3 TikTok Viral Beauty Brands And Their Secret Strategies For Success

We all dream of our brand going viral on TikTok, but how do we actually achieve this? As a TikTok strategist, social media manager and content marketer I spend a *lot* of time studying what does and doesn’t work, and what tricks and tips brands are using to go viral on TikTok. In this article, I’m going to be deep-diving into 5 viral beauty brands TikTok accounts and exposing the social media strategies that they’ve used to grow their platforms to viral success.

Kiramoon 

Kiramoon is the TikTok viral skincare brand and brainchild of Lindsey Martin, a female solopreneur who grew the brand to over 10,000 TikTok followers before the brand even launched. Now at over 30k followers and with a string of viral videos under its belt, the brand is stocked in ASOS and Urban Outfitters only a few months post-launch. Here are three strategies they’ve used to go viral on the app.

Pinned Videos

On TikTok, you can pin up to three videos to the top of your profile. A common mistake I see brands making is using these three videos to showcase their most viewed videos. The issue is that on TikTok your most viral videos might not necessarily be your best or the most relevant. These three videos are the ones most people will watch first when they click on your profile, so you want to curate them by the videos that are most likely to tell the viewer exactly what your brand and TikTok account are about, and that will inspire them to follow. 

Kiramoon is the perfect example of this. Their top 3 videos are a behind the scenes video on how Lindsey started the brand, a product unboxing video, and an inspirational video about the brand being stocked in ASOS.

Repeating themselves

One of the unique things about TikTok is how it prioritises showing content that the algorithm has selected for you, over content from people you follow. According to my own TikTok analytics, on average, about 80% of my video views comes from the ‘For You Page’, not from my followers. This poses a unique opportunity for marketers - the ability to repeat yourself without fatiguing your audience. If a message doesn’t land the first time, you can find a different way to tell that story, without worrying too much about the same people seeing it over and over.

Kiramoon are best in class at doing this, repeatedly recreating videos with the same small business founder story, and recreating their top performing videos.

Authentic Behind The Scenes

If there’s one thing TikTok audiences love, it’s a small biz BTS. Not only is it super interesting (who doesn’t love to see behind the curtain), but it adds educational value and can establish and reinforce the core values of your brand.

Bolt Beauty

Bolt Beauty is another small, recently launched skincare brand that’s been going viral on TikTok. With their innovative sustainable skincare capsules and the Hyram stamp of approval, it’s no surprise that despite launching during a pandemic this travel-focused beauty brand has had no trouble racking up over 55k TikTok followers. 

They solve problems

If you want people to stick around and watch your TikTok videos, you have to do more than just sell to them. Using your videos to add value is the easiest way to attract an audience on TikTok. For skincare brands, the obvious easy win is educational content.

But Bolt Beauty has gone one step further than that, using some of their top-performing videos to solve the problems of their audience. Stuck at a sleepover and only been offered facial wipes? No worries, Bolt has a handbag friendly, travel-proof cleanser. At the club and been let down by your mattifying powder? Not to fear - just pop on one of their transportable mattifying skincare drops. 

Oddly Satisfying

The #oddlysatisfying hashtag on TikTok has over 49 BILLION views. That’s like, quite a lot. Whether it’s perfectly looped videos of things fitting perfectly into shaped holes, or ASMR carving videos, there’s one thing that TikTok loves - satisfying content.

Bolt Beauty has taken advantage of this. Their top viewed video couldn’t be more simple - a lineup of their skincare pellets on a desk, shot on smartphone, being squeezed one by one creating a satisfying squish noise. 3.3 million views. 

Estrid

Estrid, a D2C brand known for their colourful aesthetic razors, have the most unique TikTok strategy out of all the brands on this list. This strategy has helped them amass over 250 thousand TikTok followers and pretty consistently high video views, which for a brand usually more known for its aggressive paid social strategy, is a super impressive organic feat. 

TikTok Content Creator Takeovers

If there’s one way to ensure your content is native to TikTok, it’s to hire TikTok content creators to do it for you. Whilst expensive if you’re looking to enlist A-list TikTok stars, there are cheaper ways to go about it. Not to self-plug, but our TikTok Creative Lab does exactly this for brands lacking the internal resources to populate TikTok themselves.

Estrid shun owned content pretty much altogether, instead choosing to partner with TikTok stars on weekly takeovers, letting the content creators have free reign over the official TikTok accounts content. This is infinitely cheaper than paying influencers for ads, however, still takes a mighty budget.

Education Value Add

Another key to Estrid’s success is by using their platform to educate. Videos on how to correctly shave body hair have blown up for the brand, not only because it’s providing a benefit to the audience, but also because it’s exactly the kind of education that the TikTok consumer is after.

Posting Dumb Content

I don’t mean this is a bad way, okay? But when Estrid posted a video on how to shave using stickers to demonstrate, it’s very obvious to most marketers that this was an intentional ploy to raise engagement by baiting people into commenting about what a silly way to demonstrate the products it was. And it worked so fair play.

Want more TikTok tips? Check out the rest of our blog posts, or get in contact.