L’Oréal Canada's Influencer Marketing Strategy

As the world’s largest cosmetics company, firmly established in 130 countries across five continents, L’Oréal is nothing if not a true success story in international marketing to women. It’s a brand that, since its founding in 1909, has built an unshakeable reputation, and accrued an active army of dedicated brand advocates all over the globe.

Now, in Canada, L’Oréal is finding ways to increasingly tap into the power of these most committed proponents.

The Rise of Influencer Marketing

In the days before the rise of Web 2.0, brand advocates were inherently confined to their individual localities. A champion of one brand of products could only recommend them to a friend or other personal acquaintance on a strictly (and limited) word-of-mouth basis. The brands themselves had practically no way to even identify who these individuals were, let alone harness any enthusiastic evangelism for in-house marketing purposes.

But today, in the age of social media, that’s all changed. Brand advocates now have a huge array of far-reaching platforms to choose from, upon which they can (and do) sing the praises of their favourite brands as loudly as they like.

And this phenomenon has given unprecedented rise to influencer marketing initiatives, whereby brands can finally not only identify which of their customers are being positively vocal about their products and/or services, but actually connect with these people and harness the influence they have to increase revenue streams.

(Image source: loreal.ca)

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy through which certain third-party individuals – usually a brand’s customers – take to social media to talk about a company’s products and share that company’s sponsored content through their own social media accounts.

The beauty industry has, over recent years, enjoyed much success through such influencer marketing initiatives – not least across video sharing networks like YouTube. The rise of hair and makeup video tutorials – produced by consumers – has generated much free advertising for cosmetics companies across the world, with influencer marketing partnerships being forged to the benefit of both parties.

Now, L’Oréal Canada is taking their influencer marketing program to the next level.

Partnering with dubdub

In a move that aims to accelerate its ecommerce growth, L’Oréal Canada has teamed up with Toronto-based mobile tech firm dubdub to enhance its influencer marketing program. Leveraging dubdub’s dubcandy app, which supports shoppable video content that links out to retailer websites, L’Oreal Canada is hoping to convert viewers of influencer marketing content, boost online sales, and has set up a new compensation model for influencer campaigns based on conversions.

The dubcandy application helps video creators to generate direct sales by embedding clickable and shoppable content directly into their videos. Customers who watch the videos can simply click on the links provided and be directed to the associated product page on the L’Oréal Canada website. In addition, the app – available on both Android and iOS – enables L’Oréal to accurately attribute sales to specific influencer content, and thusly measure exactly how beneficial influencer marketing is to the company’s bottom line.

dubdub CMO Hilton Barbour comments on the partnership in a press release:

"It's amazing to work with an iconic global company like L'Oréal Canada who is genuinely looking to innovate its marketing efforts. L'Oréal Canada is actively using dubcandy to optimize their influencer campaigns and that highlights how astute brands want new ways to engage their consumers, but require a simple way to attribute direct sales from authentic content creators. It's going to be fascinating to see how dubcandy can help them do both."

The Beauty Squad

L’Oréal’s influencer marketing strategies have always been powerful and innovative. Last year, for instance, L’Oréal Paris partnered with five of the UK’s most influential YouTube beauty vloggers, whom together have a combined audience of around 5.5 million viewers. These five vloggers – known as the Beauty Squad – joined forces with Kristina Bazaan (the brand’s global digital influencer) to help cement L’Oreal Paris’s position as the ‘go to’ digital beauty brand.

The Beauty Squad were selected for their already high reputation among followers in terms of knowledge and expertise, and it was decided that using influencers as opposed to celebrities would build greater trust amongst consumers.

With such measures already in place, as the company begins to measure the impact that influencers have through applications such as dubcandy, it is likely that the company will begin to expand its shoppable video content initiative to other websites if the L’Oréal Canada and dubdub partnership proves to be a success.

The last word goes to Stéphane Bérubé. Vice-President and CMO, L'Oréal Canada:

“We are always looking for ways to innovate and be 'digital first'. Ecommerce acceleration is part of our growth strategy in Canada and as a longtime advocate and supporter of influencer marketing, we feel that partnering with influencers through innovative e-commerce initiatives is the new way to operate.

dubcandy is helping us convert content into ecommerce sales. This will definitely change the way we produce in-house video assets and the way we work with influencers in the future. dubcandy is helping us elevate our influencers' partnerships and launch a new compensation model that will be directly linked to the influencer's branded content reach and engagement."

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