Chris Nathan, Marketing Analyst, CreatorIQ10.19.20
The beauty industry has always been a natural fit for influencer marketing campaigns.
With visual-forward platforms like Instagram and YouTube, it’s easy for influencers to share tips, tricks and product reviews with fans. As such, beauty consistently generates large volumes of sponsored content which drive high engagement.
Leveraging influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ’s new Share of Influence report for beauty, we highlighted the beauty brands that received high shares of influence in August. That month, the industry generated 144K sponsored posts from 67K creators with 1K brands sponsoring content. (Data includes Instagram and YouTube posts).
Key Highlights
- 2.10% — average engagement rate on Instagram for sponsored content within the beauty category in August, a decrease from July’s 2.2%.
- 661K — average estimated post reach
- ColourPop Cosmetics was the No. 1 brand by share of influence (SOI), with 9.46% SOI and an estimated media value of $161.2 million.
- Selena Gomez had the most-engaged-with sponsored post in the beauty industry, with 1.5 million likes and 11K comments -- and a 107.8 million estimated reach.
How Brands Are Stacking Up
With a SOI of 9.46%, ColourPop Cosmetics leads for beauty brands in August, although Milk Makeup, No. 11 for SOI, had a higher engagement rate (4.45%). And although Huda Beauty had a lower SOI and engagement rate than ColourPop, it had a higher estimated media value ($181.9 million).ColourPop’s top creator, AnaCheri, had an estimated reach of 7.83M for sponsored posts with an average engagement rate of 0.80%. Notably, she was the only one of the brand’s top-five creators that was on Instagram (the rest were on YouTube). But it’s worth pointing out that the top three posts for ColourPop came from different creators: Kathleen Fuentes, NiinaSecrets Store and FlawlessDolls.
It’s also worth examining which brands experienced SOI increases or decreases compared to the previous month. Notably, Elf Cosmetics saw an 83% SOI increase, propelling it into August’s top 20 brands at No. 13; the brand also had a higher engagement rate (3.31%) than three of the top five brands by SOI. On the flip side, Wella saw the biggest SOI decrease, 86% compared to July.
Nano Influencers Had the Best Average Engagement Rate
As CreatorIQ studies have shown, influencer size can play a key role in average engagement rates. Creators with smaller audiences often command a better engagement rate than mega-celebrities, partly because their followers tend to be passionate and less broadly distributed across niches.For the beauty industry in August, nano influencers (1K-10K) had the highest average engagement rate (8.13%), followed by micro influencers (10K-100K followers) with 3.03%. Mega influencers (1M+ followers) were in third place with a 2.77% average engagement rate while macro influencers (100K-1M followers) had the lowest engagement at 2.66%.
A Note About Our Methodology
Our Methodology:Share of Influence considers the volume of creator activity, the realness of creators' audiences, and the performance of content for each contender brand.These three measures make SOI a powerful representation of a brand's influencer marketing presence and impact.
