Lancome; China social media campaign offers optimized engagement.

Internationally well-known cosmetic brand, Lancome, also made a move on China social media marketing, and started surprisingly early. In year 2006, Lancome already built its own Chinese community (www.rosebeauty.com.cn), where consumers can not only get to know Lancome products but also interact with the brand and other consumers.

Early this year, Lancome started to use popular China SNS site – Kaixin001 – to drive traffic to this community. So, let’s take a close look at what Lancome is doing with its own site, and other SNS site marketing.

Lancome Official Online Community

From the earliest post date, it seems this community started around Sept.2006. There is no data released on site on how many members it has now. However, it is definitely not empty – “current online member #” shows that there is 73 members online as I’m writing now.

All the sections and functions in Lancome online community are pretty basic; it provides beauty knowledge, Lancome products information (where member can rate products), Lancome news & events, members can also discuss in forums and purchase Lancome products online (this leads to Lancome’s official site), etc.

The forum status may give us some idea of how the community is doing regarding the popularity. There are altogether 428 topics in the forum so far, and for each topic there are average 500,000+ views and 500+ replies. Like other brand sponsored forums (Lufthansa, L’oreal…) we reviewed before, the forum admin, aka: Lancome’s staff, are playing a very important role getting the conversation going – almost all the topics are initiated by admin.

Lancome Kaixin001 Group

Started from January this year, Lancome’s Kaixin001 group has 117,030 members so far. It seems Lancome’s strategy is to use this group to attract interest from Kaixin001′s members (Kaixin001 is one of the most popular SNS site in China) and then send that traffic to its official community. There is a homepage banner and some brief descriptions at obvious positions introducing the official community.

Regarding what is the strategy to get Kaixin001 members interested in this group, here are what Lancome does -

1. Online beauty contest

The beauty contest participants images take up almost 90% of the group home page, from which we can tell this is a big event Lancome held. The contest was from May25th to July15th this year, targeted to white collar women working in different industries. There were two ways to participate in this contest – create you own profile page in Lancome group, or recommend a friend to participate in it (if she wins then you can get a prize as well). The beauty winners were determined by how many votes they got, and top ones could get Lancome products as prizes. Altogether there were 18,038 people participated in this contest and 1,232,459 votes so far.

Below is profile page of the member who got the most votes, 171,609 votes -

2. Online skin and personality test

Besides the beauty contest, Lancome also created two different online tests targeting to white collar women – skin test (107,370 members took so far), career personality test (77,409 members took so far). Besides taking the test, members can also see their friends’ test results, and beauty contest participants’ test results as well.

Below is an overview of Lancome Kaixin001 group stats:

• Kaixin001 campaign period: 2009.1-present
• Group member: 117,030
• Beauty contest participants: 18,038
• Beauty contest votes: 1,232,459
• Test participants: 184,779

Thoughts:

First I was surprised by Lancome’s early move on building a brand SNS community 3 years ago. By providing beauty/product knowledge and interaction with the target market, this community brings Lancome closer to its customers.

However, what really impressed me is Lancome’s strategy in its Kaixin001 group. It seems this brand really knows how to get people engaged. From the other brand groups we reviewed before, usually the brand does most of the “talking” – open a blog, put up some images, show people some videos, etc. But in Lancome’s group, almost all the “talking” are done by members.

By creating a beauty contest, Lancome not only got 18,038 participants engaged, but also got viral word of mouth which pulled in more votes. By creating a couple online tests, it not only got people engaged by finding result for themselves, but also got them connected with their friends; which is obviously what people want nowadays; perfect example: the popularity of facebook, twitter…

Over look Lancome’s SNS strategy – first, Lancome built its own SNS community, then launches campaigns on popular SNS sites to drive traffic to this community. In this community, Lancome retains people who already had interests by beauty/product information as well as related discussions, and finally leads to direct sale on their official site. When compare this to the old way of marketing – using some print ads or online banner ads to get people to buy things; I think most will agree with me that this SNS campaign is definitely much better -

• In the short run - the SNS campaign and the community increase the interaction with targets; getting them involved and increase their engagement with the brand.
• In the long run – the community will keep on growing, which means Lancome will always have a solid “launching pad” for any future promotions.

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Tagged as: China, Kaixin001, Lancome Official Online Community From, Marketing, Personality test, Social media marketing, Social network service, Target market, Virtual community