SUGAR Cosmetics is India’s fastest-growing premium cosmetics brand with a product portfolio that has consistently received excellent reviews across its own and partner channels. It is a cruelty-free makeup brand that is high on style and higher on performance. The brand is inspired by and targeted towards bold, independent women who refuse to be stereotyped into roles. With a cult-following across millennials, SUGAR targets 25 to 35-year-old women with clutter-breaking products. Manufactured in state-of-the-art facilities across Germany, Italy, India, USA and Korea, the brand ships its best selling products across Lips, Eyes, Face and Nail categories across the world.
Influencer marketing has become an essential part of a brand's marketing strategy, and SUGAR Cosmetics is no exception. They know the power of working with influencers who have a big following and know how to spread the word about their brand and products. By teaming up with these influencers, SUGAR taps into their followers' interests, creating a buzz that's hard to ignore. That's why SUGAR Cosmetics has become one of the hottest consumer brands in India on Instagram!
In a conversation with Suraj Shukla, SUGAR's strategic lead on all things influencer marketing, he sheds light on the team's meticulous approach of executing impactful campaigns and successful product launches with affable.ai.
Before using affable.ai, Suraj's team faced several challenges due to manual processes. They had to analyze and track insights from thousands of influencers manually, which was time-consuming and required significant bandwidth from the whole team. They also had to connect with influencers individually to gather information such as demographics, reach, and insights. Communicating through DMs on Instagram was not preferred, as it lacked professionalism, data to derive profile insights and made it challenging to track conversations amidst numerous DMs.
The biggest challenges SUGAR faced with the manual interventions were:
• Tracking campaign performance and calculating CPR (Cost per Reach) was time-consuming and dependent on influencers' responsiveness.
• Obtaining demographic data of influencers in mass campaigns was difficult, especially with non-paid collaborations.
• Maintaining a cooperative and reliable relationship with influencers for sharing necessary information and insights was very hard due to the absence of a centralized platform.
• This further resulted in delays, miscommunication, and a tedious process of manually collecting data from various sources.
• Analyzing and deriving meaningful insights from the collected data to understand campaign effectiveness and identify successful strategies was difficult because of the fragmented nature of the data.
However, the adoption of affable.ai helped SUGAR Cosmetics overcome these challenges and streamlined their influencer management process.
The platform provided a centralized hub for tracking and analyzing influencer insights, saving the team valuable time and effort. By leveraging the power of automation, SUGAR could efficiently gather essential data like demographics, reach, and post-campaign insights. This not only facilitated smoother post-mortem analysis but also enhanced their ability to make data-driven decisions and optimize future campaigns. The organized and all-in-one platform of affable.ai further improved communication, ensuring clear and streamlined conversations with influencers, without the hassle of lost messages or scattered DMs.
The most standout features of affable.ai for SUGAR are: