"A belief in something revolutionary: that business could be a force for good. We’ve never been your average cosmetics company, with over 40 years of campaigning, change-making and smashing beauty industry standards – and we’re still going strong."
This is the origin story of The Body Shop, and an ideal the social media team in charge of The Body Shop Indonesia carries into everything they do. From an Instagram story that really resonates to solving a customer question with care, it all adds up to a great brand experience. To ensure every touchpoint is meaningful, The Body Shop Indonesia believes a data mindset is key. Here is their story.
A message of sustainability needs a sustainable approach
The Body Shop is a well-loved brand bringing sustainable products and practices to their customer base. Their marketing strategy strives to highlight this purpose, but they must continually vie for customer attention and loyalty, especially on social media where the sea of voices is a lot to contend with. For The Body Shop Indonesia, data has become their most valuable asset, helping them make the right decisions to stand out as an ecommerce powerhouse. But it hasn’t always been easy.
Before having the right system in place, it was harder for the teams to use their data effectively. Rizky Puji Lestarina, Social Media Manager at The Body Shop Indonesia, shared some of their past pains using native analytics alone: "Social is all about data. When we would go to the native platforms for insights, it definitely took a lot of time to record and analyze. The data was harder to understand and the insights lacked flexibility and a historical view."
Now, the team can take in insights from everywhere to build a full picture of what’s happening. Emplifi’s unified platform has become their go-to place to access all the insights they need to make better decisions. "Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud gives us a great understanding of our organic performance, as well as how we fare against our competitors," said Lestarina. "When we want to benchmark our performance, we can analyze different metrics and judge whether we are doing well or falling behind."
And when the brand experience is on the line, this holistic approach serves The Body Shop Indonesia’s main goals from brand awareness to customer loyalty.
"Emplifi helps me understand insights better than ever. It’s very easy to create user-friendly reports and make our own custom comparisons, for example, against our historical performance, competitors, and the industry," said Rizky Puji Lestarina, Social Media Manager of The Body Shop Indonesia.
Using data to discover opportunities
The Body Shop Indonesia constantly iterates on their creative strategy to meet their audiences’ needs. Relying on indicative metrics such as Average Interaction per 1,000 followers to get a more qualitative benchmark of their own performance, they have uncovered many insights gems that may have been missed had they not been so tuned in.
Like many brands, their social media strategy has changed a lot over the years. In the past, the team pushed out a lot of content that was mostly in English. As their community grew and became more connected, the brand responded to a shift in consumers’ attitudes and characteristics. They decided to loosen up the formality and tone of their message, and, to be more locally relevant, they used Bahasa Indonesian. They felt confident in their decisions to make the change because of what the data was telling them. As Rizky Puji Lestarina said, "When we can get detailed insights from our historical data, it allows us to see true growth in our performance."
Following data can also lead to unexpected activation opportunities. Brands who take on those opportunities reap major benefits. For The Body Shop, this insight came from one of their campaigns that featured a man. When the campaign received great feedback, they saw that their male audience was much larger than they expected, but more shy to interact. Rizky Puji Lestarina shared the lesson here: “You never really know who your true audiences are until you truly ask the right question.”
Co-creating the brand with the community
As people spend more time online, brands have become even more embedded into the fabric of daily life. Brands who can make content activations feel seamless make the biggest impact. The Body Shop Indonesia has made sure their brand touchpoints do more than just push the hard sell, but add value too. Using advocate voices and micro-influencers as part of a dynamic content strategy has proven effective.
Rizky Puji Lestarina explained why: "While social media is a way to build brand awareness, we want people to do more than consider our products through informative content. We also share meaningful feedback from our audiences and reshare user-generated content that expresses their loyalty to the brand. Even with the fall of organic reach, organic interactions have become more meaningful."
Meeting expectations by listening to audiences
As they look to the future, audience advocacy will remain key. Thus, being able to catch feedback with social media listening will become even more important. Handling everything that 2021 has in store, it will be more important for The Body Shop Indonesia to have an organized look at how the brand is being perceived across social media. "We think listening will be more crucial than ever, especially since we are starting to shape our social as a place where our audience can have a two-way interaction with our brand," said Rizky Puji Lestarina.
For The Body Shop, a data partner like Emplifi will allow them to stay in step with their audiences’ needs and wants. As Rizky Puji Lestarina said, "We believe that insights are a powerful thing, and Emplifi’s insights will continue to help us through our journey. We are also excited for the new features that will be beneficial for our future endeavors."
