When skincare brand Peach & Lily was crafting a social media campaign to launch its latest product, the team wanted the outcomes to talk for themselves. Breaking from convention, the marketer avoided trending sounds and viral gimmicks that saturate the platforms and as a substitute took a risk by sending the product — sans any and all branding — to pick out influencers for an effort that generated an engagement rate five-times higher than its previous campaigns.
Peach & Lily’s MiniProtein Exosome Bioactive Ampoule is a super-charged serum meant to firm skin and smooth wrinkles. For its launch, the marketer sent unmarked bottles to 14 influencers in July with minimal ingredient information, inviting creators on TikTok and Instagram to share organic feedback before the brand revealed itself July 31. The story-first, name-last approach aligns with an education-led marketing strategy that has helped Peach & Lily turn into the No. 2 prestige skincare brand at Ulta, said founder and CEO Alicia Yoon.
“Everything is about product first … it’s about being driven by solutions and with the ability to leverage innovation to create these solutions,” said Yoon. “We didn’t do it by chasing every trend or attempting to do influencer marketing the best way everyone else does it.”
Peach & Lily was initially created in 2012 to distribute third-party Korean beauty brands, but later evolved into its own line of products in 2018. The brand is commonly attributed to popularizing the TikTok-viral “glass skin” movement, a Korean beauty trend around healthy skin, after launching its Glass Skin Refining Serum. The Korean beauty market has seen major traction within the U.S., growing 53% year-over-year in Q1 because of high demand from cohorts like Gen Z and millennials, in response to data from the Korea Customs Service.
To feed the momentum, Peach & Lily sought a launch strategy for its ampoule product that may turn heads but still resonate with its core audience, which ranges from those of their early 20s to those 60-plus. Social listening revealed that for influencer content, get-ready-with-me videos and product reviews weren’t performing in addition to teaser content, Yoon explained. The Peach & Lily consumer base also gravitates toward education, which helped inform the rest of the strategy.
“Marrying all of that together, it became very clear to us that we should always work with experts — dermatologists, cosmetic chemists, estheticians, product developers,” Yoon said. “We want the experts to have a look at the formula, some high level notes in regards to the product, try it out and have them opine on it with their real thoughts.”
The brand sent its product to influencers including dermatologist Lindsey Zubritsky, esthetician Morgan Antinarelli, cosmetic chemist Javon Ford, beauty experts The Lipstick Lesbians and more. Participants, who had the selection to enter a paid partnership following the product’s official reveal, received a dossier with an ingredients list and notes in regards to the product and created videos speculating about which brand may very well be behind the brand new product and the consequences it had on their skin, while commenters mentioned their very own guesses and observations.
Notably absent from the influencer videos was using add-ons like trending audio — the content featured the experts simply chatting with the camera — a contrast from typical social media content that Yoon says differentiates Peach & Lily’s effort from the remaining.
“While we now have seen teaser content before, this specific format of teasing and mysteriously launching something isn’t something that’s done on a regular basis,” Yoon said. “On TikTok especially, there’s lots of content centered around trends, even in terms of skincare education … but all of our expert partners, and even on our own social media, we weren’t leaning into that.”
When it got here time for its reveal, Peach & Lily hosted a New York launch event with the influencer partners and over 60 other creators in the realm. The reveal took the same approach to the product teasers, initially lacking any branding to as a substitute be themed around neutral white and glass accents. After guests had time to mingle, TV screens across the room reintroduced the product before Yoon appeared on screen to disclose Peach & Lily because the brand behind the launch. The marketer tracked over 1 million impressions inside the first two hours of the event.
“The sentiment around it was each elevated excitement but additionally an actual intrigue and curiosity and desire to examine out the product itself, so we actually considered it a hit,” Yoon said.
The great thing about science
While a give attention to educational content is essential to Peach & Lily’s core consumer, marketing across the science of its products takes a fastidiously curated strategy, Yoon explained. Its recent ampoule product alone is a mouthful, full of a proprietary MicroMimic Tri-Signal Complex, exosomes and biomimetic miniproteins. To avoid the danger of overwhelming consumers, the team prioritizes meeting consumers where they’re with digestible information. For example, a recent Instagram carousel explaining exosomes included high-level information, but a link within the brand’s bio led to a deep-dive blog post.
“We have so many individuals who wish to dig in somewhat bit more,” Yoon said. “Our [consumer] psychographic, a part of it is due to our own brand positioning — we’re attempting to make things that weren’t possible up to now possible.”
In establishing a winning marketing strategy, Yoon also prioritizes a data-driven approach that permits the team to higher track what levers are working and what may be optimized, she explained. In that regard, the marketer avoids viral moments, despite their potential for mass exposure, recognizing that such visibility is not any guarantee of long-term success.
“The team could be very focused on not chasing trends or attempting to go viral, actually, we don’t prefer to go viral,” Yoon said. “We don’t think that it’s a sustainable, repeatable, measurable marketing strategy which you could comp 12 months over 12 months.”
While social media was key to Peach & Lily’s latest launch, the brand strives for a balanced marketing mix, Yoon said. That spans conversion-based, bottom-funnel paid ads on platforms like TikTok and YouTube to top-of-funnel efforts, which have included moves like New York subway ads centered across the brand’s core promise. While not for each launch, Yoon and the team on a yearly basis considers how you can fuel Peach & Lily’s top-of-funnel awareness because the marketer eyes stronger consumer loyalty for its next launch and beyond.
“It’s been really essential for us to think in regards to the mixture of marketing across different formats and platforms, including in real life formats and events,” Yoon said. “You really do have to nurture the highest of the funnel, but you furthermore may need to start out driving revenue so that you just begin to see that conversion. We imagine that it really works best when it’s all type of happening together.”
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