Any new business start-up has its challenges and comes often with a learning curve. This is especially true for beauty and skin care ventures. Beauty brands are often started by skin care enthusiasts, aestheticians, dermatologists, and other skin care professionals.
The challenge often is that even though the business owners have some prior skin care knowledge, they do not necessary know skin care marketing, sales, and general business development methods. There are numerous points to consider and decisions to be made when starting a skin care business or trying to grow it.
Often, skin care start-ups and small brands cannot find the proper help with adequate experience to provide assistance. As a start-up, brands have limited budgets to start the business and properly grow it. To help, here are 5 business development tips for beauty brand start-ups.
5 Business Development Tips For Beauty Brand Start-ups
1. Properly start content marketing right away.
Content marketing is in most cases not even an option anymore for beauty brands but a requirement. For skin care business development, content marketing is highly effective. Beauty consumers demand it and expect it as well as key people within the industry such as buyers, brokers, and distributors. Content has to be created, published, and distributed online properly for best results. Content is considered to be blogging, articles, press releases, images, and video.
2. Contact online distribution opportunities.
Often beauty and skin care brands go after retail opportunities, but overlook online distribution chances. There are several online only retailers such as dermstore.com, which specialize in retailing skin care and beauty products online. They invest heavily into marketing to reach the consumers. This benefits brands that have their products for sale there. In most cases, these online retailers buy a case at a time from brands of each desired SKU. Brands with quality beauty products including start-ups can contact the appropriate buyers and decision makers with these online only retailers to explore sales opportunities.
3. Utilize key industry influencers to grow rapidly.
Beauty and skin care brands that want to grow their sales and brand awareness should utilize key industry influencers to grow rapidly. What are key industry influencers? Well, these people come from a diverse area, but all can significantly improve the business development of a beauty brand. Influencers can be beauty bloggers, skin care video reviewers, magazine editors, award organizations, product review shows, known dermatologists, and other industry professionals.
4. Use social media channels to reach desired audiences.
There is not any other platform that can give the level of exposure that social media channels do aside from maybe Google search engine itself. The average individual spends over 4 hours on social media channels. This makes social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn one of the most results oriented places to increase sales and brand awareness for beauty brands. When properly utilized, results can be visible quickly through social media marketing campaigns.
5. Contact small retail locations and local chains.
Beauty brands and skin care companies that wish to increase sales should contact small retail locations and local chains first. Why? Well, larger chains buy from distributors and not directly from manufacturers and brands. Distributors often require brands to be in several local retail stores prior to considering them. This leaves start-ups and smaller brands with the task to initiate the sales cycle themselves first. Focusing on single retail opportunities and smaller localized chains can help a brand with the learning curve, but also prepare them for larger distributors and opportunities.
