Coty Acquires Content Marketing Agency Beamly

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No sooner than I hit publish on my last post about Clinique’s new blog The Wink, I discovered that another beauty company is investing in content marketing. Coty announced on October 19, their acquisition of digital marketing and content agency Beamly, based in New York and London. This is a big deal for the future of beauty brands. It’s no longer enough to simply be online, but now brands must engage, interact and create experiences for their customers.

Beamly’s main focus is on driving audience growth and engagement for consumer brands across the digital space. This is a big step for Coty, on the heels of their P&G acquisition, they  are the first among the big beauty companies to acquire a content marketing agency. Coty and its many licensed brands “will benefit from Beamly’s suite of social data benchmarking, content creation, content optimization and consumer engagement tools to deliver Coty’s brand strategies.”

Coty’s current roster of brands plus the 42 newly acquired brands from the P&G deal have positioned the beauty conglomerate as one of the leading global beauty companies. Competitors L’Oréal and Estée Lauder, both known for best in class digital strategies, might face increasing competition from Coty as they work with the Beamly team to become a digital content and marketing powerhouse.

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Clinique launches The Wink

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Content Strategy is one of the new buzzed about positions that has now become a necessary part of the marketing team. Much like the addition of the Social Media Manager was a few years ago, the Content Strategist is quickly becoming a role in high demand.  And Clinique is doing just  that, offering a new way to use content to target a new customer: The Millennial woman.

Clinique is a popular and familiar brand, best known for being hypoallergenic and dermatologist approved. Clinique is, for many women, their first exposure to prestige skincare and even beauty products!

Clinique recently launched The Wink, a new online destination for beauty and lifestyle content. This was a smart move by Clinique —probably due to the success of it’s sister brand, Estée Lauder’s The Estée Edit. The platform definitely attracts a younger audience —through whimsical posts and lots of  lovely pastels— a demographic that like Clinique’s other sister brand, Origins, also aimed to target. Clinique and Origins are two somewhat similar brands in the customer they attract. Origins has a great case study in Fast Company on, among many things, led to the co-creation of a product with millennial women that helped them gain access to this target demographic. I think Clinique might have seen the success in both The Estée Edit and Origin’s and developed their own way to connect with a younger audience.

The Wink is their own Pinterest-like boards and How-To guides, all in one. They even have a beauty index which lists popular beauty terms with definitions and related content. In another strategic move to garner user-generated content (UGC), The Wink offers a place for customers to upload and share their favorite products. Optimizing UGC is done expertly well by “L’Oréal brands, and it seems that Estée is catching up.

 

Mad Men x Estée Lauder

On my beauty kick again, I found out that Estée Lauder has teamed up with hit show Mad Men to produce a make-up line. The packaging and colors of the products look like something Betty Draper would keep in her silk clutch. The collection will be available March 18 just before the season 5 premiere of Mad Men on March 25.

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