Recently, Base Beauty’s COO Aleni Mackarey, Ph.D., MS, and Emily Horrego, our Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, led a webinar for Brandwatch that explores how we use data to drive our creativity. (Here is a link to the Brandwatch case study on Base Beauty.) This expansive webinar provided a wealth of thinking and learning into how we optimize the data we gather and combine it with our creative concepts and execution.
Part of their presentation focused on community management tools, offering an in-depth discussion of how our community engagement coordinators—the front-line staffers of a brand’s outreach—seed conversations, gather insights, analyze learning, and feed it all to other departments within our agency as we create omnichannel programs. Brandwatch has become a trusted partner in our data collection, helping us listen deeply, identify trends, and focus on solutions to share across our teams for planning paid searches, forging influencer relationships, pitching PR articles, inspiring our blog writers, approaching promotional and trade events, even informing our package design team.
I love how Emily laid out the three data modules that we incorporate into our daily work—key pieces of our holistic marketing puzzle:
- Engage is our community management tool where we respond to comments, DMs, etc., and generally meet our community where they are. Part of this module is Labels which lets us categorize every conversation and comment so we can see patterns and trends to plan strategies.
- Example: Based on the data that we pulled from Labels, we discovered there was confusion about a client’s tinted sunscreen, so we created graphics that broke down the key benefits of each tinted option and a video with swatches of the textures and the shades. This resulted in an 85% above-average engagement rate and a 715% above-average reach.
- Measure is where we monitor and report on the growth of our KPIs to break down performance per individual post and see what content is resonating with our audience. Watching engagement rate changes helps put the “why” behind content that’s performing strongly and lets us track (and then tweak) content that could have performed better.
- Example: For a client, we have been tracking monthly engagement rates compared to the benchmark we developed when we started working with them. Using the measure module, we’ve been able to easily see that this client’s engagement rate is nearly 5% above that benchmark.
- Listen is about, well, listening! This is where we can hear what conversations are happening across different platforms—including those other than the brand we are working on—that might be relevant. We can learn what’s being said about a key ingredient, a new skincare study, or a buzz-worthy technique. This is so, so valuable as we see which brands are at the top of these conversations and what questions consumers are asking about them. Then we create strategies to address those topics. To me, this is like being in the opposing team’s locker room. It gives us a great edge.
- Example: Working on a fragrance-focused brand for a global CPG company, we listened intensely to consumers’ engagement with our client and its competition. Using that data to focus our creative, we saw a 52% growth rate and an average engagement rate of over 6% within six months.
Every day at Base Beauty we utilize these tools to fuel our work. By gathering, embracing, and analyzing data and using it to power our cutting-edge creativity, we help our beauty and wellness clients continue to move the needle, grow, and succeed in this multi-faceted, complicated, and thriving industry.
How does your team gather and use data for your brand? Please share with me!