Dash Hudson, BareMinerals on Why E-commerce’s Future Lies in Social Media

12/20/2020 Beauty & Balance

This has been a big year for e-commerce, and one in which social media is playing an ever-larger role in online sales.

“During the coronavirus times, social [media] was the way that we were connecting with our consumers with stores closed, and it’s really been so important for us,” said Lauren Jury, director of global content and social media strategy at BareMinerals. “We really made sure to integrate the connection to e-commerce with Likeshop, which is through Dash Hudson. And we’ve also been able to see that shift that people are shopping in-app, and they are wanting to see that connection of e-commerce to our posts,” she said.

At WWD Beauty Inc’s Virtual Summit, Michelle Belcic, vice president of strategy at Dash Hudson, interviewed Jury about the increasing overlap between social media and product sales. Keeping pace with changing shopping habits did take a few pivots, Jury said, and just as consumer behavior changed in 2020, so did BareMinerals’ social strategy.

“We knew everyone was spending more time at home, so we were doing much more engaging content, making sure to focus on skin care, and all the products that consumers were using in quarantine,” she said. “We also had to pivot our video strategy to that, too, because some people were still using makeup on video, and we had to develop Zoom content.” Jury later added that skin-care content has driven the most traffic to BareMinerals’ web site.

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“This year, there was a decline for some industries, and skin care was really one of the categories that we saw growth across the board with engagement and effectiveness,” Belcic said of Dash Hudson’s annual report. “The growth rate was up 16 percent across the top 100 skin-care brands on Instagram”

Instagram has been the top priority for the brand this year, Jury said, following the advent of IGTV and Instagram Reels. The brand also launched its TikTok account in September, she added.

When Belcic pointed out that user-generated content was a key piece of the brand’s social media success, Jury said BareMinerals’ network of microinfluencers, dubbed the Bare Beauties, has been integral to growing the brand.

“So we use the Relationship IQ [feature] on Dash Hudson. We really lean into this tool to help us decide on different partnerships we’re looking into,” Jury said. “A lot of times, we want to understand how our ambassadors are driving growth on Instagram specifically. And the tool generates the numbers behind who is driving growth and strong engagement.”

BareMinerals is also launching Instagram Checkout in 2021, but has been using Dash Hudson’s Likeshop feature in the interim. “We are starting to form a story strategy for Checkout because we understand the types of content that are driving those clicks and driving sales,” Jury said. “So as we’re prepping to launch, we’ve been able to get a lot of those insights to get ready for 2021.”