How Benefit Cosmetics gained 50% growth in engagement.

Engaging global audiences with great content

As the Senior Vice President of Global Digital, Toto Haba leads a team of about 45 individuals where his areas of expertise extend to three main branches:

• Worldwide strategy and measurement of digital marketing with a huge team setup, distributed across 40 to 50 countries.
• Content development for the beauty brand, including things like video and model photo shoots.
• Managing the entire global website structure which includes at least 42 different localized sites.

Arguably more than most industries, social media presence is “super critical”, as Toto puts it, for their beauty brand. “Customers don’t discover beauty trends anymore through just traditional channels like TV or magazines, it’s online. It’s extremely important for product awareness.”

For Benefit, keeping the brand approachable and humoristic is key, working with each local channel by talking with country managers and getting ideas on how to connect with their unique audiences. Analysis of their Instagram performance consistently shows high engagement on posts that are crafted for specific demographics, what Toto calls "hyper-local" content.

In addition to the popularity of their brand on Instagram, Benefit holds YouTube has another one of their top channels which with Facelift Data Studio they are also able to be measure growth outcomes and percentages, then have them ranked by countries.

As Toto tells us, “It’s helped create some kind of competition amongst our teams, almost game-ifying social media marketing.”

Managing global markets by centralizing data processes

Before using Facelift Data Studio, every one of Benefit’s teams across the world was reporting online performance in different ways, working towards different goals and making it difficult for them to see what teams were really focused on.

These days, consistent measurement and strategic benchmarks to understand success have helped all teams achieve their goals much more quickly, especially towards growth.

Setting goals for success and making it measurable

Benchmarking against competitors gives brands invaluable insights into how others perform on social around the world. Benefit Cosmetics’ strategies focus especially on growing brand awareness on social and working with influencers.

Toto tells us their focus on brand awareness really brings an increase in sales – by connecting with audiences to have them really engaging with the brand and ultimately attract more buying customers.

Taking learnings and insights from data to drive strategy towards ongoing content campaigns is what makes Benefit such a hugely successful brand on channels like Instagram.

Storing and analyzing social data with powerful integrations

Benefit takes their Facelift Data Studio data even further with Google Big Query and business intelligence tools like Tableau. By cutting the technical work out of the process by doing all the setup, Facelift Data Studio helps Benefit to have their data delivered directly to Benefit’s own data warehouses, keeping things centralized.

In Facelift Data Studio, page level data – like follower data – provides a great number of insights on any number of Facelift Data Studio dashboards, but storing and centralizing post-level data (such as interactions) with tools like BigQuery allows brands to better archive performance numbers and make even more detailed analyses of their content over different periods of time.

As Benefit's VP of Digital, Toto considers it a great way to stay organized and revisit old content or campaigns to see what worked and what didn't. With these options for Facelift Data Studio API and data integrations, Benefit has the flexibility to have their data delivered to their own BI tools or work directly with different data points with their own engineers.