How Anastasia Beverly Hills Became The Most Powerful Beauty Brand On Instagram
With 800 million monthly active users (500 million daily active users) and a highly visual content platform, Instagram is the best place to showcase your brand and engage with your audience. With recent new features such as Stories or Polls, Instagram has also significantly increased its usage amongst younger demographics.
If you want to grow your brand quickly, you must build a smart Instagram strategy.
Take the example of Anastasia Beverly Hills. In just a few years, the brand has become one of the most engaging beauty brands on Instagram. How did Anastasia Beverly Hills manage that? And how can you apply the beauty brand’s best practices to your own brand?
What is Anastasia Beverly Hills?
In 1997, Anastasia Soare was opening her beauty salon in Beverly Hills. One year later, Anastasia and her daughter Claudia launched their own eyebrow product line named Anastasia Beverly Hills.
20 years later, Anastasia Beverly Hills has become an eyebrow empire with $340M estimated sales in 2017 and a line of 450 products sold in over 25 countries. This impressive growth is actually pretty recent and has everything to do with Anastasia’s early adoption of Instagram in 2012. Since, sales are said to have quadrupled year-over-year.
A master on Instagram
While Anastasia is “only” the 2nd most followed beauty brand on Instagram (17M followers, behind Huda Beauty’s 25M followers), Anastasia Beverly Hills is actually the most powerful beauty brand on Instagram today.
According to Octoly Top 25 Instagram Beauty Brands, Anastasia generated the highest number of posts (4,594) and interactions (7.38M) among US Beauty influencers in March 2018. Way ahead of any of its beauty competitors - including Huda Beauty!
Here are Anastasia’s lessons you can apply to become the next Insta-brand master
Lesson 1: Give products at scale with micro-influencers
Lesson 2 : Watch your community grow with UGC
Lesson 3: Master the chit-chat around your brand
Lesson 4: Drive sales with Instagram Stories
Lesson 1: Give products at scale using micro-influencers
Free products in exchange for reviews: a great strategy
When organic brand reach is next to nothing on Instagram, product placement is a great alternative to paid advertising. Giving products to influencers is a very effective and cheap way for brands to reach a young and engaged audience outside of their own.
Giving at scale with micro-influencers
Giving those products at scale is where the magic can happen. You can only do this with micro and small influencers i.e. influencers that have between 5K followers and 100K followers. According to Octoly, micro-influencers have generated 40% of interactions and 90% of Instagram posts referring to beauty brands in March 18. That is huge.
Anastasia relies on thousands of smaller influencers who receive products usually 1 to 3 weeks before each launch. They distribute products based on YouTubers’ videos or Instagrammers’ photo quality and makeup artistry, rather than the number of followers.
Why does a brand like Anastasia work with micro & small influencers?
- They accept free endorsement: If your brand resonates with their community, most micro-influencers will agree to do a review in exchange of a free product.
- They are more authentic: By not being paid, influencers keep their freedom and share their honest opinion on products. Nurturing honest relationships based on gifting is one of the main keys to success of Anastasia Beverly Hills.
“Influencers are my friends. We don’t pay friends. We send them products, and whatever they like, they post. I never ask anybody to talk about it. I want people to be in love with what I make. Everything that I do has to be organic. That’s the reason we are successful.” — Fashionista, 2016
- They target distinct audiences: By collaborating with tens or hundreds of influencers, you can reach many different audiences all at the same time.
- They are more engaged: According to L2 research, micro and small influencers mention brands 3 times more in their posts than big influencers. They can become your next ambassadors.
Lesson 2: Watch your community grow thanks to UGC
The power of genuine reviews
Reviews, favorites, tutorials, GRWM… Any type of content that was created by consumers in the name of your brand are a form of User Generated Content.
Your fans are the best to speak about your brand. Regraming their best posts can offer a consequent amount of benefits for your brand:
- It’s easy to put in place
- Very cheap compared to usual branded content (ie. professional photos with a model)
- Enhances visibility thanks to smart usage of hashtags
- Gives stronger engagement among your community
- Offers higher authenticity
Almost every of Anastasia’s 7 daily posts is a regram of one of their fans, and they’re usually beauty influencers with more than 5K followers.
How to kill the UGC game like Anastasia
Create the right hashtags
- Using hashtags is one of the easiest ways to grow your audience on Instagram. Posts on Instagram with at least one hashtag reach on average 12.6% more engagement than posts without any.
- Your brand’s hashtag(s) should be easy to use and find. Make it simple just as Anastasia Beverly Hills promotes the brand’s name’s hashtag in the bio.
