Rare Beauty

The objective

Crushing paid goals through organic exploration

Rare Beauty gets TikTok. The brand has built itself into one of the top brands on TikTok through a consistent strategy of organic and paid content. The Rare Beauty business account is chock-full of native storytelling that puts the brand's creative spin on top trends. The brand's founder, Selena Gomez, shares brand updates to her own personal profile, speaking directly to her follower base of 58.8 million TikTok users.

Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty to break down the unrealistic standards of perfection and give people the tools they need to feel less alone in the world. Since the brand's inception, it has leaned heavily into connecting with the TikTok community; its approach is grounded in a deep understanding of what works on the platform, and making content that reflects the storytelling and authenticity viewers expect when they open TikTok.

The Rare Beauty team and their partners at digital marketing agency Booyah Advertising have worked together to build one of the strongest organic-to-paid strategies on the platform. This has consistently led to strong results for the brand. The business has seen high returns on ad spend, sales increases, and engagement over the years, and the organic buzz behind their products has let them sell out of products many times over. Rare Beauty's success is the kind of outcome that most brands seek when they build a TikTok strategy—and their approach contains crucial insights for other brands who want to get it right.

In honor of International Women's Month, read on to see how female-owned Rare Beauty tested their creativity on TikTok and used learnings from that exploration to build a strong paid strategy.

The solution

Full-funnel strategies grounded in deep learnings

Rare Beauty's social-first mindset has allowed the brand to effectively capitalize on trends. Case in point: They created a video for the Rare Beauty account in early 2024, featuring staff and using the "I'm a [blank], of course I [blank]" trend. The video quickly garnered nearly two million organic views.

This native, trend-based strategy is bolstered by Rare Beauty's data-driven decision making. If the brand's community isn't engaging with a particular asset or type of language, it uses campaign metrics to guide them toward what is working.

Thanks to their years-long exploration of which native formats work best for them, they've built a creative foundation that helps them achieve the quantitative results they want. This was exemplified in their Find Comfort campaign, which kicked off around the holiday season in 2023 and ran into the new year and was designed to drive awareness and sales of their new body care line.

Their strategy started with upper-funnel tactics focused on product education and mass reach, then drove users down the funnel with placements that drive actions, such as Shop Ads and Interactive Add-Ons. Through this full-funnel strategy, Rare Beauty saw a 22% more efficient average cost-per-click. Meanwhile, the post-holiday return on ad spend remained 43% above benchmark, despite the usual lag in shopping at the start of the year.

The results

Gaining icon status as a brand on TikTok

Rare Beauty's strategy on TikTok is the stuff of legends. They're beloved by viewers on the platform, who regularly make content talking about their products; creators have posted over 406,000 videos using the hashtag #RareBeauty. Media outlets have called Rare Beauty "TikTok's favorite brand," with much of its success attributable to marketing on the platform. All this stems from Rare Beauty leaning heavily into TikTok, using it as a key channel for understanding user sentiment and reaching viewers with content that inspires them.

"TikTok is a platform built on joy, education, entertainment, and connection which aligns with our ethos as a mission-driven brand built to make people feel good," said Logan Reynolds, Manager, Social & Content at Rare Beauty. "By incorporating TikTok in the incipient stages of our marketing strategy, we've been able to achieve unprecedented growth by co-creating with our community."

For brands that want to emulate Rare Beauty's success, getting a strong creative footing is key. By using creative solutions like Creative Center, advertisers can track trends, storytelling formats, and top ads—thereby getting a sense on what kinds of content are performing best. Partnering with creators is also easy through TikTok's creator marketing solutions, which give advertisers access to over two million creators who are ready to help brands reach the TikTok community.

As evidenced by Rare Beauty's success, creative exploration lays the groundwork for impactful campaigns—which advertisers to reach their results through strategic, full-funnel tactics.

To learn more about TikTok's creative solutions and how they can help advertisers reach their goals, go here.