Social Listening at Ulta Beauty

 

I am an Ulta girl and today I am going to talk about Ulta and how they responded to the pandemic, going mainly to online sales, and whether or not they are responding to their customers. I personally have always been drawn to Ulta, I am not sure if it’s the easy of using their website and app or if its because I don’t live near a Sephora. I love the way Ulta looks, the simplicity of the design and how clean and bright the stores always look. I always get greeted immediately by an employee and the stores are always very easy to navigate. If you would like to read a little more about the differences between the two companies here is a great article that breaks everything down nicely. Personally, I have never been disappointed with the products, online ordering, or customer service. But let’s see what others are saying…

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 Value Proposition:

"We believe our focus on delivering a compelling value proposition to our guests across all of our product categories drives guest loyalty. We offer a comprehensive loyalty program, Ultimate Rewards, and targeted promotions through our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. We also offer frequent promotions and coupons, in-store events and gifts with purchase."

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Like many companies over the past year during the pandemic, Ulta had to get creative and come up with some new ways to get customer interaction via online. Ulta completely threw its marketing playbooks “out the window” and replaced them with a flexible digital marketing strategy. This in turn helped the company to evolve the content with the culture, which some companies are having a difficult time with this and suffer. Karla Davis (vp of integrated marketing and media) and Christine White (senior director of media and content strategy) realized that Ulta Beauty needed to provide consumers with more reasons to shop with them. Davis is looking into opportunities of working with influencers as word of mouth to reach more consumers. This would be great because consumers are already creating content for brands, which in turn will lead to the brand succeeding with “superfans”.

Instead of just posting a video tutorial on YouTube, Ulta is aiming to break down the videos into smaller and simpler bits to post on Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Imbedding the posts with direct links to the specified product for ease of shopping. The company has also thought about having customers leave short snippets of a product review to use on social media as well. I think that this is a fantastic start to evolving to the new, technological world.

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This short 4 minute video with Ulta Beauty's CMO, Shelly Haus, talks about the companies influencer marketing philosophies and discusses the ways Ulta has built meaningful relationships with various influencers through programs. Here is a link to the full hour interview.

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As for responding to their customers, I could not find a huge amount on that. I saw that on their twitter account they do respond to customers and usually in a quick manner. When reading complaints and reviews on Google and Facebook most were left unread though. I did however notice that the more recent reviews (bad) did have responses from Ulta.  Here is what I was able to find:

On Twitter this was originally posted at 1:03AM 

on 7/16/21 and Ulta responded at 1:19AM on 7/16/21. 

On Twitter this was originally posted at 10:58AM on 

7/16/2021 and Ulta responded at 10:34AM on 7/16/21. 

The first Google complaint that I came across that had a 

response was this one and it took Ulta an entire month to respond. 

Ulta had a much better response time with this review. 

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If I were Ulta Beauty's brand manager, I would ensure that there would be more interactions on social media with the customers. When looking at Facebook, Instagram and Google I saw that Ulta did not interact with customers, whether it was a good response or a bad one. I did notice that on Google, Ulta was starting to respond to newer complaints, but some of them were over a month later. I would make sure that complaints were responded to within 24-48 hours, as that shows the customer that you care about them and want to make things right. On Twitter, Ulta was very fast to respond to customer complaints. I think that Ulta should respond to most, if not all of the interactions that customers have. This assignment showed me how to know if the businesses are truly looking out for their customers. I think that it is very important today with how technology based we as a community are. A businesses social media presence in extremely important anymore. 

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Here are a few interesting articles that I managed to find on Ulta that goes into more detail on what I talked about today. 

How the Pandemic Changed Ulta Beauty's Digital Strategy
People are Buying More `above the mask` Makeup During the Pandemic

COVID-19 Has Ugly Impact on Ulta Beauty