Objective
Verifeed was asked by the global beauty trade show Cosmoprof to understand how influential individual female consumers are in influencing the beauty purchases of other women – across skincare, hair, nails and self-tanning products.
Challenge
Millions of women are sharing beauty secrets, tips and challenges every day across all social media channels, and countless new and existing brands and products are competing for their limited attention.
The challenge was to find “signal” in all that social noise, and understand what makes some pins, posts and Tweets spread virally – and why.
Approach
Verifeed began by creating multiple searches across many months of historical social conversations – focused on understanding how women talk about beauty on social media, what products and companies were resonating virally and influencing consumer purchases, and who was influencing purchasing decisions.
Result
What we found was astonishing.
Verifeed identified 10 women, all of them everyday consumers, whose Tweets influenced more than 9 million others straight to an Amazon shopping cart for the collagen pill produced by Reservage.
Analyzing those interactions demonstrated exactly how brands and businesses should communicate with consumers and customers:
- Thank people, recognize them, make them feel special.
- Provide helpful content and personalize how you deliver it.
- Ask them “open-ended” questions to learn more about them and establish something you have in common.
- Speak authentically, like a real human being. People buy from humans not faceless businesses.
- Don’t be salesy: On social the hard sell is “spam”.
- Once you have a rapport, ask them to share your content with friends – and thank and reward them for doing it.
- Keep making them feel special, and give, give, give, give before you even get to asking them to do something for you.
What Verifeed discovered in its work for Cosmoprof was
the beginnings of its Return on AuthenticityTM or ROATM Score.
Namely, that brands and businesses that take time to understand who they are talking to on a personal level, establish an authentic human connection with those individuals, demonstrably seek to serve and create value for their customers in a responsive helpful way, and “walk their talk” in alignment with their mission … outperform those that do not do these things on social. In fact, the measurable return on authenticity could be evidenced by the few brands that focused on making individual consumers feel special – because it was those individuals who “went to work” for the brand, driving viral referral or “word of mouth” traffic and conversions.