
Q: Marketing wise I’m doing all I should be to drive growth, and I’m getting the results. But is there anything out of the ordinary that I should be considering to help gain the edge on my competitors?
If you study marketing or read a stack of marketing strategy books, youโd be forgiven for thinking thereโs a pretty solid playbook. All brands must do the same things in order to generate sales and grow. The idea that marketing is always formulaic has become even more prevalent in the age of social media โ scroll through a social feed and youโll see sponsored ads from marketing agencies that tell you, this is how to build your brand! Do these five things and youโll sell more products!โฆand so on.
The problem with formulaic strategies is that they put you at risk of jumping through the marketing hoops because thatโs what you think youโre supposed to do, when in fact some of those hoops are not a good fit for your brand. An agency might tell you that Instagram is essential to market a beauty brand, or that pop-ups are hot this year โ but the truth is that some brands donโt do well on Instagram, and some consumer markets donโt attend (or like) pop-ups. So the job of a beauty marketing team isnโt just to understand how marketing works in 2022, and tick off all the things on the this-is-how-you-do-it list. You have to build a strategy from within the brand, rather than picking a strategy from the outside and forcing your brand to fit into it.
Sometimes, that means using techniques that seem counterintuitive if youโre looking at them through the lens of a set strategy. So here are a few of those counterintuitive techniques that can, in fact, be incredibly effective.