As 2024 kicks off, TikTok Shop is expected to be a central theme within beauty brand retail strategies.
TikTok aims to grow the size of its U.S. e-commerce business tenfold, to as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to Bloomberg. And beauty brands like Benefit Cosmetics are equally ambitious about their growth and preeminence on TikTok Shop.
Since joining the TikTok Shop beta program in March 2023, Benefit has sold well over 87,000 product units, according to its own TikTok Shop. But the brand has even larger ambitions for TikTok Shop moving forward. A unique selling point of TikTok is its product and brand discovery capacity, which has led the app to become a notable search competitor to Google among younger people. Toto HaBa, svp of global omni-marketing for Benefit Cosmetics, said Benefit wants to lean into that trend to uncover new audiences. He said he could see the brand’s TikTok Shop sales “easily tripling or quadrupling” in size in 2024. The LVMH-owned brand does not disclose overall sales.
“Benefit understands this is an emerging platform, and we are innovation partners with TikTok. So 2024 is a period where we want to help define what the future of social shopping will be on TikTok [by] being able to be the trailblazers and leading the innovation,” said Haba.
Haba referred to Benefit’s presence on TikTok as “decentralized,” meaning multiple accounts exist for different regions and countries. This is typical of Benefit’s social strategy on other platforms, where people can find a Benefit Australia account on Instagram and a Benefit Cosmetics Middle East YouTube account, for example. Benefit has over 30 TikTok channels, and TikTok allows each country to have its own TikTok Shop account. In addition to the U.S., Benefit has a TikTok Shop for the U.K.
Much like The Ordinary and Estée Lauder, LVMH-owned Benefit also has a gated affiliate program for TikTok Shop. Benefit vets every prospective affiliate content creator, which includes evaluating their content to assess brand alignment and reviewing their average engagement, said Haba. There are currently about 2,000 affiliate content creators.
“While our approach [affiliate sales] is a short-term barrier, in terms of quickly increasing our sales, we firmly think it is the right long-term strategy to maintain our prestige brand image within TikTok,” he said. “The more diverse you can get with the creators [a brand] has, the more diverse the content is about your brand. The TikTok algorithm is good at matching content with audiences, so it serves a brand better to have a lot of different choices.”
Although Benefit joined TikTok Shop in March 2023, its familiarity with its in-app shopping experiences is extensive due to Benefit’s presence on Douyin, the Chinese name for TikTok in Asia. On Douyin, livestreams drive between 80-90% of Benefit’s in-app revenue, said Haba, while on TikTok in the U.S., the affiliate program has driven that same percentage of sales. However, the tide may be turning. Haba said that livestream moments on TikTok in the U.S. have driven closer to 40% of in-app sales since at least November. Benefit hosts livestream shopping events at least twice a week for two hours each, with viewership ranging from a few thousand to “tens of thousands,” Haba said. The month-over-month audience growth in November was over 20x as TikTok Shop officially went live app-wide. Additionally, according to TikTok, Benefit was ranked in the top 10 livestreams among TikTok’s large business beauty brand accounts in early December, based on sales.
Like Tarte, Benefit also customizes its merchandising strategy to appeal to TikTok Shop customers. Benefit exclusively sold its newest mascara, Fan Fest, for 48 hours on TikTok Shop. The brand also hosted a 24-hour livestream event coinciding with the 48-hour exclusivity. In addition, it sold a TikTok-exclusive product bundle pairing the new mascara with its Get Unblocked Makeup-Removing Cleansing Oil for $30, compared to $67 if sold separately. At the time of this publishing, Benefit has sold over 48,000 units of the Fan Fest mascara.
Benefit’s TikTok livestream episodes are built around themes, such as a product category or a launch. They include a mix of micro-challenges and contests to provoke engagement from viewers, as well as Q&A sessions focused on questions from the audience. Haba said that the more engagement and longer viewing times a livestream receives, the more the TikTok algorithm will push the livestream to people’s For You main page. The livestreams are often hosted by Maggie Ford Danielson, director of brand outreach and brand ambassadors for Benefit Cosmetics, or Autumn Estelle, a licensed cosmetologist and U.S. national brow artist for Benefit Cosmetics.
“In the last year on TikTok, we have seen wild success — not just in terms of products going viral, but also in products going viral and that leading [viewers] to purchase,” said Ford Danielson in a Glossy story at the time of the Fan Fest launch.
