Branding for Cosmetics: How to Sell More Beauty Products
Branding is a strategy for differentiating your business from the competition and establishing a positive relationship with your customers. Since it is a saturated space, branding for cosmetics can be difficult, but it is also an important part of your business.
So, how do you do it? How do you create a beauty brand that people want to associate with? The importance of good branding for cosmetics cannot be understated. It’s the difference between being a good company and being a great company. A good brand can sell, but a great brand can sell as well as build a loyal community for itself.
Aventive Studio is a full-service branding agency that helps cosmetic, skincare, and beauty businesses sell more products. We can create cosmetic packaging designs that stand out from the crowd and attract more customers. Learn about our branding & design services here.
How Good Branding Works
Branding is all about perception and the right message at the right time. You need to tell your story in such a way that people will remember it and come back to it again and again.
This means that you need to know what they want from your brand – what they want to hear when they hear about your product or service – before you even start creating anything.
As a process, branding involves creating a unique image for a product or service that establishes it as a member of a category or makes it memorable.
It can also be the process by which an organization identifies itself with its target audience. Branding includes creating visual, verbal, and emotional connections between your brand and your customers.
With customers having shrinking attention spans, cosmetic companies need to build their brands to compete effectively in today’s competitive marketplace. And good branding can help you establish yourself as a solid competitor in the beauty market.
Looking for examples of effective beauty branding? View a case study from one of our cosmetic packaging design clients here to see how Aventive Studio helped them position themselves and make more product sales.
5 Pillars of Successful Branding
Purpose
Every cosmetics brand begins with a specific objective. It is either to solve a problem faced by the ideal customer or to bridge an existing gap in the market. Your branding needs to reflect your purpose for it to look coherent with the rest of your brand and be comprehensible to your customers.
Perception
Brand image and perception are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but they couldn’t be more different in terms of application. Brand image is the position you want to create in the market for your target audience. Brand perception is how that same audience perceives your brand.
You can put out marketing campaigns and try out strategies to position your business in a certain light in the market, but if your end user doesn’t perceive you the way you want them to see you, your beauty business will struggle to establish itself.
Visual branding should be used as a tool to bridge the gap between how your target audience views you now and how you want them to view you for your business to be successful.
Personality
Every beauty brand needs to have its own voice, ethics, values, mission, and vision. If people can’t associate your business with certain traits at the drop of a hat (ex. Aveda with nature), they won’t turn into loyal customers. Branding can help you connect your business with a clear set of traits on which you will be able to base your future marketing decisions.
Position
As discussed above, branding should be used to establish your authority in the cosmetics market and position your business in a specific market segment. Just like Neutrogena focuses on positioning itself as a safe and affordable brand, your brand also needs to identify a clear position that it can assume in the marketplace.
Promotion
A brand isn’t a brand if nobody knows about it. Successful branding should help you further your brand’s reach and ease marketing activities for you! Check out this in-depth guide on branding for the beauty industry to learn more.
How to Increase Your Beauty Brand’s Sales
Understand Who Your Ideal Client Is
If you don’t know who your target persona, it will be hard to design products that will appeal to them — especially if you want customers to stick around after they have browsed through everything else on your website.
Your ideal customer is someone who has a specific aesthetic and lifestyle and aligns with what you are looking to offer. It isn’t easy to get your ideal buyer right from the get-go, so we highly recommend you contact our brand strategy team who can develop an in-depth customer persona for your beauty brand.
Develop a Unique Brand Voice
A brand’s voice is what separates it from all other brands in the market. It is instrumental in the content you publish across your website or social media, so it has to resonate with your ideal buyer.
A unique brand voice is created by using words that are specific to your business, such as “beauty” instead of “fashion,” or “lifestyle” instead of “glamor,” because ultimately your brand voice stems from your brand personality.
You can also start by thinking about what makes your business special. What are its values? What makes it stand out from the competition? How do you want to be perceived by your ideal customer?
Once you have a solid understanding of your brand voice, you can develop a visual representation of that voice. This can include an image or logo as well as tone and style guides for how your content will be written and presented.
Nail Down Your Cosmetic Packaging Design
Once you have a hold on who your audience is, it is time to focus on your packaging and packaging design. This is especially important if you are working in a crowded market, and given how saturated the beauty industry is, the importance of good packaging can’t be ignored.
Whether you choose a clear bottle, a glass jar, or a plastic tube, make sure that it reflects the quality of your product and matches the aesthetic of your brand. You can’t have a sustainable brand if you choose to sell your products in plastic containers.
The designs also need to express your identity and the image that you wish to create in your audience’s minds. We have multiple guides to help you with packaging and packaging design that will make the process a tad easier for you.
Create Content to Educate Your Ideal Buyer
Good content is essential for any business trying to reach new customers online, but it can be tricky if you don’t know how to make it engaging and informative at the same time.
Content that educates potential buyers about why they should buy from you instead of another beauty brand that offers similar products is a good starting point.
But in the end, content that allows your target audience to see you as an expert or authority figure in the industry should be at the center of all your content marketing efforts.
Develop Marketing Guidelines for Your Campaigns
You want to make sure that you are meeting your audience where they are — not where you think they should be. By developing marketing guidelines for your campaigns, you can ensure that the content is relevant to your audience and will help them feel like part of the campaign.
It’s important to define a set of goals for your campaign and make it as detail-oriented as possible so that everyone on your team can align their role in the company to the document. For instance, your content marketing guidelines could include:
- What type of content will be used to market your beauty brand?
- How many times will it be posted on social media?
- How long will the post be?
- Which platforms will it be shared on?
Your marketing guide should also help you determine how much money to spend on each campaign and what distribution strategies to use. Since they will be used to drive your business forward, you need to ensure you spend enough time on it to get it right.
Focus on Organic Marketing
Brands often undermine the power of organic marketing. You can’t expect your business to grow if it only relies on paid media, even though it is an integral part of brand exposure and reach.
But organic marketing is where sustainability is. It allows you to drive your business even when you don’t have the resources to reach out to your customers.
Therefore, getting found on Google using SEO best practices and connecting with the ideal buyers where they are the most active should be one of the primary goals of your overall branding if you want to or even keep selling more beauty products.
Partner with Influencers for Organic Reach
Your influencers should be people who have a sizeable following on your preferred distribution channel and a credible hold on your ideal customer base. Their morals and values should align with yours and they should be willing to share your product or brand with their followers.
You need to work with influencers who have specific expertise in your industry in order to get your message out there in a way that resonates with consumers. Your influencer should also be able to create videos or other forms of content to show off new products or features of existing ones, which could help increase sales of those items, as well.
For example, if you own a nail polish brand, you can partner with nail spas that post about nail-related topics on social media and use their influence to promote your new collection.
Having said that, influencer marketing has evolved and become trickier than before. If you are looking for more information on influencer marketing – specific to the wellness industry – to understand it better, you can read more here.
Aventive Studio is a health and wellness branding agency that helps our clients sell more products and make more sales. We can help you rebrand your cosmetics business to stand out from the crowd, command premium prices, and sell more products.
To learn more about our branding and cosmetic product packaging design services, contact our Creative Director here.