E.l.f. boosts ad recall 60% with social video campaign

Brief:

E.l.f. Cosmetics saw a 60% increase in ad recall and 10% lift in brand awareness with a campaign that included Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok as new channels. The beauty brand's "e.l.f.ing Amazing" effort also generated 31 million video views and 548,000 new users to its website in 90 days, according to a case study from marketing agency Tinuiti, which oversaw the effort.
It launched nine display activations on Tinder, Undertone, TapJoy, Roku, Hulu, Amazon, Pandora, Reddit and TripleLift to nab more than 206 million impressions from July to September 2019. The campaign beat click-through rate (CTR) and video completion rate (VCR) benchmarks, per the case study.
E.l.f. also saw a 38% jump in orders on elfcosmetics.com, a 28% increase in clicks on branded search and a 10% growth in organic keywords after a restructuring of its search, shopping and search engine optimization (SEO) channels.

Insight:

E.l.f. Cosmetics saw impressive results from its digital media efforts, as Tinuiti highlights in a case study that touts the agency's know-how. E.l.f. ran a campaign aimed at every part of the purchase funnel, what the consumer path from seeing an ad to buying a product is called. The full-funnel campaign included paid search, paid social, shopping and display ads that boosted impressions 63% from the prior year, and increased search interest 11%, per the case study.

E.l.f.'s creative centered on "e.l.f.ims," or branded everyday expressions that were captured in video spots. Tinuiti placed six-, 10- and 15-second videos to reach different audience segments on social media. The agency also built a custom dashboard to show a daily analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) for its accounts in the U.S. and U.K. Tinuiti created a monthly pacing and budgeting tracker to show moving averages for different periods as the campaign went on, allowing for easier adjustments along the way.

The results led E.l.f. to run the first campaign by a cosmetics brand on TikTok, the social video app whose downloads rose 13% to 738 million worldwide last year, researcher Sensor Tower estimated. E.l.f. in October 2019 launched a challenge on TikTok that urged people to share videos using the #eyeslipsface hashtag and an original song created by record label Republic Records and creative agency Movers+Shakers. Videos using the hashtag have been viewed 5.9 billion times on TikTok as of this week.

Since that first campaign, TikTok has become a more prominent part of E.l.f.'s social media marketing. The brand returned to TikTok in March 2020 with a remixed version of its "Eyes. Lips. Face." song, this time to raise awareness about COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. E.l.f. followed that effort in May with a dance challenge and influencer campaign to promote another product, a sign that TikTok has been a successful platform for the brand.