Makeup Eraser
As co-founder and COO at Makeup Eraser, Elexsis’ main focus is running and growing her company. Since Makeup Eraser’s birth, influencers have always been an important part of the brand’s growth and marketing strategy. Soon after the brand launched on Shopify, Elexsis saw that beauty gurus were creating YouTube videos featuring her product, and one video amassed almost six million views. Thrilled with the organic exposure for her brand, Elexsis attempted to recreate the viral interest in her product online by trying her hand at the “pay for play” approach to influencer marketing.
After partnering with a few micro-influencers, Elexsis was finding it difficult to estimate the direct impact these sponsored posts had on sales. However, Elexsis was very impressed with the quality of the content that micro-influencers were creating for her brand. That was when Elexsis realized that the content that the influencers produced was even more valuable than their reach. With only a small internal team, it was difficult and expensive to produce content in-house. In comparison, influencer-generated content was inexpensive and accessible.
Makeup Eraser now uses its influencer program as an always-on content engine that provides the brand with content for its landing pages, social media, paid ads, and retail store advertisements on- and off-line.
Connecting With Influencers
With Aspire, Elexsis can easily search through 700,000+ influencers to find people who produce on-brand, high-quality content that she can repurpose. Connect provides Elexsis with an overview of each influencer’s content, audience demographics, and average performance statistics so Elexsis can ensure she is investing in the right influencers every time. Unlike using Instagram, Elexsis can view dozens of influencers at once. She no longer has to spend hours clicking through Instagram to view a creator’s content.
Additionally, Aspire’s image search allows Elexsis to start a search based on images she loves. When Elexsis collects a stockpile of images that she knows perform well or that perfectly align with the Makeup Eraser aesthetic, she can simply drag and drop them into the search bar and source thousands of influencers who create content that is similar to the original image.
Managing Relationships
Once Elexsis finds the perfect influencers to partner with, she can easily create and send collaboration proposals at scale. Aspire eliminates the need for messy direct messages and emails. Elexsis can message influencers, negotiate contracts, approve content and make payments on one easy-to-read dashboard. Aspire takes the guesswork out of influencer marketing because brands are provided with a recommended price-per-post so Elexsis can ensure that she is staying within her budget. Aspire contracts also automatically give brands the usage rights to influencer-created content so Elexsis never has to worry about paper trails or involving her legal team when she repurposes content from her collaborations.
Organizing & Sharing Content
Aspire’s full-service solution not only allows Elexsis to connect with and manage influencers at scale, but she can now analyze, manage, and organize the content they produce. The Aspire’s content library allows the Makeup Eraser team to collect and organize all of the high quality imagery from influencer collaborations, eliminating the need to rely on screenshots of the content. The content library also allows her team to easily search through content by custom tags and filters, track what content they have licensing rights to, and then download the images and videos to repurpose on other channels.
Sourcing Content for the Sephora.com Launch
Makeup Eraser has been so impressed with the influencer-generated content they’ve received that they have repurposed it in in-store advertisements in several of their retailers — including Sephora.com and 238 Costco stores across the nation.
For example, Makeup Eraser is launching their recently acquired brand, Cellu-Cup, in Sephora stores. To prepare for the launch, Elexsis needed to provide Sephora with content that would be used on the product’s landing page on Sephora.com. Cellu-Cup is a brand that was originally based in France, and Elexsis wanted to add “the American touch” to the new content. Instead of trying to create content in-house, Elexsis ran a campaign on Aspire and was able to get all of the content she needed for the brand’s Sephora.com launch from influencers she partnered with on the Aspire platform.
Increasing Content Creation While Reducing Costs by 90%
Since partnering with Aspire, Elexsis has been able to increase content creation for Makeup Eraser on a massive scale.
Influencer-generated content is a fraction of the cost of professionally produced content, yet it does not lack in quality. Elexsis recalls spending $3,500 just for one professional video. For that price, she has received up to 10 videos or 30 pictures from influencers. That’s a 90% reduction of costs!
Always-On Content Engine
Since working with Aspire, Elexsis has been able to create long-term relationships with 50+ influencers that she knows can provide her with high quality content for product launches, paid ads, and various marketing campaigns.
The Makeup Eraser team no longer produces content in-house because, with the same budget, Elexsis can source 10 times the amount of content by partnering with influencers. And because influencer-generated content is a byproduct of her influencer marketing campaigns, she is able to extract the maximum value from each investment. Now, all of the content that Makeup Eraser uses in paid ads, on their website, and on their owned social media channels is repurposed from influencer partnerships.
Influencer-generated content is not only inexpensive and accessible, it is high performing. Unlike brand-produced content, influencer-generated content is diverse, and highly engaging because it comes from real fans of the brand. For this reason, Elexsis has seen amazing results when using influencer-generated content in paid ads on Facebook and Instagram.
