Behind every swipe of a lipstick or indulgent spritz of a floral scent is an industry known not just for its allure but for its fiercely competitive spirit. An ever-increasing roster of beauty brands has even global power players jostling for visibility – and there are few things that boost brand presence more than media coverage.
But with so many brands and so many media sources across the beauty landscape, benchmarking is becoming more crucial than ever before. It’s the key to understanding and enhancing your value market share. Here are just some of the ways knowing your media ranking can improve your strategy, whether you’re planning your PR approach or choosing which influencers to work with:
1. Rankings reveal your real competitors
With the right media tracking tool, you will be able to see your media presence not just in isolation, but within the context of the whole beauty industry. mmi’s media tools give you a ranking – a clear and concise datapoint – which allows you to immediately understand where your brand stands, and who you’re truly up against. In an industry that’s always growing, your competitors aren’t always who you think they are. Benchmarking helps you quickly identify newcomers or rising stars that could be impacting your value market share.
2. You can see the impact of mentions on sales
Media presence is directly linked to value market share. The more presence you have, the more you will sell, so you need to measure how often your brand appears in front of your audience. Once you start tracking, you will often see a direct correlation between a high media ranking and high sales, giving you a new, seemingly tangible KPI to drive your PR strategy forward. Soon, you’ll begin to understand what level of coverage leads to your target sales figures, clarifying your media and influencer goals for the future.
3. New PR tactics and inspiration start to emerge
Along with your true competitors, new tactics begin to emerge when you track beauty media. Your tool should enable you to explore the strategy that helped brands reach their high rankings. On analysing their media mentions, you might discover certain online magazines that gave their presence a boost, or an exclusive press push with just the right audience to send their new product viral. This can serve as inspiration or, conversely, if your brand is launching a similar product to a competitor, help you stand out by approaching the media types that weren’t part of their strategy. Knowing competitor activities also means you can mitigate them or explain their successes, which gives even greater context to your own brand performance.
And this is what competitor benchmarking and media rankings is truly all about; understanding where you (really) are, and what you need to do to reach your next goal. For more advice on media tracking or a demo of mmi’s tools, reach out to us for a demo.
Up next: Discover 5 ways beauty brands can use data to work more effectively.