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In the final episode of the Vogue Business and GRIN master class on building brand endurance in the creator economy, Jessica Colucci, director of PR and influencer marketing at Grande Cosmetics, joins Amy Rollinson, senior advisor at Vogue Business, to explore how brands can take on TikTok. As a beauty brand, visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are key to consumer engagement and discovery. Yet, all social platforms should not be treated as one, with TikTok requiring a unique approach to content creation and measures of success.
TikTok often acts as a search engine for consumers and content creators as product reviewers. Grande Cosmetics leans into personality-driven content, with its community of content creators elevating trust on the platform through relatability. The power of personality is also reflected in the regular presence of Alicia Grande on the platform, Grande Cosmetics’s founder and CEO. As Colucci puts it: “People want to see a personality on TikTok, not just the brand itself.”
Reactiveness is key to success on TikTok, with Grande Cosmetics noting the importance of an in-house content creation team who are able to act quickly on trends. Experimenting with these trends through a test-and-learn approach is also important. “You can’t be scared to put a video out there and it not perform well; it’s a learning process. There’s no one-size-fits-all with TikTok yet,” says Colucci.
Measuring success on TikTok is also vastly different from platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, with the platform centred around an algorithmically personalised feed. As Colucci puts it, “That’s the beauty of TikTok; any video can really catch the algorithm and go viral.” Therefore, follower count is not the most important metric here, and brands should instead focus on engagement, such as views and comments, with community building being of high importance. “You can have followers, but if no one’s watching the videos, no one’s going and buying those products,” says Colucci.
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