Guest Blog: People buy from people – the power of strategic staffing, Carina Filek, Elevate Staffing

Carina Filek, managing partner, Elevate Staffing UK & US discusses promotional staff selection in the beauty and cosmetics sector.

Engaging and on-brand promotional staff are key to successfully carrying out any sampling, guerrilla or experiential marketing campaign, but they play a particularly important role for any company operating in the beauty and cosmetics industry.

In most markets, a product can be expected to be freely and fairly tried and tested by consumers. But the beauty and cosmetics market is a bit different. There are two big hurdles facing any business that wants to launch or promote a beauty product.

Firstly, the beauty and cosmetics industry is incredibly competitive, which makes marketing anything problematic. With an insane amount of competition and rival, alternative products everywhere you look, each with their own marketing campaigns, brands need to fight for consumer attention.

Secondly, beauty and cosmetic products are, by nature, extremely personal items. We grow attached to the brands we like and humans are resistant to change. That’s the case with everything in life, but especially with makeup and skin care products. We build up experiences and preferences over time and the positions we take up and the set of beliefs we develop are difficult to shift and change.

However, almost anything can be achieved with a sophisticated approach to marketing.

In addition to possessing a quality product, the promotional staff you use in any campaign have a massive impact. Staffing should never be an after thought. With short engagement time, promotional staff need to understand the market, be targeted, accurate and effective. In addition to these elements, staff for beauty and cosmetics campaigns need to be passionate about the type of product they are promoting, allowing for their own personal experiences to support the engagement. Considering the very personal nature of the products at hand, this value-add of personal experience from the staff should not be undervalued.

We’ve worked with various established beauty brands sourcing perfect-fit promotional staffing.

P20 is a skincare business that needed our help. P20 sells water resistant sun protection and they wanted a different way of promoting their range of skin care products. We created a campaign to help people beat sunburn that targeted city centres, university campuses and UK beaches over the course of one summer. With over 60,000 products distributed, we helped deliver some huge brand awareness and the strategy was carried out to perfection. As with any project, this campaign required promotional staff with a special set of skills. We specifically assembled a team of people who were health conscious and knowledgeable enough to stay true to the P20 brand ethos and personality. They needed to be able to convey the long-term benefits that come from using P20 products in the heat, which is why we developed a dedicated training plan for new recruits. With over 11,000 samples distributed over 25 different locations and spanning 1,000 hours of staffing work, we proved our credentials again.

We’ve also worked with Soap & Glory, in both the UK and US, across a range of programmes in retail, campus and festival environments. Soap & Glory is a fresh, fearless beauty brand aimed at fun-loving young women. Working closely with the brand we strategically planned an extremely bespoke recruitment campaign to help us support Soap & Glory to deliver exceptional results through one-to-one engagement. We wanted a promotional team like no other, a team of glamorous and inspirational women who would get results – Soap & Glory’s very own ‘Glory Girls’. As good as the Soap & Glory products are, we knew that showcasing the items themselves wouldn’t be impactful enough, such is the nature of the beauty industry these days. The Glory Girls carried out 50,000 onsite product trials, encouraged in excess of 30,000 meaningful engagements with consumers, distributed more than 25,000 samples and delivered 4,000 product makeover demos.

No matter how good your product is, the promotional staff will decide whether your sampling campaign is a success or not.

Find out more about Elevate Staffing here