Beauty Creators Can’t Resist a Good Makeup Challenge
How Hello Gloss is bootstrapping explosive organic growth of its influencer community
Hello Gloss is a new startup in the online beauty space which launched only a month ago. Our business model requires that we engage with beauty influencers all over the world — thousands and thousands of them! In this article I’ll dive into our creative solution for finding and working with these essential creators at scale using mostly organic (free) techniques.
This article was written in a way that not only describes what we did, and why, but so it can also serve as a blueprint of our thought process for anyone needing to explore solutions for similar problems.
Before getting right into our ultimate solution, I think it’s important to first touch on some of the concepts and learnings that helped shape our approach. With this simple background, you’ll quickly see why whenever I start to noodle (deep thinking) on a new marketing problem, I immediately gravitate toward things I can do for free at massive scale, using automation whenever possible.
These ideas don’t always come quickly, but when they do come, everything just starts to flow, and all the pieces of the puzzle just magically fit together as if it were naturally meant to be. And no doubt, free is always better — it just sometimes takes a little unconventional thinking and a bit of software to put it all together in a form that perfectly fits the situation.
Understanding our full business model and how it evolved isn’t itself so important to this article, but if you’re interested, we’ve got quite an interesting backstory which I chronicled previously in Our Startup was Cooked Up Over Thanksgiving Dinner.
In brief, we’re needing to amass a diverse global army of nano and micro influencers to work with beauty brands on reimagined product launch campaigns.
More specifically, we’re making engaging and scalable launch campaigns for beauty products as easy as buying Facebook pay-per-click ads — something everyone in our industry already knows how to do.
Although the full vision for Hello Gloss actually goes way beyond what I’ve just described, this is where we’re starting. We’ll surely have more to say about all the rest soon enough.
Why Not Just Buy Pay-Per-Click Ads?
I hate paying for online ads! Seriously, don’t we all. We all know that feeling of what it’s like to wake up each day and check to see how much Facebook or Google has charged our credit card before we’ve even had our morning coffee. We next dash over to our traffic and transaction analytics and quickly compute how much each visitor or sale cost us — and it’s always way too much!
And even if I didn’t hate buying ads, I still can’t afford them in any meaningful volume because we’re bootstrapping our company out of our own pockets. We don’t have the luxury of venture capital to spend on lavish pay-per-click campaigns to grow our company with deficit spending — nor would it likely be sensible for our goals.
We needed to think more strategically, but not just to save money. We need to recruit motivated creators en mass using a process which doesn’t require us to spend lots of time figuring out who is well suited for our platform. In short, we needed a model that tends to be self filtering by nature — and we found it! It was perfect. And I’ll get into it below, right after I finish the foundation.
Organic Marketing Rocks!
I’ve been a big fan of organic marketing for as long as I can remember. This is the term commonly used to describe the origin of website traffic or sales which comes our way mostly for free. Notable examples are simple word of mouth, and all that traffic Google sends over when our websites show up high in the search results. Importantly, it’s not about pay-per-click ads.
Closely related to all of this is search engine optimization (SEO). This is the term used to describe techniques for crafting website pages to grab Google’s attention and get highly ranked for searches related to your business. I won’t be delving into SEO here, but it’s important to know that I’ve spent a lot of time in this world too, and many of my learnings directly contributed to how we thought to go about building our community of beauty creators for Hello Gloss.
I’ve Received Over Ten Million Dollars in Free Traffic from Google
That’s right. Over the past decade of running tiny startups, I’ve crafted website traffic strategies that have yielded over ten million dollars in free organic traffic from Google. This is why I simply can’t bring my self to buy pay-per-click ads if I don’t have to. I think my brain is permanently wired to avoid them at all cost.
Moreover, when you pay for clicks and banner views, those are one off transactions. That money is gone forever, irrespective of if you made a sale. Instead, I prefer to focus my energy and resources on evergreen techniques which live on for months, and even years, deep inside Google’s mystical algorithms for getting ranked on page one.
My point in bringing up evergreen concepts that are organic by nature is that if you spend the time and truly think through what you’re trying to accomplish, there’s often a way to get there for a lot less money that has the potential to scale up big. And for an added bonus, if an organic campaign turns out to be a runaway success, you don’t have to pay extra for the increased traffic. This is in stark contrast to PPC where you pay for every click.
Hopefully this bit of background will help you understand why we immediately put our thinking caps on when it came time to pull together an influencer recruitment strategy rather than whip up a few display ads and give Facebook our credit card.
