Creators' Power: Inside Rare Beauty's 98% TikTok Ad Conversions

Rare Beauty's Challenge

Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty was founded with a mission to destigmatize mental health and celebrate individuality by redefining what “beautiful” means. To take advantage of the authentic, storytelling nature of TikTok, Rare Beauty highlights Selena’s personality, as well as those of creators who love, and genuinely use its cosmetics. Despite the powerhouse of talent on its roster, the rapid pace and viral nature of the channel means Rare Beauty must constantly refine its content strategy. With Dash Hudson’s TikTok Insights, the team combines their social media savvy with enhanced access to data to drive brand success.

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Optimizing the Time and Impact of Founder Talent

While Rare Beauty reaps the benefits of having a famous founder as the face of its brand, the team also recognizes the power of its burgeoning creator community. To strike the right balance, the brand leverages Dash Hudson’s TikTok Insights to measure key performance metrics such as average time watched, engagement rate, reach, and Entertainment Score in order to understand how different styles of content perform. This helps the team identify the optimal moments in which to feature Selena, and it’s working—videos featuring the brand’s founder receive on average, 211% more video views than the brand’s typical engagement rate.

Quantifying Top Creator Content

Rare Beauty has also found success by collaborating with creators from its TikTok community on content ranging from makeup tutorials to mental wellness tips. Leveraging data from the Your Posts tab of the Dash Hudson platform enables the Rare Beauty team to identify the highest performing creators along with which styles of content keep viewers tuned in. On average, these creator highlights on Rare Beauty’s TikTok see a 16% longer watch time, indicating viewers find this mainly educational style of content valuable and engaging.

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"Creator driven content continues to perform well for us and we see the impact of the platform throughout the customer journey. For us TikTok is about entertaining, deepening our connection with the community, and making people feel good. Which aligns with our brand’s mission of creating makeup made to feel good in, without hiding what makes you unique."

Ashley Murphy,
Senior Director, Consumer Marketing

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Maximizing Paid Campaign Conversions

The Rare Beauty team also sees impactful business results from their paid initiatives on TikTok. In alignment with its organic strategy, the team works with its advertising agency Booyah to share both Selena and creator content as ads. Ads featuring Selena are an important part of Rare Beauty’s awareness strategy, and drive 770% more average video views to completion than the brand’s other ad content. 

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Creator ads, on the other hand, are highly effective in achieving Rare Beauty’s conversion goals, suggesting that audiences are influenced by content featuring educational aspects and a diverse range of voices. Though these videos achieve a lower view rate than videos featuring Selena, the brand’s TikTok creator ads drove almost 98% of recent ad campaign conversions, indicating a high intent to buy from viewers. 

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"Rare Beauty finds that user-generated content performs the best, as it allows the user to feel like they have a friend in their pocket. Yes, Rare Beauty has the power of Selena behind them, but we continue to learn that you don’t need a high-profile celebrity or influencer for successful marketing on TikTok. Instead, discover relatable individuals or influencers to your target demo."

Kara Cascio-Mariana,
Account Director at Booyah Advertising