Interview with Dimsy Mirchandani, Marketing Manager, Revlon India about Their Social Media Strategy

Revlon India, one of India's leading cosmetics, has been active on Social Media promoting its existing products, as well as using this medium to launch new ones.

The brand shares its communication strategy on social media and talks extensively about the various social media campaigns it has executed recently in the interview below.

It also throws light on how an Indian page with a global reach brand itself independently or in support of the latter. Dimsy Mirchandani, Marketing Manager, Revlon India, has uncovered some interesting facts about the brand's marketing plans on various social platforms.

What objectives is Revlon India seeking on social networking sites? How are you mapping out your path to achieve them?

Social media is one of the key channels for us. We use it to not only communicate what the brand stands for, but also engage with our consumers. Since the last one year, we have launched various campaigns where the prime objective has been engagement.

The journey has been very interesting so far. We have high levels of engagement on all our platforms and I believe the biggest reason behind this success is the branded content that we post online. We have a local content strategy which has been formulated post an extensive online listening that we did some time back.

By listening to our consumers, we figured out which topics were of interest to them and found some common talking points between the brand and our consumers. Thus, we give them what they want, bringing forth an amazing rate of engagement.

It is also a great platform to get consumer insights. A very good example to strengthen this is one of the campaigns we did last year where we asked consumers online to share their makeup habits and also things that we did not like about their makeup. 75,000 women participated in the poll questions and the insight was then used to launch a new makeup range that we were launching.

Do you follow similar content strategy as the Global Revlon pages or do regions work independently? Why and what is the difference?

Our content strategy is a mix of Local and Global, but we work primarily on a Local basis. Some of the content buckets such as products and Brand are same as that of our Global page; we pick and choose interesting content from them.

Local content is relevant as our consumer resonates with such content quite well. Eg, one of the insights we received from online listening was that women’s issues are a big discussion point for Revlon Woman online. This is a local insight and as a brand, Revlon believes in encouraging women to express themselves, therefore the insight is very relevant to us, as a brand as well. Thus, it is one our key discussion points on social media.

Revlon recently launched its ColorStay Lipstick through an interesting Vine Campaign. How was it received by your audience?

Vine was a part of a larger campaign that we created to launch our new ColorStay Lipstick. As an early adapter, we wanted to use this innovative video content to highlight the product’s USP.

We got a fairly good response from consumers, but I believe that not too many users were aware of this new format at that point in time. But if I look at the campaign in totality, it was very successful.

Your latest campaign #TwiceAsGood looks interesting. What did you achieve through this campaign? Please share some important results.

TwiceAsGood is one of my favorite campaigns as well. The campaign idea was based on a simple, yet interesting insight that women in India play several roles in their lives. We wanted to salute this dual nature of woman and thus, TwiceAsGood which was also the USP of the product that we were launching i.e. Revlon Just Bitten Kissable Lip Balm Stain.

The engagement during this campaign was extremely high. Women loved the campaign idea; they tagged their friends, participated in the contest and were very involved in it. Moreover, this was indeed one of the best lip launches we have had till now.

Some results:

• During the campaign our fan base grew by 72% with 2,03,191 new fans.
• Our engagement rate during this campaign was at a whopping 86%.
• We had over 700 fans create custom Twice As Good cover photos using our application.

What is your strategy on Twitter? Any three things that differentiate you from your competitors?

Twitter for us is primarily to generate advocacy. While the overall content strategy is the same for all social channels, we tweak the content a bit to cater to Twitter users.

 I won't say the following differentiates us from the competition, but factors which have helped us succeed are:

1. Interesting, topical, bite size content which is easy for consumers to expend.
2. Use of innovative formats such as Vine to engage consumers.
3. KOL (Key Opinion Leader) target strategy wherein we target experts and opinion leaders, who in turn add interesting content on our channel for consumers.

You have just begun marketing on Youtube. How is this channel helping your brand objectives?

One of our key objectives on YouTube is to educate consumers on How To’s which is also one of our brand objectives. Currently, we are posting all our TVC’s, global tutorials and BTS which are very useful for consumers.

What are your plans to augment your subscribers and views on YouTube? Several celebrity actresses have been associated with Revlon. How will you strike a connect between your brand ambassador and fans online too?

We have plans to build local content, for later next year, which will be more relevant for Indian consumers.

Our Brand Ambassadors are very aspirational, and we are  using all our social channels to build this connect. We have 3 beautiful ladies, who are all at different stages in their life, who women of different age groups can easily resonate to.

What is your strategy to target other sites like Pinterest, Instagram etc.?  

We want to own one channel and then move on to the next. Currently, Facebook and Twitter are the two primary channels for us but we are evaluating other channels as well.

How are you measuring the ROI of your social media activities on various platforms?

Since our biggest objective on social media is to engage with consumers, one of the ways to calculate ROI is to calculate the engagement on the page. But personally, I believe that there is much more we can achieve through social media. It is not only an excellent platform to build awareness, but it can also build the brand’s credibility and relevance.

We should all work towards the idea that Positive/Negative sentiment, consumer involvement, reviews, etc are all ways and means to calculate how well the brand is doing on social media.

How do you measure the impact of brand loyalty on Social Media for your brand?

It is similar to PR. Both, social media and PR are great channels to build brand loyalty but it takes time for consumers to build the trust. Therefore, we must continue to do our bit without worrying or trying too hard to find a measure for it.

Do you have a social media policy in place? If yes, then what does it entail?

Yes, we do. It’s a global policy which all the countries follow. Some of the key points are; following the rules, being transparent, protecting our suppliers, consumers and partners, non-edit policy etc.

What percentage of your marketing budget is allocated to social media?

Our expenditure is largely bent towards social media, as we understand the importance of this channel.

Key Takeaways

• Revlon India picks and chooses interesting content buckets from its global page which promotes its products and the brand.
• #TwiceAsGood Campaign run by the brand to promote its new product was received very well by the audience and the fan page grew by 72% during the run of the campaign and the engagement rate grew to 86%.
• On Twitter, Revlon India uses the Key Opinion Leader target strategy wherein they target experts and opinion leaders who add interesting content on their channel for consumers.