Lottie London shows how nimble beauty brands targeting Gen Z and TikTok can leverage their social communities to build effective and relevant marketing campaigns and fill out their internal teams.
When Lottie London realized it was getting tagged by followers on TikTok and Instagram, it began reaching out to its social media community (dubbed the #lottiesquad) for applications to be the faces for upcoming collections.
As it developed its 2022 Halloween campaign, the brand again tapped its social media community.
"Lottie London truly is a community-led brand," says Nora Zukauskaite, global marketing director for Lottie London. "We are constantly working to build a two way dialogue with our followers—not just speaking at them. We noticed the high volume of tags and DMs from our followers and fans on social media and realized we had a really powerful tool at our fingertips. We then continuously nurtured the Lottie Squad to bring them to the heart of the brand, leveraging them in several ways, i.e., campaign advertising, content across social platforms and even asking for opinions on new launches."
Zukauskaite adds, "When it comes to our A* collection, My Little Pony, Gossip Girl and Pride, we put a call out on Instagram and Tik Tok to engage with the community to DM us to be the faces of the new launch. Most recently we did this with our new limited edition collection in collaboration with The Vampire Diaries. We put content up reaching out to all fans and followers of #vamptok encouraging them to come back to us if they wanted to be a part of our newest campaign and we had a huge volume of applicants."
In a more unusual move, the brand is also reaching out to that same community to fill roles at its corporate offices in London. These hires are calibrated to help Lottie London remain in-step with Gen Z and the rapidly changing TikTok environment, per the brand.
To date, and with just one social post, Lottie London has filled three marketing department roles.
Zukauskaite explains, "When I looked at building out our social media and community team, I knew we needed to find talent that could genuinely speak to our target audience with firsthand experience, and so the first place we put our job advertisements up was on social media, primarily Tik Tok and Instagram. In the same way we would recruit faces of our campaigns from our social following, we put a call out for our head office roles leading to a high volume of applicants. The most important quality when hiring new talent, especially in this field, is passion for the brands so we knew by hiring this way that would be a given."
She continues, "A key element to building and maintaining the community is that we always want to ensure we are speaking their language in order to engage with them correctly. By making the #lottiesquad the faces of our various campaigns, we hope that our customers see themselves reflected in the marketing and can relate to our brand. The Lottie Squad is all about inclusivity and creativity, we will never turn anyone away. Equally, through hiring Gen Z internally it means that all of our copy across consumer touch points is in language that also translates."
The executive notes that both the social media marketing outreach and corporate hiring programs have one thing in common: agility.
"We are an extremely agile business, meaning we can react to industry trends very quickly," says Zukauskaite. "This is the same when we notice consumer demand for a product in our comments and DMs. Our hero eyeliner Stamp Liner: Wing Edition went viral on TikTok when we launched, and the Lottie Squad was calling out for us to launch their favorite product in a brown shade. Due to our agility, reactivity and dedication to the Lottie Squad, we were able to respond to this demand and turn around the new launch super quickly. It is important to show that we are listening, and most importantly, actioning to what they are asking of us."
Zukauskaite concludes, "The importance of community is spoken about time and time again, and what we are so grateful for at Lottie London is the genuine authenticity with which we are able to speak about ours. I’ve already mentioned it but truly having a two way relationship is key for brand building—we listen and respond to what they want and equally we put them at the forefront of the brand advertising."
