This case study article is a compilation of my writing on my previous blog (www.growthpresso.com), which planned to migrated into this website. I write around 3 article about case study, and here are the compilation result of that three.
Glossier Growth & Digital Marketing
Origin Story
Emily Weiss launched her blog (Into the Gloss) in 2010 while working as a fashion assistant at Vogue, Weiss blog then become the cornerstone for Glossier as she planned to launched the business with just four products, and after turned down by more or less 11 Venture Capitals, she finally scored the investment from Kristen Green, and the Glossier founded in 2014.
The Business Model
The company started with the direct to consumer (DTC) business model, which focuses on not relying on the big retailers as the sales channel, for the idea to continue selling high quality products directly to its fans at lower prices compared to the big retail beauty products.
The Product
Glossier’s first products in 2014 are Soothing Face Mist, Priming Moisturizer, Balm Dotcom Lip Gloss, and Perfecting Skin Tint Foundation. As of 2021, the product categories of Glossier vary from skincare, makeup, body care, fragrance, balms, wedding makeup edit, and also some Glossiwear.
The Growth Story
There are 4 main contributors on why this Glossier growth so fast from the beginning of its creation up until now:
- Glossier wasn’t built from scratch, because there are hundreds of thousands of followers from Into The Gloss instagram, and thousands of blog readers. So with that being said, the Glossier already has a massive audience pool even before the brand is launched.
- From the fast company interview, we find out that 80% of Glossier and growth and sales come from word-of-mouth marketing, and they do it by involving the audience, plus rewarding them, and they do it by regularly regrams (repost on IG) the user-generated content. The next question will be why this marketing style works, and the answer will be because shoppers trust other shopper’s opinions.
- Heavily invest in customer journey, by owning all of the data of their customers (because they are a D2C company), and using the data to launch campaigns that target the precise audience that is similar to the existing customer through multiple marketing channels.
- Experiential marketing, is another component into Glossier marketing mix, as they often use pop-up stores in many cities across the globe (from miami to paris), with the goals to create a physical bonding experience between the brands and it’s customers.
Traffic Analysis
Using Similarweb.com, we get the understanding that Glossier website bring more than 2 million visitors per month, with the peak in June 2021 for about 3,250,000 visits recorded.
Source: similarweb
Most visitors come from the U.S (63% of it), UK (14%), and Canada (6%), and so on.
Most of the traffic comes from Search (organic & paid) which is 50% of it, followed by Direct traffic (34%), Social (5%), Display (5%), and Referrals (2%).
When we compare with the competitors, here’s the traffic comparison between them:
From this simple column we can see that Glossier still fall behind in terms of total visits per month comparing to the other direct competitors, and also need to work on the higher bounce rate, and lower average visit duration.
But on the defense, we personally think that sometimes website total visits are not relevant with how much revenue that you got, because a brand only needs a couple of hundreds or thousands of hard core fans in order to jumpstart, and sustain.
Facebook Ads of Glossier
In this section, we will try to use Facebook Ads Library in order to take a look in the detail for current Facebook Ads that Glossier running to their target audience, so at least we can know what step of the funnel they target, what kind of creatives, and what landing page they use for their FB ads campaign. So let’s get started.
Source: Facebook ads library
Let’s start with this one, the button of the bottom right corner says “Sign Up”, and that means this is the activation phase, which has a goal to make the target audience sign up to the Glossier website by offering them USD 500 glossier credits to the target audience and their friends.
So this is brilliant as not only for the activation phase but this also involves the referral phase, as they also include the target audience to share the credits with her/his friends. So two birds and one stone.
We can see the offer detail on the landing page here.
On the other hand, as you can see in below, there are ads specified for the offline store opening, and if you click the ads, it will redirect you to specific landing page, but instead only to homepage, so the message is clear to only focus on store opening.
We also see some of the product introduction ads, to highlight new products to the market, such as Ultratip introduction, and The super pack, which are very simple in their ad copy, and only focusing directly to introduce the product, its price, and the offer. Each of the product intro ads will redirect the target audience to the specific product pages.
As you can see below, that is the specific product page that is used as the landing page.
Source: Glossier.com
Google Search Ads of Glossier
Source: SEMRush.com
Based on our observation on SEMRush paid search position tools, we got the top search keywords for this brand target, and in above you can see the top 11 of it based on the traffic they produced in the last 1 year.
From 100 top keywords, we observe nearly half of it (50%) using the “glossier” word in its keyword, e.g: glossier ultra tip, glossier balm, glossier lip gloss, and glossier perfume.
If the keywords related to the product category, it will be directly redirected into the specific category page as the landing page, and so with the product page, they will be redirected into the specific product page. As for the more general keyword like “where to buy glossier” OR “glossier coupon” it will be redirected into the homepage as the landing page.
Anatomy of the Glossier search ads ad copy
Search ads consist of Headline and Descriptions, as the headline max char is on 30 char, and descriptions is on 90 char. We see the Glossier headline contain an “official” keyword, and their descriptions contain several USP (unique selling proposition), such as free returns, cruelty free, skincare as makeup, and also some of their brand value and sales points that they try to promote consistently.
Google Display Ads of Glossier
As we observe in their display ads, most of it is used to advertise their referral program (friends let friends take 20% off), and use all of the banner sizing and placement available as you can see below.
Source: SEMRush
Summary
- Glossier started from humble beginning in 2010 from just a beauty blog into a ecommerce that has a DTC business model with products range for every beauty product variation.
- Their growth comes from “into the gloss” reader, word of mouth marketing, user generated content, focus on customer journey by combining data & marketing, and doing experiential marketing.
- Their paid ads vary from Facebook ads, google search ads & google display ads, and have campaign goals from sign up, referral, store visit, website traffic, and up to conversions.
Magic Spoon Cereal Facebook Ads
Here is the unique selling proposition that they keep repeating over and over again in their ad copy:
- 13g of protein
- 4g net carbs and 0g sugar
- Tastes like your childhood favorites
- Perfect for low carb or Keto lifestyles
- Less than $2 per serving
- Satisfaction guaranteed
They advertise their best seller restock announcement
They advertise their new product/feature
They include positive testimonial quotes in their ad copy
They compare their ingredients with the mass market product
They use new year resolution as psychological anchor
They craft effective landing page
They tell a story of why they create the brand in the first place
They introduce new product (cereal on-the-go)
They include positive media coverage, from Fast company, Forbes, and so on.
They add their USP in this landing page as well
They add the positive reviews
They add product/limited edition packs, with CTA button
Docusign Facebook Ads
DocuSign is a company that allows organizations to manage electronic agreements, and provide a way to sign electronically on different devices
[DISCLAIMER: This articles is made for purely educational purposes to our reader, and all of the image, video, and landing page is a screenshot that taken from either Facebook ads library OR DocuSign own website].
That’s for introduction, let’s deep dive into the observation results:
They use e-book as their lead magnet
They give e-book with various topic, and targeting founders, executives, and HR, as their lead magnet to gain leads, and of course they will follow up this leads with their CRM. I do believe they using lead generation objective in this FB ads campaign.
They advertise their new feature
Which in this case is CLM (contract lifecycle management).
and they are using related blog as their landing page for this campaign:
They advertise their webinar
Webinar often time use for gain leads in the upper funnel level.
They use couple of creatives and angles in this campaign.
They announce their CSR in their ads
Below is the example of another CSR (corporate social responsibility), standing for their value, environment friendly, use less paper, by going digital signed.
They advertise their promotion during special day like Earth Day
For Earth Day campaign, they have below landing page to display their pricing comparison.
That’s it for now.
Hope this helps, Cheers!
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