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Title of the piece

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Title of the piece

Lorem ipsum ergo sum this is a caption blurb about the article.

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By Sean Hargrave

For beauty brand Clinique, YouTube had traditionally been a top-of-funnel activity that helped raise awareness. That all evolved in the challenging final quarter of 2020. Like retail brands around the world, the business had to face up to the busiest time of the shopping calendar being accompanied by a series of lockdown measures that affected consumer confidence in high street shopping, and eventually saw yet another Covid-enforced closure of non-essential stores across Europe. The brand realised Q4 2020 would not be business as usual, and that its advertising had to drive digital sales by making an impact on the middle and end of the purchasing funnel, boosting consideration and purchase intent directly to Clinique.co.uk. Karen Ehrlich, marketing and consumer engagement director at Clinique, remembers it was a particularly testing time for the business. “With physical stores closed, the focus of the business was to drive consumers to Clinique’s website, by highlighting the brand’s gifting value and ease of shopping online,” she reflects. “Holiday is a very important time for us, when we both recruit customers as well as welcome our loyal customers back, as people buy for themselves or purchase gifts. We needed to deliver on some very strong sales predictions and, with lockdown measures in place, it meant we had to rely far more heavily on digital than previously.”

How Clinique’s YouTube approach evolved from awareness to full-funnel strategy

Clinique knew it had to drive digital DTC sales in Q4 2020 and one of the ways to achieve this was evolving its YouTube strategy beyond awareness, to drive efficient site traffic.

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The Clinique marketing team knew it had to make digital channels work harder than before to drive up holiday season sales on its online site. This need to turn brand sentiment into purchases prompted Clinique to investigate how YouTube strategy can be evolved to play a role beyond the top of the funnel. Ahead of the holidays, Clinique decided to test this new approach with the launch of a new product, Clinique Moisture Surge Intense, in September 2020. The objective was to determine whether the video platform’s TrueView for Action format (now called Video Action Campaigns) can play an incremental role to their awareness driving strategy, which Clinique already consistently activated, to encourage consumers to progress through the purchase funnel. The test was successful and proved TrueView for Action format drives efficient site traffic and strong ROI based on Marketing Mix Modeling. The question then moved on to how it could be refined further for the wider Clinique range in the run-up to Black Friday and Christmas. The main lesson from the September trial, which guided the rest of the quarter’s activity, was what Ehrlich describes as adopting a single-minded approach across all elements of the campaigns to align to the key objective. “If the focus of a campaign is driving performance, then you need to align accordingly the campaign’s advertising format, messaging and creative, and then you need to think about the right targeting,” she says. To get the right type of traffic – the most likely to convert – Clinique relied on the extra help of Google data to determine seasonal shoppers on the platform that were likely to be in-market for beauty purchases. This went beyond demographic and affinities data, that would have sufficed for an awareness campaign, to look for video viewers who had shown an interest in the category and were showing signs of being in-market for a purchase. It also involved remarketing to people who had visited the Clinique website.

Testing a new approach

"We needed to deliver on some very strong sales predictions and, with lockdown measures in place, it meant we had to rely far more heavily on digital than previously."

And YouTube is in a league of its own compared to the other alternatives. ■

— Karen Ehrlich, Clinique

The September test showed Clinique also the impact of creative assets in driving performance, and this also shaped how the brand approached the platform for the busy Q4 holiday season. The only problem was that it did not have the creative to go with the new campaign focus. This was another area where Google could help. It worked in partnership with Clinique to reuse social assets to create six 15-second video adverts. This involved product focused animations, as well as a version where models used the products on their skin. Both vertical and landscape formats were created for optimised performance. “We had assets that worked well in social and so Google worked with us to repurpose them for our video creative,” Ehrlich says. “It was quite amazing how quickly we worked. We got the assets produced and the campaign set up and ready to go in just two weeks. Our focus was always on the product and its value with a very strong call to action – that was what Google advised and it’s what worked well for us. It was very interesting to see how different calls to action and creative assets performed and, in the end, the creative that outperformed them all was the one with models applying the products.”

Creating assets at speeD

Clinique needed to drive online sales through digital channels to hit strong financial forecasts

With the campaign aimed at driving qualified traffic to its own online store, Clinique was in a good position to measure the impact of the activity. For Ehrlich, analysing the Q4 campaign figures vindicated the new approach. While the team were hopeful of a positive set of results against a backdrop of difficult trading conditions, she reveals they were pleasantly surprised by the outcome. “We were pretty confident that we could produce good results, but the results were better than we’d expected,” she says. “We were able to reach our target audience, who were in-market for beauty products, and so the average click-through rate for the campaign was 21% higher than the industry average, with the best performing ad achieving a lift of 127%. We drove a lot of qualified traffic to our site at a lower cost per site visit.” Brand lift studies also crucially showed a lift in purchase intent, with a corresponding lift in searches for both the brand and its products. Ehrlich is clear the lessons for Clinique were that while driving top of mind awareness and reach is important, Clinique could also use YouTube to drive mid and lower funnel objectives. The lesson has been applied to campaigns in 2021 that have again looked at influencing shopper behaviour throughout the full funnel, allowing the brand to drive branding and awareness campaigns side by side to driving performance campaigns. The real lesson, Ehrlich says, is that Clinique now understands the importance of setting the right objective for each campaign and then being single-minded in executing it. ■

Results exceeded expectations

* TrueView for Action campaigns have been revamped as Video Action Campaigns with an average of 20% more conversions per dollar spent (vs. TrVA)

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