Social media influencers are pivotal to the success of any social media campaign, and beauty brands like Olay have been quick to recognize this.
Sometime in August 2018, the beauty brand launched a campaign on social media tagged #Faceanything. The goal of the campaign was simple: to encourage women to embrace their natural beauty without losing a sense of self. The message to women was: ladies, be “unapologetically” yourselves.
The campaign, which ran for 28 days, had 8% engagement on Instagram. That’s to say 8 in every 100 persons that saw the post on Instagram engaged with it. Not only that, the brand was able to amass a large following after the campaign, thanks to its witty use of influencers.
As a new brand looking to cut through the noise on social media and reach your audience, you can’t go wrong with influencer marketing. Olay is a testament to that. In this post, you will get to understand how they pulled the stunt off.
You don’t have to be in the beauty industry to see success with influencer marketing. It works in the beauty industry just as it would in any other industry. Only follow the principles!
The #Faceanything Campaign
To get the #faceanything campaign off the ground, the beauty brand teamed up with 9 women of repute, drawn from different backgrounds. They were dubbed the “Fearless 9”. Among them was a cancer survivor, an Olympian, a comedian, to name but a few. Each of these women had a unique background story to tell.
Curious to know the identity of the women? Here are their names:
- Denise Bidot
- Elyse Fox
- Mama Cax
- Lily Singh
- Jillian Mercado
- Kay Adams
- Angela Dimayuga
- Piera Gelardi
- Aly Raisman
The campaign’s strategy was pretty straightforward: to get the women to stay off makeup for the 28 days period. In place of makeup, the women used Olay’s skincare products and made posts about it each day. Obviously, they sought to convince consumers looking to stay naturally beautiful that Olay’s products were all they needed. That meant more loyalty from fans and, ultimately, more sales. Brilliant!
At the flag-off of the campaign, each of the 9 fearless women announced their new 28-day journey to their followers.
Lily Singh, for instance, made it known to her followers that she hoped to walk the runway without makeup after the 28 days. Mama Cax, on the other hand, started off by thanking Olay for the opportunity to the part of the campaign. She went on the make several posts, using the #faceanything hashtags in her posts.
The frequency of posting varied among the influencers. While some posted to their feed on average once a day, some posted twice to thrice on the average. In addition to posting to their feeds, they also shared promoted posts from Olay, all in a bid to increase engagement.
In addition to the fearless 9, respected figures in the beauty industry were engaged to talk about the campaign. A move which proved highly successful.
Results of the Campaign
In the end, the campaign garnered over 1.4 million likes, about 12,000 comments, and a thousand hashtag usage. These are quite impressive results, going by the competitive nature of the beauty industry.
To wrap up the campaign, a makeup-free runway event was put together, featuring the fearless women who had participated in the challenge. It was exhilarating, to say the least.
Olay’s following on social media went on to increase in the months that followed the end of the #faceanything campaign.
Conclusion
As a brand looking to amass a large, engaged following on social media, you can’t afford to turn a blind eye to social media influencers. If you help with it, you can reach out to us at Web Content Development.
