The role of the beauty advisor in promoting brand awareness is often enormously undervalued. By helping customers find beauty products they’ll love, beauty advisors are the mouthpiece for your brand in the retail environment. So how can you ensure that beauty advisors are falling in love with your brand and sharing that love with customers? Here are seven simple training tips for educating beauty advisors about your brand.
Let Them Try Your Product Themselves
In a survey of Ulta and JCPenney beauty advisors, 46% said that they were unlikely to recommend a product they had not tried themselves. That’s why gratis programs are so important. By giving beauty advisors the opportunity to test your product for themselves, you increase the likelihood that they’ll recommend it to customers on the sales floor. Beauty advisors see the results firsthand: nearly 71% of respondents said that sharing their personal experience with a product is the best way to convince customers to purchase it themselves.
Make Training More Fun
With hundreds of brands and thousands of products to remember, beauty advisors have to go through a lot of training that can often be monotonous and unengaging. Whether you’re training in-person or online, remember to make your materials fun and engaging. A list of benefits or huge chunks of text aren’t going to cut it: keep training points high level and mix it up with interesting anecdotes, engaging quizzes, and creative games that show off your brand’s personality.
Highlight Target Skin Concerns & Types Above All
There’s a lot to say about your product, but not everything deserves to make it into training. While deciding what to highlight in your training materials, consider this: nearly 62% of beauty advisors in our survey said the majority of customers come into stores looking for products that address a specific skin concern. Don’t forget to emphasize this point in your training–and don’t just say that your product is good for everyone. Having a specific customer profile and list of target skin concerns for your products will actually help them stand out from the rest.
Show Them How to Sell with Demo Tips
When asked to rate various training points in order of importance, our beauty advisors revealed demo tips as the most impactful information a brand can share. Demo tips tell beauty advisors how they can show your product off when they’re talking to a customer–and which points to emphasize to make the sale. Try to provide suggestions that are just a little different–like mixing your concealer with a cheek stain to create a creamy blush or showing how your cleansing oil works better than micellar water–to inspire beauty advisors.
Make Sure They Know How to Use Your Products
The majority of BAs in our survey agreed that the top reason that customers don’t see results from products is incorrect usage. This is something that beauty advisors can help with every time they make a sale. When you emphasize correct product usage with BAs, they can take that knowledge and share it with the customers buying your product. This increases the likelihood of customer satisfaction and repeat purchases.
Reward Them For Engaging With Your Brand
Remember that beauty advisors engage with hundreds of brands–so how can you make yours stand out from the rest? Consider ways that you can reward BAs for engaging with your brand instead of others. Whether its prizes or extra gratis, little tokens of your appreciation can go a long way.
Make a Personal Connection
For decades, BAs have had little direct interaction with the brands they support in stores every day. Feedback is filtered through layers of retailer management or brand training staff before it makes it back to the decision-makers at brand headquarters. When asked if they would provide feedback to brands if given the opportunity to message them directly, over 88% of BAs said they would be either somewhat likely or very likely to reach out with store insights. That’s information that could be valuable to your retail strategy! As you consider your training strategy, look for ways to create a connection with BAs and open the opportunity for interaction.
Here at Landing, we think it’s time to put the importance of beauty advisors at the forefront. Our first-of-its-kind beauty education app, BeautyFluent, improves training outcomes for brands and rewards beauty advisors for their influence. With targeted solutions for all seven tips highlighted by our survey, BeautyFluent was designed to create a more fulfilling experience for beauty retail professionals that have been historically undervalued and underestimated–unlocking a rewarding relationship between beauty advisors and the brands they love.
To learn how to join BeautyFluent as a brand partner, get in touch with our team at brands@landingintl.com.