‘We’re mandating its use’: Estée Lauder turns to TikTok marketing after reach on Instagram stalls

When Estée Lauder’s reach on Instagram started to slow across EMEA, its marketers turned to TikTok.

Obviously, there’s more to it. The early success of the brand’s global TikTok account, for one. But the crux of the brand’s decision to be on TikTok came down to Instagram.

Estée Lauder’s marketers realized that no matter how big they tried to go in terms of reaching more people on the Meta-owned social network, they were stuck talking to a limited part of its desired audience, said Lubna Mohsin, the social media and content manager for Estée Lauder. Moreover, it was the same core people in the same cohort who were being reached over and again, she continued.

In short, brand marketing on Instagram across EMEA had reached a saturation point for Estée Lauder. As Mohsin explained: “We needed to reach more people.”

So she started looking for alternatives, which very quickly took her to TikTok. Mohsin and her team had already been eagerly watching how their counterparts on the global team were doing on TikTok where they had set up an account last summer. Needless to say, they had scored some early wins — enough anyway to convince the EMEA team to give marketing on TikTok a try. Its first posts ran on the global account back in the spring, and they’ve been making up for lost time ever since.

Most recently, Estée Lauder released its “My Shade, My Story” campaign, which has been running for a little over a month. In the first two weeks alone it reached 58 million views, said Mohsin. It was a litmus test of sorts for the brand’s growing confidence in marketing on TikTok. For starters, it proved the marketers were right to focus harder and longer on the casting process, said Mohsin who wanted the campaign to span a variety of communities, from CEOs to musicians, to talk open and honestly about the reasons why they use a particular shade of foundation.

“Last year, Estée Lauder’s presence on TikTok was staggered whereas this year we’re mandating its use because recruitment is our top objective on social media,” Mohsin told Digiday at an event hosted by her agency FanBytes. “It’s already an always-on part of the marketing plan.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean TikTok is an always-on part of Estée Lauder’s media plan. Its marketers aren’t spending media dollars throughout the year in the way it might do for other media channels. They are, however, marketing on the app constantly. That’s through product gifting with influencers — or when brands send free products to select influencers in the hope that they will post about them. Sometimes those posts are boosted by paid ads, other times Estée Lauder will broker deals with creators. Neither are the cornerstone of the brand’s TikTok plan. That role is reserved for organic marketing — for now.

“Nevertheless, all our key campaigns have an element of paid partnerships whether that’s through a squad of creators that we put together at a regional …read more

Source:: Digiday