About Base Beauty
Base Beauty Creative Agency are the US-based beauty and wellness marketing experts, harnessing the power of data driven creativity across all touchpoints. Founded over 15 years ago, the agency boasts unparallelled holistic capabilities under an accomplished leadership team, all with a depth of beauty and wellness in-house and agency experience with the industry’s most influential legacy and indie brands.
They conceptualize and execute groundbreaking strategic programs across paid, earned, and owned marketing for high-growth beauty and wellness businesses. The success of their work goes hand-in-hand with the team’s values to work kindly and collaboratively.
The team’s beauty and wellness expertise is often featured in business publications, such as Glossy, WWD, Business of Fashion, The Washington Post, Luxury Daily, and at industry events such as Cosmoprof NA, ADF & PCD, Indie Beauty Expo, and Beauty Connect Summits.
In this case study we hear from Aleni Mackarey PhD, MS - COO and Emily Horrego, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist.
Base Beauty Creative Agency has been a Brandwatch customer since 2020. Their dedication and innovative approach to all things social are some of the many reasons they are a leading player in the agency space.
At Base Beauty, the ethos behind everything they do is data-driven creativity. When you combine the power of quantitative data with the magic of creative thinking, you get brand strategies that resonate and drive results.
Base Beauty uses social data from the Brandwatch platform to drive business growth for all of their clients. For the Base Beauty team, Brandwatch enables them to uncover the right data more effectively so they can focus on the value-adding work of turning that information into insights and shaping campaigns around the learnings.
“As we're building those insights, we're gathering data from social listening, from platform-native content, and from conducting competitor analysis,” explains Emily Horrego, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist of Base Beauty Creative Agency. “Combining that data from Brandwatch, we then assess what makes sense for each of our clients and how to bring a unique creative strategy to life for them in an authentic and holistic way.”
“Combining that data from Brandwatch, we then assess what makes sense for each of our clients and how to bring a unique creative strategy to life for them in an authentic and holistic way.”
Three key ways Base Beauty makes use of Brandwatch data
Here are three examples of how Base Beauty leverages the above models within the Brandwatch platform to drive social strategy, support community management, and support cross-functional success.
1.Empowering community managers with the right social listening data
Community managers are at the frontlines of your brand. They are meeting your customers where they are, answering questions, and, ultimately, leading them to make a sale. Consumers want to interact with brands. It’s how they determine who to trust. Creating connections with people is how brand interest turns into brand loyalty.
That’s why, according to Emily Horrego, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist of Base Beauty Creative Agency, it’s critical to empower your community managers to use their insights and expertise to build authentic customer relationships. They should feel equipped with the right tools to create a community online.
“Community managers create that first impression between the brand and a potential consumer,” explains Emily. “They're creating an experience that's going to either drive you to love the brand or maybe leave a not-so-great taste in your mouth.”
Using labels for trend spotting
Building, nurturing, and maintaining a brand community is no small task, though. With hundreds of thousands of conversations happening online daily, it’s critical to have tools in place to manage relevant discussions, flag important topics, and organize all of that information.
For example, Brandwatch Labels help the Base Beauty team pinpoint trends in conversations more efficiently. They categorize every single conversation they’re having on social media to understand what is most relevant, and what the hot topics are, and then utilize that for content creation.
“We use Brandwatch to engage with notable people and categorize these conversations through comments, DMs, and beyond. That way, we can really track trends, share it with our team, nurture those relationships, and, ultimately, turn them into loyal customers of the brand,” Emily explained.
“We use Brandwatch to engage with notable people and categorize these conversations through comments, DMs, and beyond. That way, we can really track trends, share it with our team, nurture those relationships, and, ultimately, turn them into loyal customers of the brand,”
For EltaMD Skincare, a leading sun care and skin care brand and one of Base Beauty’s clients, labels helped inform one of their most successful campaigns to date. When reviewing their social data, they saw that tinted sunscreen shot to the top of the labels charts and stayed there for months on end. The team knew that meant that it was something their audience wanted to talk about. They had questions and EltaMD Skincare had answers.
“We realized consumers were not sure which tinted sunscreen to buy. The market was saturated,” explained Emily. “They were so unsure and needed us to guide them. Labels gave us the information we needed to realize that. We might not have been able to pick up on that without that Brandwatch data.”
These community conversations and relevant labels enabled the Base Beauty team to quickly identify the uptick around tinted sunscreen, which informed their content strategy. The team began creating a campaign of educational content.
They built a variety of content types, from graphics about types of tinted sunscreen and their benefits to videos with swatches that helped showcase texture and shades. All to inform customers on a topic they were frequently talking about.
The outcome? Top-performing content that was highly engaging and drove considerable brand awareness. The campaign had an engagement rate that was 85% above the EltaMD Skincare average and reached an audience 715% bigger than the average audience size.
2.Testing different types of content to drive strategy
To understand what your audience wants to see, you need to be able to test different types of content and leverage the data to learn what’s working. For the team at Base Beauty, a test-and-learn social strategy is crucial to painting a full picture of what resonates with their community.
Looking beyond your own industry for content inspiration
While Base Beauty focuses solely on beauty and wellness brands, they saw synergies with a popular household cleaning brand, Fabuloso, who came to them with an awareness goal. Fabuloso products focus heavily on a fragrance-first story. With a deep understanding of consumer behaviors and patterns in this space, Base Beauty strategically helped Fabuloso to reach new viewers and build their audience.
