Indie Beauty Expo

If you haven’t heard of Indie Beauty Expo (IBE), you’re in for a treat. IBE is a platform designed to recognize, showcase and celebrate independent beauty brands and to support the growth of the entrepreneurs behind them. It’s like #WomenEmpoweringWomen IRL and we are here for it. IBE isn’t an only-child though (not that we have anything against ya’ll). They’re part of a larger entity called Indie Beauty Media Group, which houses Beauty Independent, the definitive content destination for beauty entrepreneurs, BeautyX Summit series focused on entrepreneurial learning and networking, and Retail Partnerships, such as ShopTheExpo.

Long story short, IBE retained yours truly as their social media partner to increase overall brand awareness, promote Indie Beauty Expo LA 2018, and drive ticket sales to the 2018 LA expo.

02 Strategy

We dove in with a comprehensive audit of Indie Beauty Expo’s brand aesthetic on their primary social platform, Instagram. After a deep dive into the brand’s values and key messaging pillars, we concluded that their Instagram feed did not accurately reflect their entrepreneurial mission and core values.

We obviously couldn’t let that slide on our watch, so our creative team built out a series of audience personas and coinciding visual representations of each (we love a mood board, okay?), to attract key audiences to their feed while clearly visualizing their mission to support entrepreneurs and indie beauty consumers on their journeys through knowledge-building and collective discovery. It was legit a full-circle opportunity we could not pass up.

From there, our social team built content pillars and a coinciding communications architecture to guide our social efforts in terms of audience targeting and messaging. As a result, new visitors to IBE’s Instagram feed were met with an inspiring, thought-provoking, and empowering visual representation of their brand that spoke to them at various points in their entrepreneurial and consumer journey (because hello, entrepreneurs are not robots. We shop, too).

Taking stock of the resources at hand, wimze leveraged past and current Indie Beauty Expo exhibitors to implement a brand advocacy program that turned Indie Beauty Expo exhibitors into representatives for the brand. Our team worked alongside IBE’s internal team to supply creative content and copy direction to 300 IBE-exhibiting brands across Instagram and lead a series of synchronized outreach efforts that flooded their target audience with IBE-branded content and a powerful message in support of the upcoming event’s mission. Brand advocacy outreach ramped up in the weeks leading up to IBE’s LA expo, and our team instructed advocates to utilize the campaign hashtag #IBELA2018 to promote awareness of the event.

The party didn’t stop there, friends. Leveraging major brands in the beauty space, wimze worked with IBE’s PR team to strategize, craft copy and curate creative for a series of Instagram giveaways to grow the brand’s audience just before show time and encourage engagement leading up to the big day. Barriers to entry for all giveaways included following IBE on Instagram and tagging friends in the comments. 24-hour deadlines created a sense of urgency, and giveaway partners promoted each campaign across their social channels.

We’re rounding the finish line here. Stay with us. Finally, our paid media planners implemented a paid ads campaign across Facebook and Instagram that ran for a two-week period leading up to IBE LA 2018 with the goal of selling tickets to the SHOP INDIE event. Working from the audience personas we outlined previously, our media team segmented audiences and promoted creative that spoke to each audience’s specific needs. Ads sent users to various customized landing pages that were A/B tested to maximize sales.