Finally, although SEO isn’t directly related to our hunt for beauty influencers, if you’re interested in learning more about my profoundly successful strategies, I highly recommend reading my article titled The Secret to My Long Tail SEO Success. If anything, it shows how a bit of creative thinking can be remarkably effective at bringing in boatloads of free traffic.
Challenging Beauty
As already mentioned, our challenge was to find an organic, and hopefully evergreen, way to recruit thousands of diverse beauty creators across the world — and quickly. Moreover, we’re specifically looking for nano and micro influencers because they’re hungry for opportunities, approachable, and their consumer engagement statistics for social media posts are meaningfully higher than the “big names” who demand $10,000 or more per post.
Virality and Social Fan Out is Essential
The next piece of our recruitment puzzle was that our solution needed to leverage social fan out and have the potential to go viral — at least within our target community. This is how we achieve scale without any extra cost.
Not Just Evergreen, But Repeatable
I’ve already noted my thoughts on evergreen marketing campaigns, but there’s something that’s even better than that, and that’s a campaign concept that’s infinitely repeatable over time with just a few tweaks.
There’s no doubt I’m a big fan of less is more and rinse and repeat. It takes a lot of energy (and possibly software) to gear up creative campaigns, and when you find a successful model, it’s always sweet when you can simply change out a few words and graphics and run it over and over again. The old ones live on forever in Google and social searches as long tail click food, and the new ones target crowds which you missed on earlier rounds.
In marketing, long tail is a term frequently used to refer to products (or web pages) which don’t individually yield a lot of results, but when there’s enough of them out there, their contribution to the bottom line is quite substantial.
Fish with a Net, Not a Pole
While less is more is a great concept most of the time, there are other times when more is definitely more. One of the big lessons I learned early on in my SEO journey was that something that’s way better than having your page come up number one in Google is having thousands of your pages come up number one, or at least on the first page, across a multitude of search terms.
Here again, it takes some thinking and likely some software automation to pull this off, but I’ve done exactly this many times — and it’s a game changer.
I call this fishing with a net. And frankly, it’s the only way to achieve scale. The key is to get many thousands of pages or posts spread across the Internet which are all directing traffic back to your website. And this is most easily achieved when the message is being crafted and spread by others; not because they’re being paid, but simply because they’re keen to join the conversation and post something interesting. But to be clear, this cannot be SPAM!
Strive for Reengagement Loops
By now it must surely seem as though my rules for crafting an effective organic recruitment campaign are ridiculously constrained, and yet I’ve still got more requirements. When it comes to website traffic, I’m greedy. Once I’ve spent all this time and energy to get someone to click, I want more clicks. I want them engaged, over and over again — even daily if possible. Moreover, I want them excited to keep coming back regularly.
We’re all familiar with Instagram and Facebook posts. You get tagged in a photo and you immediately get a notification. You can’t wait to see the post. You click. Then you comment back or maybe just give a like, which now sends a notification back to the poster. And this pattern just keeps repeating.
These kinds of feedback and re-engagement loops are a beautiful thing when they can be crafted to fit your campaign. It’s a perfect way to keep in someone’s head even after they’ve put down their phone, because inevitably, they’ll soon get a notification and you’ve once again captured their attention.
Of course, there’s nothing new to this concept. This is exactly how all the big social platforms work, and users are all familiar with this engagement pattern. What’s new, when it fits, is being able to include this pattern in an organic marketing or outreach campaign. This is what turns your campaign into a talk about — where people tell their friends.
Automate for Scale
I try to think big from the start. If it’s worth doing, then I want to make sure I can do it over and over again — thousands of times, or even millions if necessary. This is where software automation becomes critical.
Fortunately, given the big number of no-code and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions out there these days, it’s typically not very difficult to cobble something together. Crucially, it’s important to design strategies which won’t suddenly bottleneck or break down altogether if there’s far more traction than expected in the middle of the night. Keep the human touch to a minimum.
Our Solution: Makeup Challenges!
Yes, makeup challenges. That was what we finally homed in on that addressed all of the above requirements — every one of them! It’s in the title, so this didn’t come as a total surprise. But given the lead up to this point, it probably was a surprise that makeup challenges would actually satisfy all of the foundational rules that guided our thinking. And they’re FUN!
Admittedly, this idea didn’t come to us right off. But once we got it into our heads and kept noodling over it, the more we became convinced it was nothing short of absolutely perfect for what we were trying to accomplish.
