Search for skincare marketing and you get lists of forty tactics. Influencers, quizzes, loyalty points, referral codes, a podcast. Each of them can work. A brand with two people cannot do forty things, and the lists never say which one comes first.
I am the creative director of Skin Boutique Online, a skincare store in Canada. I design the store, handle its search content and make its social posts and ad creatives. I do not buy the media, so I will not tell you what to bid. What I can tell you is the order I would work in, and why.
The short version: every channel sends people to the store. So the store comes first.
Why the order matters
Marketing a skincare brand is a chain. An ad or a post gets attention. A click brings someone to a page. The page has to finish the job.
If the last link is weak, everything before it costs more. You pay for the click and the visitor leaves, because the product page did not say who the product is for. More ads will not fix that. They send more people to the same page.
So I work from the end of the chain backwards.
1. The product page
Start where the decision happens.
Open your best seller on a phone. Someone who has never used it should be able to answer five questions without hunting: what is it, who is it for, how do I use it, what is in it, and what does it cost with delivery.
In skincare the second question does most of the work. People shop for a concern: something for redness, or for dry skin in winter. Say the concern and the skin type near the top, in plain words.
Put ingredients and directions in the same place on every product. And keep the claims to wording you have approved. A page that promises more than the product can do gets you returns and, in some markets, a letter from a regulator.
2. The way into the catalogue
Next, check how someone finds that product if they did not arrive on it.
Most skincare shoppers start from a concern. A menu that lists only brands or product types makes them translate: I have dry skin, so I need a moisturiser, so I click Moisturisers, and now I am looking at thirty of them.
Give the concern its own way in. A collection for dry skin, one for sensitive skin, one for breakouts. If you can show a routine, with the products in the order they are used, do that too. A routine answers the question people are too shy to ask, which is what to buy with what.
I covered this in more detail in skincare website design.
3. Search content
Once the store can hold a visitor, bring in the ones who are already looking.
People type their skin questions into a search box every day. How to layer a serum and a moisturiser. Whether an ingredient is safe to use with another one. Those are questions your brand can answer honestly, on your own site, with a link to the product at the end.
Two rules keep this useful. Write about what you know and sell, and stay out of medical advice. And answer the question in the first paragraph. A reader who has to scroll past your brand story to find the answer goes back to the results.
This is slow. A new article can take months to be found. That is the reason to start it early, before you need it.
4. Social content
Now the feed.
For a small brand, social content has two jobs. It shows the product in use, which a product page cannot do well. And it keeps the brand recognisable, so that someone who sees a post and later lands on the store knows they are in the same place.
That second job is about consistency more than volume. The same type, the same way of photographing the product, the same tone. Three posts a week that look like your store do more than a daily post that could belong to anyone.
Texture, application and a routine filmed in real time are the formats I would make first. They answer what a buyer cannot learn from a packshot.
5. Ad creative
Ads come last in this order because they multiply whatever is already there.
When you do run them, make the ad and the page it leads to look like each other. Same product, same photo style, same promise in the same words. A visitor who clicks an ad about redness and lands on a general homepage has to start again, and many will not.
One product and one message per ad is enough. If the product needs its own page for that campaign, build one. I wrote about that in what goes on a skincare landing page.
I make the creative and leave the buying to the brand or its agency. If you do the same, agree before the campaign which page each ad leads to.
What can wait
A small brand does not need all forty tactics at once. These can wait until the five above are in place:
- a loyalty programme
- a quiz
- an app
- a presence on every platform
None of them is a bad idea. Each one needs upkeep, and a half-kept quiz or an empty second channel makes a brand look smaller than it is.
Email is the exception. Collect addresses from the first day, even if you only send one message a month. It is the one audience you do not rent.
Keep the claims straight
Skincare is a category where words have consequences. “Reduces the look of fine lines” and “removes wrinkles” are different claims, and the rules do not treat them the same. Check which ones you are allowed to make where you sell.
Decide your approved wording once. Use it on the product page, in the posts and in the ads. That protects you, and it has a second benefit. A brand that says the same true thing everywhere is easier to trust than one that gets louder in its ads.
Where to start this week
Pick your best seller. Open its page on a phone and time how long it takes to find who it is for and how to use it.
If that takes more than a few seconds, you have found the first job. Fix that page before you spend on anything that sends people to it.
If you want help with the store, the content or the creative, here is what I do for skincare brands, and here is where to start a project.