- You can be more creative and create hashtags based on themes or different products that represent your brand. Here are a few hashtags that Anastasia promotes and are being heavily used by their fans.
Promote your hashtags
- Remind your followers the “official” hashtag in the bio of your page
- Add your hashtags to every single post
- If you want to go further, you can even explain how to get featured in your bio or your posts
Regram your followers’ best content
- In your post, tag the follower account at the origin of the post and personalize your comment to make it personal
- Insert your relevant hashtags in the post to keep promoting them
- Make sure that you have the agreement of your follower before posting
With a powerful brand like Anastasia, results can be astonishing for smaller influencers whose audience can grow by thousands of followers in just one day.
The virtuous circle of UGC
The more Anastasia regrams its best followers’ content, the more their followers post about Anastasia’s products in the hope of being regramed. Even celebrities post about Anastasia Beverly Hills products without even being asked. Hence, Anastasia’s #1 rank in Octoly top 25 Instagram Beauty brands.
Lesson 3: Master the chit-chat around your brand
Mastering conversation and becoming a love brand
Emily Weiss, founder of Glossier, once stated “There isn’t a single beauty brand you’d like to wear a sweatshirt of”. But somehow, Glossier managed to get Karlie Kloss wear one their sweatshirts…
That’s because this cult-favorite beauty brand masters conversation with its community and listens to what its fans have to say. Something that larger beauty brands struggle to do.
How does a brand like Anastasia Beverly Hills do it?
Talk directly to your followers
Anastasia Soare uses the company’s account for personal usage. One page, one single meeting place with your followers. With this in mind, Anastasia and her daughter Norvina have created a direct connection with their followers and made themselves known as beauty gurus.
Give a sense of belonging by listening to your community
The brand constantly interacts with its audience and sees what they like or dislike. “We are so in tune with our customers because of our social media”.
It’s a great way to innovate and get feedback for product development.
“By speaking directly with consumers on social platforms, responsive brands can innovate to meet real-time shopper demands…This is how a product starts”. Anastasia Soare
Don’t avoid bad conversation
The brand answers every comment and question on Instagram and other platforms such as Twitter. Even negative ones.
It’s not always easy to handle backlash, especially when founders are on the front line. But responding honestly to any form of criticism is always well received.
Lesson 4: Drive commerce with Stories
When Instagram launched Stories in August 2016, the industry was talking more about how it was a blatant copy of Snapchat and was not anticipating its future success. With 300M daily active Instagram Stories users, Instagram almost has twice as many users as Snapchat.
Influencers and brands have rapidly adopted the new feature as a way to engage with audiences in a more intimate and spontaneous way than posts. Become an early adopter like Anastasia!
Use Stories intensively
Stories is the best way to produce easy, cheap content on Instagram. You don’t have to worry as much about the visual and the quality than for posts. Anastasia’s Stories are not as refined as its Instagram feed and that’s okay.
Don’t hesitate to heavily use that feature. In 2017, Anastasia Beverly Hills was posting more than 6 stories per day and has accelerated the pace since, with 8–9 stories per day in 2018.
Link your Stories to your e-shop…
The good thing with Stories is that you can place organic external links — that’s the only place where you can add them, besides the bio section on the main page.
According to L2, 90% of Anastasia’s Stories links to an e-commerce page of its shop. This is way ahead any other beauty brand on the market.
Don’t hesitate to do the same especially if you have already build a good audience on your Stories.
…But be smart about it
Anastasia is pretty smart at bridging the gap between social and commerce in a way that is not too obvious. The brand uses video tutorials to showcase its products in real life.
Then the brand uses the swipe up functionality to redirect its fans to an e-commerce page. Anastasia does it in several ways:
- Either Anastasia cuts one single tutorial video into many Stories in order to feature one specific product including a link to the product’s web page.
- Either Anastasia creates a dedicated landing page where users can go and find all the products in one single place.
- Or Anastasia splits into defined sections the Stories in order to highlight important moments that the brand wants to keep in its feed longer than 24 hours.
All of this has nothing to do with a cold, boring product page on a website — and that’s why it generates clicks. Instagram has enabled brands to develop their creativity. It’s up to you now to apply the rules to get like-minded people (aka your future community) to talk about your brand! We don’t have the figures yet but considering the heavy usage of linked Stories by Anastasia, we wouldn’t be surprised if it works rather well in terms of sale conversions…
That’s all for Anastasia Beverly Hills’ success story! If there’s a brand that you would love us to analyze, please comment below or send us an email at success@octoly.com!
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