How Facebook Helped Estée Lauder Become A Highly Sought Beauty Brand Across Three Markets

Estée Lauder, founded by Estée Lauder and her husband Joseph in 1946, has become one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. Estée Lauder's success story is marked by the company's focus on quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction. From its humble beginnings as a small business selling four skincare products, Estée Lauder has expanded into a global corporation with a vast portfolio of high-end brands.

But a major component of Estée Lauder’s success has also been its effective leverage of marketing platforms like Facebook. Here’s how Estée Lauder used Facebook to consolidate its position as a leading cosmetics company across three markets.

1. Estée Lauder Taiwan

Estée Lauder launched a digital-only, multi-part campaign to increase sales in Taiwan, and engaged Kantar to conduct a CrossMedia study.

Their Objective

Estée Lauder wanted to increase its market share and become Taiwan’s number-one repair serum by driving consideration and purchase intent among 18- to 29-year-old females.

Solution & Approach

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic accelerated online shopping, and the digital space has become a prime channel to reach consumers. Estée Lauder realized it had to move away from traditional television commercials and take a digital approach to advertise the launch of its new Advanced Night Repair product. The beauty brand decided to adopt a “full-funnel” strategy or one that aimed to lead people from discovery to purchase. This included various digital technologies, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

On Facebook and Instagram, Estee Lauder launched a series of mobile-first video ads to create awareness of the new Advanced Night Repair product. The video ads featured a popular 30-year-old Korean celebrity to resonate with the brand’s younger target audience. Next, the brand ran photo ads with well-known key opinion leaders (KOLs), or influencers, posing with the new product. The KOLs also posted the photos on their personal social media accounts to encourage their followers to redeem free product samples.

Finally, to seal the deal, Estée Lauder ran Facebook link ads to drive traffic to the campaign website where potential customers could redeem product samples or buy the product online.

The Result

Estée Lauder’s Facebook campaign turned out to be a resounding success and led to a 39% lift in purchases from Facebook and Instagram. Also, the brand saw a 33% lift in consideration from Facebook and Instagram, compared with 0% from YouTube. Moreover, there was a 40% higher impact efficiency from Facebook and Instagram compared to YouTube.

2. Estée Lauder Turkey

Estée Lauder established an affiliate in Turkey in 2006 and increased online sales by 20% through its Facebook campaign.

Their Objective

Estée Lauder Turkey wanted to test whether automating its campaigns would help increase online sales.

Solution & Approach

Estée Lauder Turkey was already using Advantage+ catalog ads in its existing campaigns and decided to test whether the automation offered by Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns would further improve results.

Advantage+ shopping campaigns use automation to enable e-commerce and direct-to-consumer retail and brand advertisers to potentially achieve better performance, greater personalization, and more efficiency. These campaigns provide greater flexibility to control options such as ad creative, targeting, placements, and budget, and more opportunities to optimize campaigns that drive conversions.

Instead of running several campaigns with segmented audiences, Advantage+ shopping campaigns let advertisers combine audiences for a given market into a single campaign structure. This is designed to simplify creation and management while reducing audience overlap.

The Result

Estée Lauder Turkey’s Facebook campaign performed exceptionally well and resulted in a 20% increase in online sales, a 16% decrease in cost per purchase, and a 12% decrease in cost per 1.000 people reached with Advantage+ shopping campaigns plus usual ads, compared to usual ads alone.

3. Estée Lauder Malaysia

Estée Lauder ran Facebook Collaborative Ads in Malaysia in partnership with the e-commerce platform Lazada to increase sales.

Their Objective

Estée Lauder Malaysia wanted to increase online sales during Malaysia’s movement control order to prevent the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), as well as test a new creative strategy.

Solution & Approach

To boost online sales, Estée Lauder ran a campaign using Facebook Collaborative Ads in partnership with Lazada. To promote this Super Brand Day shopping event, the beauty company created a catalog of its products on Lazada and then used Collaborative Ads to show these products on Facebook.

The Collaborative Ads used a collection ad format, which featured a primary video with one of Estée Lauder’s brand ambassadors demonstrating how to use the Advanced Night Repair product – a new creative strategy in Malaysia for the beauty company. In addition, the ads automatically displayed products people were more likely to be interested in, based on their past behavior, and all ads emphasized the special promotions available during Super Brand Day. Estée Lauder worked closely with digital agency iProspect to conceptualize and optimize the campaign.

The campaign broadly targeted ads to women in Malaysia. In addition, Estée Lauder retargeted ads to people who had previously viewed its products on Lazada or added them to their cart without purchasing. The beauty brand also used automatic placements to deliver ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network cost-efficiently, and campaign budget optimization to identify and prioritize the best-performing ads.

The Result

Estée Lauder had a fantastic run with its Facebook campaign in Malaysia. The brand enjoyed a 42.5X Super Brand Day return on ad spending from prospecting audiences and a 3.9X return on ad spending from remarketing audiences. Also, the campaign led to US$81,000 in sales from the Super Brand Day sale.

Bottom Line

Over the years, Facebook has emerged as a highly effective marketing platform. Through its various features like branded content ads, photo ads, Advantage+ catalog ads, Advantage+ shopping campaigns, and core audiences, Facebook has helped not just Estée Lauder but several other brands make an impact in their respective sectors. However, the key to succeeding with Facebook is having a robust marketing strategy. Once you have got that figured out, you can stay assured of the impact that your brand can make with Facebook’s help.