How we earned 130+ links & pieces of targeted press coverage for a beauty brand from a single campaign…

Cosmetify is a comparison platform that helps beauty shoppers find the best prices on all of their favourite products, making it easy to explore over 200,000 products from 1,700 brands and 138 retailers.

Cosmetify had launched an awesome platform but had one main problem; very few people knew about it. Having worked with a number of PR agencies since launching, the client was concerned that coverage often didn’t link (meaning that opportunities to add SEO value were missed) and that digital PR results were inconsistent month on month.

Digitaloft was engaged in October 2019 to take digital PR success to the next level, with an agreed brief to launch a campaign which introduced the platform to new audiences and earned great editorial links to support the wider SEO strategy, whilst coming up with a concept which remained totally on-brand.

The target KPI was to earn a minimum of 15 linked pieces of coverage from the campaign.

Our prior experience working with clients in the fashion and beauty sectors had taught us one thing; that your campaigns have to create a real talking point to land coverage, given that a lot of space on such publications is given to product reviews and launches, celebrity features and more. 

If we wanted to land big results, we needed a concept that told a story the press couldn’t resist covering, but which journalists couldn’t launch themselves without our content.

Thankfully, we found this killer campaign concept.

The Cosmetify Index revealed the hottest beauty brands of 2019, sharing data-driven insights backed by search trends, social followings, and engagement metrics. 

From the hottest hair products to the fiercest fragrances, the campaign shared an insight into the show-stopping brands that consumers simply can’t get enough of.

We began by analysing multiple data points from authoritative sources (including Google Trends, Google & Ahrefs Keyword Planners, Instagram data and the Influencer Marketing Hub’s Engagement Calculator) which covered more than 1,500 beauty and cosmetics brands from around the world. Using this data, we were able to showcase those brands who we truly love the most, whilst also allowing us to pull out and visualise a number of additional stories:

• The most powerful individuals in the beauty industry
• The rising stars of the beauty industry
• The brands with the biggest cult social followings
• The most searched for beauty products & brands
• A breakdown of every country’s favourite brand

By including multiple stories, the campaign opened up opportunities to maximise coverage, as well as offering extra editorial value to increase the likelihood of earning links as opposed to just brand mentions.

To date, The Cosmetify Index has earned 135 links from 90 referring domains:

The campaign’s successes include earned links and coverage from publications including Elle, Popsugar, Yahoo, Bustle, Hypebae, Vogue, Glamour, Premium Beauty News, Fashion Journal, Beauty Matter, Cosmopolitan and more, placing the brand in front of their key target audience online.

The initial campaign target was 15 links from relevant publications; we earned links from just short of 100 unique domains at the end of the period of active promotion. 

The power of a great campaign concept, however, is that it has the power to go beyond the typical press publications.

Alongside press features and links, one of the top-ranked brands which we featured, Rude Cosmetics, launched a hero banner on their homepage to celebrate their inclusion, linking to the campaign. Six months later, this still takes pride of place at the top of their homepage:

The success of the campaign didn’t stop there, however. 

Millie Bobby Brown, of Stranger Things (and Florence by Mills) fame, shared her brand’s (and her own) inclusion on The Cosmetify Index on her Instagram story.

Whilst we were engaged primarily to earn great links to drive SEO success and land coverage on key publications, we had one of the most influential individuals in beauty (and TV) share the campaign on her Instagram story to her 32million followers. 

With brands paying thousands for influencer collaborations, we were successfully able to gain visibility from a key influencer without spending a penny on collaborations. We simply created a great piece of content that positioned her in a great light which she felt compelled to share … and that’s the reason why digital PR is such a powerful tactic – it goes way beyond SEO and does so much more than just build links.

Earned links from topically relevant sources continue to have a strong impact on organic visibility, and Cosmetify’s organic visibility has increased by 679% between September 2019 and March 2020:

As of April 2020, the site also ranks on the first page of Google for 1090 keywords, up from 260 in September 2019; an increase of 319% and for a combined total of 51,355 compared with 21,671.

The beauty industry is competitive, there’s no ignoring that fact. However, we rose to the challenge of launching a campaign that could break through the noise, use data to tell great stories and, ultimately, help position our client as industry experts, alongside building great links to support their SEO strategy… and we smashed it!