Benchmarking your beauty marketing is vital for all activities, whether you’re tracking performance of a co-op ad or comparing revenue. So, when it comes to measuring the impact of editorial and media presence, it’s as crucial as ever to understand how your brand stacks up against the rest of the market.
One of the key ways brands measure commercial success is by looking at market share. This represents the percentage of the beauty industry’s total sales that a brand has earned. While this metric isn’t typically deployed for media measurement, try looking at brands that have gained or lost market share, as it can help you identify competitors to benchmark against.
Once you know which competitors to analyse based on their market share in your category, you can layer this with benchmarking data to see how peaks and troughs correlate with media activity. Here, we break down four reasons why that benchmarking is so important, and what it tells you about the performance of your key competitors.
Benchmarking editorial performance allows you to unveil the true impact of media presence. Rather than looking at whether your brand achieved more mentions than the previous month or year, looking at its ranking in a category can be more valuable. An increase in the amount of coverage achieved is always a good thing. However, if your nearest competitor achieved double that, there is more work to be done.
As well as figuring out what level of presence your competitors have managed to gain, benchmarking puts you on the path to pinpointing how they achieved that all-important coverage. Analyse the activity of brands with high presence to see if you can replicate their success. It might be that they’ve signed up a celebrity ambassador, or launched a new product that proved press-worthy.
For example, Charlotte Tilbury is generating buzz for the upcoming Super Radiance Resurfacing Facial by sending it alongside the full CT skincare collection to key influencers. The bumper-sized mail-out has appeared in a host of beauty editors’ Stories, and the subsequent waiting list only serves to elevate the excitement.
Meanwhile, Huda Beauty’s Faux Filter Foundation relaunch is gaining praise in the press for the brand’s crowdsourcing process, which was promoted on Instagram. The hero base was reformulated using customer feedback on social media. This feedback loop plays a starring role in the new-and-improved foundation’s marketing story.
You’ve covered the ‘what' and the ‘how’, but the ‘where’ is a vital benchmark, too. No two media outlets are the same, and certain coverage will offer you greater results. Compare a key competitor’s pool of influencers or press coverage with your own, then look at which collaborations resonated with the target audience. While you may not want to work with the same influencers on a paid level, this insight may guide you to a new pool of talent that you wouldn’t have previously considered.
It isn’t just important to look at benchmarking in terms of number of mentions and earned media value. You should also analyse percentage growth over certain periods of time. Rapid growth is an indicator of an up-and-coming brand that may be a ‘threat’. And, in this ever-evolving industry, it’s always a good idea to have an eye on new entrants.
Once you spot these rising stars, look again at the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘where’ to reveal what they might be doing to achieve their sudden success. This helps you learn from and react to their activity. It also highlights innovations that you may want to introduce within your own portfolio or strategy.
Up next: discover how you can link ROI to beauty influencer campaigns, plus read up on the five ways to measure authenticity of beauty influencers.