9 skin care marketing tips to make your brand stand out

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Skin care marketing can be a daunting task in a fiercely competitive industry. According to Statista, the global skin care industry is valued at $187 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow by about 13% by 2028, worth more than $210 billion by 2028. 

With countless brands vying for customer attention, you need to find a way to stand out with your skin care marketing. 

And we’re going to help you do just that. In this article, we’ll reveal nine proven tips on how to sell skin care products online and boost your sales. 

Let’s go!

What is skin care marketing?

Skin care marketing involves specific marketing techniques and channels to promote skin care products to the right audience. Done well, it will build trust, establish your brand identity, and cultivate brand advocates to grow your skin care brand.

It’s important to note that although there are similarities, skin care marketing differs from general marketing. It requires a distinct and targeted approach. 

Here’s how it’s unique:

• Target demographics: Your audience could range from teens to middle-aged women. Or it could be men — that skin care market is growing fast and is expected to reach a valuation of $30.5 billion by 2032.
• Emphasis on education: The marketing strategy for personal care products goes beyond selling products. You’re also teaching customers about ingredients, skin types, and proper routines.
• Convincing visual content: Before-and-after photos and video tutorials are powerful tools in your skin care marketing strategy. You need to show real results from using your products.
• Transparency and trust building: Skin care advertising requires transparency about product ingredients, their sources, and manufacturing processes. Consumers are increasingly conscious about what they put on their skin, and being transparent builds trust.
• Emotional connection: Skincare marketing ideas often tap into desires for youth, beauty, and self-care. The most successful brands have learned how to leverage this approach effectively.

9 skin care marketing tips to boost your brand

Let’s examine nine strategies for selling skin care products to clients, which will help you achieve your objectives and boost sales.

1. Craft captivating product descriptions

Your product descriptions often set the first impression for your skin care products. Here’s how to make your product descriptions stand out:

• Use sensory language: Describe how the product feels, smells, and looks to create a vivid image in the customer’s mind
• Highlight benefits: Explain how your product can help the customer achieve their skin care goals
• Address specific skin concerns: Mention how your product solves common skin problems like acne, dryness, or wrinkles
• Keep it readable: Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and subheadings to make your descriptions easy to read
• Include social proof: Adding customer testimonials to product descriptions makes them more relatable and trustworthy 

A good example of an effective product description is this one from Bubble Slam Dunk. The brand highlights key benefits, details specific ingredients and their effects, and provides clear usage instructions. It also breaks down the information into short paragraphs and statements, making all key points easy to read. 

2. Invest in high-quality images

When marketing skin care products, visual media plays a vital role in convincing potential customers. Creatively captured, high-quality images can help bring your products to life. 

Here are a few fundamentals to keep in mind:

• Contextual settings: Show products in bathroom settings or on vanities to help customers visualize use
• Use ingredients as props: Feature key ingredients in your product shots to add a sense of reality and authenticity
• Add human touch: Including hands or models alongside your products in an image makes it more relatable
• Use macro photography: Capture intricate product details like product shimmer, texture, or even packaging to add depth

Take a look at this closeup image Bobbi Brown used in one of its emails. By showcasing a model applying the lip balm at the center of this email, the image becomes more relatable and engaging. It immediately draws the reader’s attention to what the product is, looks like, and will look like on them: 

3. Be active on social media

Social media is one of the best channels for skin care marketing. The audience that skin care brands are targeting is mostly active on social channels. 

Investing in social media campaigns can help you reach a larger audience and build a brand presence effectively. 

At the same time, social media is extremely competitive. Here are a few actionable tips for a successful campaign:

• Choose visual platforms: Focus on Instagram and TikTok for skin care marketing. These platforms are perfect for streaming video content, such as quick product tutorials and user-generated content.
• Educate your followers: Social media platforms are the perfect avenue to educate followers about your products and how they can address common skin problems. You can also share skin care routines and showcase real results. 
• Engage with interactive posts: Invite your followers to interact with your brand. You can do this through posts like “Guess the ingredient” quizzes, “Skin type” polls as well as Q&A sessions with the experts.

Take a look at how CeraVe collaborated with a dermatologist to run a highly interactive Q&A session. Collaborating with an expert helps a brand to establish greater credibility, which in turn gives potential customers the trust and peace of mind that CeraVe’s products will meet their needs. As you can see in the following image, this resulted in over 9,100 bookmarks and more than half a million likes on TikTok:

4. Take advantage of email marketing

Email marketing is an effective way to communicate directly with your customers, nurture relationships, and drive sales.

To succeed, focus on building a quality subscriber list, creating valuable content, and personalization. 

Automation is key in helping you deliver timely, relevant content throughout the customer journey.

Omnisend is an advanced email and SMS marketing platform for skin care marketing. Some of its standout features include:

• Powerful segmentation
• Seamless combination of email, SMS, and push notifications
• Product reviews integration
• One-click integration with ecommerce platforms, including WooCommerce
• Automated workflows
• Smart reporting
• Customizable and easy-to-use templates

Take a look at this engaging skin care newsletter template you can utilize for your brand. The design is clear and modern. You can use it to feature your products, educate your audience, and add multiple CTA buttons to ease the buying process:

5. Integrate SMS marketing

Don’t ignore the powerful effects of SMS marketing. Implementing this strategy enables you to reach customers almost instantly and has a significantly high open rate. 