Makeup challenges are:
- Organic because participants post on their own at no cost to us
- Evergreen because posts live on forever with our tags and attribution
- Repeatable with new themes, limited only by our imagination
- Scalable without limit outside of our own platform at no extra cost
- Re-engaging by nature as entries are liked and commented on
- Viral by way of self promotion by participants and by social feeds
- Fished by casting a wide net all over the Internet; not a single pole
- Automatable using mostly no-code solutions
But wait, there’s more. Once we locked into this concept and started going down the rabbit hole, the benefits kept piling on. For example, we could partner up with beauty brands and get them to contribute prizes and allow us to use their names. And once they’re on board at that level, which is not really a big ask, it opens up the door to a host of other opportunities.
Of course, I’m not proposing that makeup challenges could work for everybody. We’re in the beauty business. It’s a natural fit for our space.
Everything I’ve discussed up through here has been fairly generic in nature and could apply to almost any business looking to grow its user base using organic techniques. It’s a blueprint. Nothing more. And for us, makeup challenges were the sensible way to go for this very specific task.
I’ll next dive into exactly how we leveraged the added benefits of this concept for our specific model.
But First, a Proof of Concept
With a solid idea in our heads, it was time to craft up a plan around it that we could execute quickly on a shoestring budget. And for context, I should note that at this point in time, our Hello Gloss Creators website had only been live for about a week. We used a simple email blast to get our first thousand creators signed up — membership is free.
Importantly, the members gained during our first week provided a forum for us to test out some ideas and ask for feedback. It was a hectic and crazy time, and we did everything manually at first, but what we learned was priceless.
Makeup Challenges are Huge
We’re looking for motivated beauty creators. Makeup challenges are incredibly popular with this crowd, but they’re mostly unorganized and usually coalesced simply through eclectic use of hash tags. Let’s see if we can corral this energy. And if we see enough traction, who knows, maybe we could even make a play to own this space — as it seems unclaimed at the moment.
Now that we had some initial members signed up through a quick email campaign, we could post a challenge to the group and watch what happened.
Fall from Grace Challenge
It was already mid-September. We knew we needed to save Halloween for the big launch if everything worked out. A quick poll of our members indicated they wanted a Fall theme.
Never to be boring, we announced the Fall challenge theme would be creatively named Fall from Grace and entries should simply be posted within our community — so we had full visibility and analytics on the interactions.
Submissions started pouring in. Tons of them. It was a smash hit.
But there some something else we quickly noticed. All the participants were liking, commenting and following each other.
They were making friends and DM’ing each other. Our fledgling community experiment was actually a real community in every sense. They didn’t treat each other as competitors. The were helping each other out.
But that’s not to say there wasn’t some friendly competition going on. And of course, some of the more industrious members even started cross-promoting their submissions in the other forum topics — it was wonderful.
We next started manually posting the submissions to our @helloglosscreators Instagram account, and this is when the real competition began. Instagram is home turf for this crowd, and the instant they received the notification that they were mentioned in a post, they immediately started liking each others’ photos all over again and leaving lots of incredibly sweet comments.
Some members politely complained we weren’t reposting their submissions fast enough to Instagram so they could starting working their crowd.
Members then started making stories and asking their friends and followers to vote for them by coming to our page and liking their photos — and they did! And sure enough, some of our members got super ambitious in their quest to get out the vote and even started making new stories every day and really worked their followers.
Bottom line — they were all into it in a big way; even the members who didn’t submit an entry. And that was nothing short of awesome.
What did we learn?
Not surprisingly, we quickly learned that if we did this on any larger scale we couldn’t possibly keep reposting and tallying up the like counts manually.
Of course, the truly big take away was that this concept had legs. It was more than just a contest with a modest prize. It was a community builder. The members were all polite, competitive, and not the least bit shy about hitting up their social followers and going after votes.
Most importantly, we learned it was exactly what we needed it to be. Now, with a reasonable degree of confidence, we could take these learnings and level up — for Halloween! The timing would be tight, but we knew in our hearts a big Halloween launch couldn’t be passed up. We were going for it.
Crucially, it was now already early October and we needed to design our automations and launch a marketing campaign in no more than a week, or we’d risk being too late in the month.
And naturally, the big launch would require opening up the challenge to the outside world on Instagram and TikTok in the traditional sense; but with one twist, to be eligible for prizes, participants would need to drop by our community website and paste in the links to their posts — hopefully that wouldn’t be too much friction, because we wanted to grab their emails and get them into a drip campaign.
Leveling Up for Halloween
There is no doubt that Halloween is one of the biggest draws of the year for beauty creators. We were determined to make the most of it by announcing a global makeup challenge on Instagram and TikTok that included some serious prizes. The hope was that we’d be able to line up some sponsors to cover the prizes — and we did!
$25,000 When I’m Bad, I’m Better Makeup Challenge
We quickly came up with a fitting theme for our challenge and created a TikTok post with an original sound track to kick things off. This way our logo would show up all over the place once we were trending — gotta think big!
