Sephora Teams with Tik Tok to Promote Small Brands
Cover Art by Eman Azrak
Sephora is teaming up with TikTok to promote small, up-and-coming beauty brands. The Sephora x TikTok Incubator Program will pair TikTok creators with beauty brands from Sephora’s Accelerate program, a diversity, equity, and inclusion mentorship group. The program aims to give these brands the tools necessary in order to improve their social media marketing strategy and provides six months of mentorship, merchandising support, as well as investor connections. The foray into TikTok speaks to the application’s power to increase exposure and foster brand awareness.
Sephora is not the first company to formally partner with TikTok, as the platform has worked with large beauty companies including Maybelline, PerfumeBoss, and JustMyLook. TikTokShop, a subsidiary of the platform, aims to be the apex where “entertainment meets e-commerce” with a diverse arsenal of tools available for brand promotion. For example, in-feed ads, which appear in a user’s “ForYou” feed, allow a wide variety of audiences to see sponsored content even if they are not active followers. Consequently, businesses can see the success metrics for each ad including clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and engagements right within the app.
As digital marketing becomes the most prominent means of advertising, partnering with a powerful platform such as TikTok appears to be essential for success due to its exposure power. According to TikTokShop, TikTok’s e-commerce toolkit, many beauty brands have seen impressive growth in followers and engagement from using the app. Benefit Cosmetics, a makeup company based in San Francisco, hosted a series of LIVE video streams and short videos highlighting their launch on TikTokShop. Within three days they received 62.5k audience views, 280k total LIVE likes, and 2.5k new followers. Similarly, Grail, a digital talent agency that connects brands with digital content creators, has reported an increase of $800k in monthly revenue since utilizing TikTok as a marketing channel. These numbers speak to the impressive magnitude with which TikTok aids brands in growth and exposure.
What separates TikTok from competitors is the engagement levels. While Google and Facebook ads used to reign supreme, TikTok has taken over with over 850 million users opening the app multiple times a day. According to data from Omnicore agency, the average TikTok user spends over an hour a day browsing and scrolling. Additionally, the nature of the “For You Page” has the power to push out content to viewers who may not be familiar with or “follow” a particular company already.
Head of US Agency Partnerships at TikTok, Soniya Monga reveals, “The future of brand storytelling lies in the hands of multicultural creators, and by championing diverse creators, brands can unlock their full potential on TikTok”. Brands have the opportunity to learn about what consumers want to see, especially in the multicultural market. As more consumers hope to see diverse faces representing their favorite cosmetic brands, the Sephora Accelerate program aims to teach brands how to cater to new desires and trends.
