn your ideas into a product and brand.
We would love to have you on board!
Get in touch at hello@beautytolife.co.uk. Enroll today to become a successful beauty entrepreneur.