Although the challenge would be scored by “likes” across all participants’ entries, we gave out bonus points for posts using our song to motivate people to use it, just in case our trend needed a little jumpstart.
Automated Scoring
In anticipation of getting lots of contest submissions, we automated everything. Participants would only need to paste a link to their posts into a simple form and the automation took over from there.
We used email addresses to correlate multiple entries from the same person so we could calculate combined scores using software which monitored the like counts on Instagram and TikTok.
Our software would also automatically repost the better submissions to our own @helloglosscreators Instagram account.
Intrinsic Fan-Out and ReEngagement Loops
I previously discussed the importance of designing campaigns which just naturally encourage fan-out and reengagement loops. Our Halloween challenge has these covered from a variety of angles. Participants had on average 7,500 followers each, so our for-free reach was quite substantial as they all worked the crowd for votes.
And because we now had everything automated, we were able to create a leaderboard and send regular emails to participants to keep them engaged. This also had the side benefit of prompting regular participation in our community.
Monster Sponsorships — Literally!
As we scrambled to pull this all together with little time and money, we were connected with Gold Media Agency, a brand marketing company with an impressive list of clients. This connection changed everything.
Kate Wargo, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Gold Media Agency, had just seen a press release about us starting to work with brands, and she knew she had a pocket full of brands that would be a great fit. But there’s one brand in particular that was just too perfect — Monster Energy.
Monster has a line of products which it specifically markets globally to women in the 18–34 age range — exactly our crowd. But way beyond the obvious word play on the Halloween theme was our collective reach.
Kate and the Gold Media Agency team were quick to note that it typically takes several weeks to get major brands to sign off on creative campaigns; time we didn’t have. Undeterred, Kate said, “Once Monster sees how your reach extends out from a few thousand influencers to potentially millions of consumers, I bet we can fast track something for Halloween. It’s just too natural to pass up.” And she was right! Their team locked down a sponsorship with the brand in just three days.
We finally had a sponsor — our first. But there was something special about this, because it proved we had a story that would truly resonate with decision makers. It was all about our reach and how engaged our creators are with their loyal followers.
Reach is Critical, but so is Engagement
No doubt, logistics aside, it’s often better to work with 200 influencers with 5,000 followers each rather than a single influencer with a million followers; because it’s all about increased engagement. Online marketers are keenly aware that nano and micro influencers have highly engaged crowds, but they are difficult to work with at any scale that moves the needle. And this is where our company, Hello Gloss, comes in.
We’re solving that logistics problem; initially, with our makeup challenges for our own internal needs, but longer term, through our scalable product launch platform for beauty products. Our mission is to make it just as easy to work with 1,000 influencers as it is to work with just one. Our platform will make this effortless, while also providing a host of aggregated analytics to track results similarly to what marketers expect for their pay-per-click campaigns.
SocialBook Signs On
Still high on the news of the Monster partnership, we soon got a call from Heidi Yu, CEO of SocialBook. Her company is well known for connecting brands with influencers and helping to organize creative campaigns. They’ve also got a wealth of tools designed to streamline these kinds of relationships at scale.
Once again, the synergy was obvious and Heidi quickly agreed to sponsor thousands of dollars in prizes.
We were over the top. In the course of just a few days, our tiny bevy of prizes grew to over $25,000. We now had exactly what we needed to make a big announcement that would surely have some traction.
Getting the Word Out
It’s now mid-October and it’s time to launch our campaign before losing any more days — we’re already late as it is.
We started by telling our now 3,500 community members about the contest. We were already engaged with this group and we knew they would be quick to submit entries and generate the creative content we needed to have in place for the next wave of our launch.
We followed quickly with a larger email blast, and paid a few influencers to make TikTok videos using our original sound. We also made press announcements and bought some highly targeted pay-per-click ads.
Yes, here, the PPC ads made lots of sense given our short timeline. Moreover, it was important to jumpstart the creator fan-out using every tool at our disposal.
Final Thoughts
As I write this, it’s still early in the campaign and the final results are not yet known. What’s clear, however, is that we started with a common problem faced by most young companies, and we solved it quite inexpensively by noodling through our options and coming up with a creative approach which touched on all the key factors I outlined up top.
Best of all, we now have a solid formula we can execute over and over again with very little cost or effort. And it’s all automated with some clever software that only took about a week to develop — a fun distraction from working on our core product which is still a few months away from launch.
I’ll update this article once the final results are in. In the meanwhile, I hope some of what I’ve shared will inspire your own innovative solutions for bootstrapping growth on a limited budget.