Here’s how to make SMS marketing work for your skin care brand:

• Get permission: Always ask customers to opt into SMS marketing
• Keep it short: SMS messages should be concise and to the point
• Personalize it: Address subscribers by their name and tailor messages based on their preferences
• Offer value: Send exclusive deals, early access to sales, or useful skin care tips
• Time it right: Time your messages when your target audience will most likely engage with them
• Include a clear CTA: Tell recipients exactly what action you want them to take 

This SMS sample by Omnisend is a great example of how to place clear and concise CTAs:

Let’s look at a real-world example. Divatress, an online store selling beauty products, used Omnisend to integrate SMS marketing into its strategy. The results were impressive. 

Just three months of sales from its SMS campaign paid for a full year of using Omnisend. The SMS campaigns drove $123,000 in sales over the first year. 

6. Select the optimal ecommerce platform for your needs

Choosing the right ecommerce platform for your brand is an essential factor in marketing skin care products. This affects everything, from your store design to product display, payment options, and the overall buying experience.

Let’s compare some of the best options out there. 

1. WooCommerce

For skin care brands, WooCommerce often stands out due to its WordPress integration, which allows for powerful content marketing through blogging. Using this feature, the best WooCommerce stores can attract relevant website traffic. 

It also offers unmatched customization upon setting up your store. 

Key features

• Open-source and self-hosted
• Unlimited products and categories
• Built-in blogging capabilities

2. Shopify

Shopify is a user-friendly, all-in-one solution that’s perfect for skin care startups wanting a quick setup with built-in marketing tools. 

Apart from that, Shopify offers specialized features like subscription boxes for regular skin care regimens or virtual try-ons for makeup products.

Key features

• All-in-one hosted solution
• Mobile-responsive themes
• Abandoned cart recovery

3. Wix

Wix is a beginner-friendly ecommerce platform with an intuitive drag-and-drop design. This feature allows skin care brands to easily create visually appealing product pages that highlight the texture and benefits of their formulations. 

Moreover, Wix’s built-in blogging feature allows you to create valuable content to boost your brand’s SEO efforts and establish authority in your industry. 

Key features

• AI-powered web design assistant
• Custom domain and hosting
• Mobile optimization

7. Collaborate with influencers

With 69% of consumers trusting influencer recommendations over brands, influencer collaboration is a must when considering how to market skin care products. 

Here’s how to collaborate with influencers effectively:

• Choose the right influencer type: Skincare marketing typically fares better with micro-influencers. This is because they’re more relatable and have higher engagement rates.
• Prioritize authenticity: Work with influencers who genuinely love your products and have authority in the skin care niche. Their enthusiasm for your brand will come across as genuine to their followers.
• Sign a contract with clear guidelines: Establish a formal agreement that outlines:
  • The type of content to be created and ownership guidelines
  • Product details and brand voice guidelines
  • Payment terms and conditions

This collaboration between Live Tinted and TikTok influencer Aisha Nur is a great example of a skin care brand leveraging influencer marketing. 

The influencer promotes the brand by explaining its ingredients and benefits while demonstrating its effects. She shows how this brand of sunscreen doesn’t have a white cast, which is its unique selling point: 

8. Experiment with paid advertising

Paid advertising can also boost your skin care marketing efforts by allowing you to reach new audiences quickly. 

Here are some of the paid ad options you can consider for your brand:

• Social media ads: Platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be used for detailed targeting, such as carousel ads to showcase product ranges, video ads for tutorials, and story ads for limited-time offers
• Google Ads: Use search ads to reach people actively looking for skin care solutions on search engines
• Retarget website visitors: Showcase ads on Facebook, Instagram, and across the Google Display Network to people who’ve visited your site but haven’t purchased
• Instream ads: Consider creating short video ads that you run in the middle of beauty or skin care-related content
• Display ads: Place banner ads on relevant beauty and lifestyle websites to increase brand visibility

9. Explore traditional advertising options

While digital marketing is what’s in vogue, brick-and-mortar advertising techniques can still be highly effective for skin care brands. The good old methods can help you reach audiences that might not be as active online. 

That said, consider the following traditional advertising methods in your skin care marketing efforts:

• Print ads
• Direct mail
• In-store displays
• Radio ads
• Outdoor advertising
• Event sponsorships

Wrap up

There you have it — some of the most reliable skin care marketing tips to make your brand stand out. Remember to leverage product descriptions, high-quality images, social media platforms, and SMS and email marketing. 

Also, conduct proper research when choosing the best ecommerce platform for your brand. Don’t ignore the power of influencer marketing and paid advertising. 

Lastly, traditional advertising options continue to be relevant and effective, so you may want to see if that’s a good fit for your brand as well. 

Now, go put your best face forward and watch your brand glow.