Cosmetics Applied What It Learned on TikTok to Its Campaign on Triller. e.l.f Cosmetics was one of the first well-known marketers to embrace TikTok. Its 2019 #EyesLipsFace challenge, featuring a hip-hop song written expressly for the campaign, inspired users to submit 5 million videos that were viewed a combined 6 billion times.

Cosmetics was what inspired the brand to join the platform. “We were seeing, without any effort or work from the brand side, that there was a pretty sizable organic presence that had already been built on TikTok,” said Gayitri Budhraja, vice president of brand at e.l.f. “There were over 3 million posts against the hashtag #elfcosmetics that we had absolutely nothing to do with.

Cosmetics: The beauty brand recently partnered with gamer Loserfruit, also known as Lufu, for a series of makeup tutorials on Twitch.

Augmented reality (AR) is becoming more widely available on social platforms. It’s mainly been a tool for entertainment and brand awareness, but the pandemic is pushing marketers to explore new use cases.

“Everyone's a creator, and often you're getting up, not just off your couch but out of your house, out of your environment, and you're creating,” said Kelly Solomon, senior vice president of consumer marketing at MAC Cosmetics, during a panel at Advertising Week.

Junior Pence, CMO and creative director of Peace Out Skincare speaks with eMarketer vice president of business development Marissa Coslov about the brand’s marketing efforts during the coronavirus pandemic, including the surprise success of a viral TikTok video.

Fashion and beauty are two other verticals that are continuing their strong support of influencer marketing. A December 2018 study of 133 fashion and beauty brand executives worldwide by Glossy (a media property owned by Digiday and focused on the business of fashion and beauty) found that just 12% of respondents were not using influencers. A fourth vertical experiencing an uptick is entertainment.

Stories are intensely popular in verticals such as cosmetics and beauty care that rely on social media. Among the haircare and hair color brands tracked by Gartner L2’s Digital IQ Index, 86% used Instagram Stories as of August 2018. Retailers have also embraced stories.

With a massive, engaged daily audience and a lean-back environment, social is ideal for building brand awareness. Research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA) put brand awareness and brand building as the most common use of social media for 88.2% of respondents, followed by introducing new products and services at 64.7%.

Since its launch in 2017, Peace Out Skincare—known for its Acne Dot patches—has been rapidly expanding its business through an exclusive partnership with Sephora, as well as its own direct-to-consumer (D2C) business.

Earlier this month, a widely publicized feud broke out between two well-known beauty influencers, Tati Westbrook and her protege James Charles. Bypassing the rather complex details, the debacle ensued after Charles posted an Instagram ad for SugarBearHair vitamins, a direct competitor of Westbrook's Halo Beauty vitamins.

The beauty brand is focusing on organic and paid content

Tina Craig launched U Beauty after building a large following for her posts related to luxury handbags and beauty. “Checkout allows us to grow U Beauty with accurate consumer buying behavior based on content,” she said. “This enables me to adjust content accordingly with an immediacy not offered by retailers. Plus, there’s the ease of purchase without leaving Instagram.”.

Cosmetics. Cosmetics brand e.l.f. launched a paid campaign in October targeting TikTok’s Gen Z user base. Using the popular “Hashtag Challenge” ad unit, the brand recently launched its #eyeslipsface campaign, encouraging TikTok users to create videos showing off their makeup using an original song created for the activation. e.l.f.

“Fraud is a concern of ours,” said Tota Haba, senior vice president of global digital at Benefit Cosmetics. “But overall, I’d say it does not outweigh the effectiveness of the [influencer] marketing tactic in general.".