A Luxury Beauty Brand’s Social Media Strategy Begins Failing

Through social media and word-of-mouth marketing, Beauty Bio Sciences hopes to spark interest and drive consumer sales of its new product, Lash Allure MD, by staging a contest with a $100,000 cash.About The ContestThe company used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Online Video Contest Sites to launch the contest. Entrants must write a story or post a video describing what they would do with the prize money.The most compelling story, to be determined by public vote, will be announced by January 1, 2010. Lash Allure MD encourages contestants to post before and after photos of their lashes, but no purchase is required in order to win.About The Product

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Lash Allure MD is said to be an eco-friendly, partially organic product that grows longer, darker and thicker lashes for most people within two weeks.A Social Beauty Campaign Going SouthSo how’s the campaign going? Not so well. A few beauty bloggers have picked up the contest and written about it on their blogs. Launched almost a month ago, the brand has 38 followers on Twitter, 70 fans on Facebook, a YouTube channel that has no videos and a website that offers no community. The website traffic appears stagnant after 9/20/09 with an estimated 52 views per day beforehand.For such a lucrative prize, $100,000 is nothing to sneeze at, so why is there so little engagement and virtually no awareness? Hopefully this campaign will change course. Otherwise, it would have been better to spend the money on traditional advertising, as it would have had a better ROI.Turning The Beauty Boat AroundFirst-year sales of Lash Allure MD are projected at $10 million. How can this campaign be turned around?Blogger Outreach: Blogger outreach is key in this campaign. The brand wants beauty, fashion and even lifestyle blogs with a beauty vertical writing about the product and the very generous contest. But the brand isn’t going to get all the coverage it wants or needs for free.Product Giveaways & Paid Partnerships: Lash Allure MD can give the product away on a few select blogs, but Lash Allure MD is going to have to invest in quality promotion. By investing in blogs that lead lifestyle and beauty, awareness will spread like wildfire as the brand is leveraging the credibility of established online leaders. Online websites that would be ideal to lead this would be MyItThings, The Coveted, Second City Style, LadyLux, Refinery 29, Total Beauty and Meg’s Makeup. A clever collaboration with a great PR pro would also obtain online placements on Style.com, Glamour.com and Allure.com to garner interest from other web audiences.Community Monitoring: While the contest is running, the brand needs to assign a community manager to monitor and respond to comments, questions and videos posted on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. The community manager should also be monitoring blogs and websites that write about the contest, leaving comments on every single post. These posts could also be linked to on the site’s press coverage page, if it wanted to be very social. Tracking tweets, Facebook engagements and online write-ups will help establish the campaign’s effectiveness and reach.Capitalize positive qualities and price points: The green and holistic attributes are selling points of this product and should be promoted in reviews and to contest entrants. As most of us know, green is an major trend in every industry now. The product’s price point, $49.50, is also ideal against its competition; Latisse is $89.50, LiLash is $139.95 and Revitalash is $150.00 (these are the brands with the highest online awareness).A Word of Advice: Please don’t abandon the community that’s been developed through the campaign. Continue to interact with the audiences the brand has built, they’re an ongoing source of information and revenue.Our Video Nomination: Why isn’t this on the Allure MD website? It’s the best one!

Lash Allure MD is launching this month at 300 units of Dillard’s Department Stores and Nordstrom and through its Web site. Beauty Bio Sciences also sells its Organicare line of USDA-certified organic skin treatments through the same retailers (WWD).