As part of their initial research, the team at Base Beauty decided to look outside of the cleaning industry for fresh ideas. From the beauty industry to food and beverage, they were looking for brands who really empowered the color and the fragrance and drew inspiration from them.
Move fast and test things
Eventually, they gathered some insights, and now it was time to test out different types of content. According to Emily, the team truly wanted to try some of everything, including lo-fi reels, professional photography, graphics, user generated content (UGC), and stories with polls and questions. Working with creators and in-house teams, they built the full spectrum of content aimed at brand awareness and then set it out in the world to see what worked.
“We did it all, and using Brandwatch, we could look at data and engagement rates for every individual piece of content. We could determine what our audience loved, what they liked and could be improved on, and also what wasn't working,” explains Emily. “We wanted to see that people were sharing and saving this content. Whether they wanted their friends to see it, or if they came back to look at it again later.”
Using this test-and-learn method, the team at Base Beauty created a social program, and within six months, they saw a 52% growth rate and an average engagement rate of over 6%.
That’s why Emily encourages marketers to experiment, be open to trying new types of content, and to look beyond one’s industry for inspiration.
"Using Brandwatch, we could look at data and engagement rates for every individual piece of content. We could determine what our audience loved, what they liked and could be improved on, and also what wasn't working.”
3.Leveraging social data across departments for better business outcomes
Your consumer intelligence shouldn’t live in a silo. There is so much to be gained from sharing social data across functions and departments. Social data gives you a way to meet your customers and understand who they are. Therefore, it should inform every type of communication. When you understand how your customers think, you are better positioned to serve them the products and services they need.
“Utilize that social data. It's so rich. That's where consumers give you the information you need,” explains Emily.
“Utilize that social data. It's so rich. That's where consumers give you the information you need”
One client, Epionce Skincare, had the Base Beauty team build out a holistic program using social data to inform all of their customer touchpoints: email, blog, paid social, PR, influencer relationships, and beyond.
Here are a few scenarios where social data played a key role:
Scenario #1: Using social data for language in paid social ads
When crafting paid social ads for Epionce, the Base Beauty team leverages insights from Brandwatch to enhance their advertising strategy. They carefully select compelling content, determine the key products to showcase, and strategically incorporate relevant keywords. Additionally, they harness data from organic social media channels, transforming it into powerful paid social content that effectively resonates with their target audience.
“Every word, every asset, and every CTA that we pick is chosen based on that social data,” explains Emily.
By speaking to customers in a familiar language and finding the topics that are actually top of mind for them, ad creation can be tailored to be direct and relevant.
Scenario #2: Using social data to understand what blogs to write
Understanding trends in conversation can also help inform your content strategy. A community manager may see patterns of questions in the data. For example, things like:
- "I don't know what order to apply my products.”
- “I don't know which products to use.”
- “I don't want a 10-step skincare routine. I want something simple. What do I use?"
When you see these types of conversations using a platform like Brandwatch, you can start categorizing them and determining what's relevant to turn into content like a blog post.
“We're looking at our consumers for inspiration,” says Emily. “We want to empower them to lead the conversations. We want to know what they're talking about on social media.”
By answering your audiences’ questions, your brand can build up their presence as an industry leader, furthering consumer trust in the product or service.
Scenario #3: Using social data to nurture influencer relationships
For Base Beauty, influencer programs usually start on social media. “Typically, our community manager would notice an influencer or dermatologist that mentions the brand, and then we would start interacting with them,” Emily says. “We're going to nurture that relationship with them.”
This becomes a cross-functional effort. The community manager will flag the influencer team so that they can reach out and maybe send them a package. Then, the events and partnerships teams are flagged to add the influencer to their next seeding list or invite them to an upcoming event.
At that point, the insights from social data have influenced several departments, all in a coordinated effort to ensure that the brand is top of mind for their audience. That close-knit work between the community manager and the influencers is how teams can turn social insights into strong collaboration programs.
Scenario #4: Using social data to track trends for PR opportunities
When it comes to public relations, social data enables the team to share trending topics, ingredients, or skincare processes with the PR team, so they can pitch those trending conversations and tie clients into the narrative in a relevant way.
As the double cleansing trend gained significant traction in the skincare industry, the Base Beauty team closely monitored social data related to Epionce Skincare. They skillfully identified a notable increase in conversations surrounding this topic and swiftly capitalized on the opportunity to engage with the audience in an authentic manner that aligned with the brand's values and messaging. By leveraging their insights, the team successfully joined the conversation and effectively connected with their target market.
“Again, it's teamwork,” explains Emily. “The community manager is on the front lines, listening to conversations, picking up on what's trending, and then bringing that information to the wider team.”
Better data for better brand strategies
The team at Base Beauty uses Brandwatch across their entire client portfolio to ensure they are on top of trends, testing reactions to new content, and sharing valuable insights across teams. Keeping on top of social data means they can create more holistic strategies for all of their clients.
“Use the data that you gather from social listening everywhere throughout your whole marketing strategy,” urges Emily. “You don't want to silo the PR Team or the Influencer Team. You want it to feel holistic. You want holistic growth for your business by utilizing the data from each department to create integrated storytelling.”
“Use the data that you gather from social listening everywhere throughout your whole marketing strategy. You want holistic growth for your business by utilizing the data from each department to create integrated storytelling.”