The Buyer Journey for Online Perfume Shoppers
For perfume brands looking to optimize their marketing budgets, the first place to start is to look at existing consumer behavior. Mapping out how consumers buy perfumes and where they discover perfumes will give you a tactical advantage when allocating marketing spend. This article will explore the average consumer’s buying journey.
A simplistic overview of the buyer’s journey for perfume is:
Brand / Product Aware: They first discover your perfume brand or first learn about a specific perfume in your collection
Consideration: They are looking into more information about your perfume and brand
Decision: They are looking for where to buy your perfume
A full lifecycle perfume marketing strategy should address every stage of the journey by allocating marketing spend to it. No matter what size the marketing budget is, every stage needs investment.
The Online Perfume Buyers Journey
Awareness Stage
Someone is most likely to first hear about your perfume brand on TikTok or Instagram from a fragrance influencer. The volume of views generated by fragrance influencers is difficult to quantify, but it far exceeds the in-platform search volume for perfumes. The Google search volume for non-branded perfumes (non-branded search queries indicate someone is looking for a new perfume) is often a fraction of the total number of views that many influencers generate from a single video post.
Most perfume brands are not running tv ads, in addition, tv viewership is decreasing AND young people are the least likely demographic to watch linear tv. All of this points to social media, specifically, influencers generating brand awareness for perfume brands.
Based on the TikTok algorithm, video content is heavily pushed to new audiences in the ‘For You’ timeline. In several studies on TikTok creators with over 100,000 followers, often less than 2% of their followers see a video they publish. This means that influencers and content creators are constantly reaching new (and relevant) people. The Youtube Shorts algorithm also heavily promotes content to new people.
Food for thought: The average person spends 2 hours and 24 minutes a day on social media which accounts for 35.8% of all of their online activities. In addition, Millennials and Gen Z are the driving force behind perfume sales, with people aged 17-27 purchasing fragrances at the highest frequency. This age demographic also happens to make up the majority of active TikTok and Instagram users.
How should a perfume brand spend money at this stage?
Influencer marketing needs to take center stage here. We have seen many numbers floated around online to quantify the growth of influencer marketing, but the overall point is, brands are allocating more marketing budget to influencer marketing in the hopes of reaching new audiences through influencers who have established trust with their audience.
Producing your own short-form video content is the best way to get organic views. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YoutuBe Shorts are the best discovery channels in the world. Your brand needs to be publishing video content.
Consideration Stage
People in this stage have heard about your brand…likely more than once. They are in the market to buy a perfume and are looking around for more information before moving closer to making a decision. The consideration phase can be very drawn out, especially for fragrance enthusiasts (not your average perfume consumer) who are inclined to buy based on notes rather than popularity and branding.
The consideration phase will have people looking for more long-form content. Youtube is a top destination for people looking for more in depth reviews. We surveyed 293 fragrance influencers and 69% had accounts on all of the major social media platforms. Of the influencers that had accounts on multiple platforms, 64% had dedicated long-form content on their Youtube Channel, in addition to their short-form content native to TikTok, Shorts, and Reels.
In-platform search for perfume is also a major component of the consideration phase as opposed to organic discovery of perfume that the awareness stage is composed of.
Online Forums also play an essential role for people in the consideration stage of the buying journey for any consumer looking for more in-depth reviews of a perfume. Forums like Fragrantica get 25 million visits a month and specialize in fragrance review content. Subreddits r/Fragrance have 1.6 million members and are solely composed of perfume hobbyists. While we do not have 1st party impression data from these forums to quantify the scale of research consumers are doing, it is clear that these forums play a key role in the consideration stage for many perfume shoppers.
Forums might not have the scale of users that TikTok and Instagram have but they play a very crucial role in providing more detail-oriented reviews that perfume collectors seek. This is especially important for people shopping online, who cannot sample fragrances like they otherwise could in a retail setting. It should also be noted that forums can be great places for consumers in the awareness stage since Google is prioritizing forum content in search results, particularly Reddit.
How should a perfume brand spend money in this stage?
Sponsor long-form content creators, specifically Youtube content. There is such a huge opportunity for perfume brands to gain exposure on the second largest social media platform in the world. It should be a crime how underutilized Youtube is for perfume brands. A Youtube marketing strategy should prioritize two things:
The perfume brands account. The content published here should focus on brand-aligned content that can include behind-the-scenes content, ingredients-based content, brand origin story, perfumer bios, etc
Sponsoring long-form content creators. Long-form content is very hard to master in comparison to short form. Finding content creators who can knowledgeably talk in depth about fragrances in long form is not common. Getting your perfumes into their hands gives other people the opportunity to get a better idea of the fragrance. The thoroughness of the content can provide the assurances needed to justify making the purchase.
Decision Stage
Perfume is largely a subjective purchase based on individual taste. They aren’t buying software and need to be reaffirmed with data. There aren’t case studies for perfume. Subjective reviews take the place of testimonials and whitepapers. At this point, your perfume is at the forefront of their mind, they just have to pull the trigger.
Your website is very relevant and important in the decision stage. They read the reviews on other platforms to get honest reviews from other people who have tried our perfume. Now they want to get a feel for your brand.
What is your brand story?
Are there any brand initiatives onsite?
What is the user interface of your website?
Who are the customer avatars onsite?
What are the ingredients of the perfume?
What does your brand’s social media convey?
Do you have social proof?
If the person likes what they see, they still probably won’t buy. There are many reasons why the purchase gets delayed. They could be waiting for a discount that is sure to arrive near a holiday. Maybe they are waiting until they are close to running out of their current perfume. Perhaps it is a gift.
Regardless, for most people, a $90 purchase needs some consideration. As anyone in the fragrance world knows, they might already have an account with another large online retailer like FragranceNet.com, FragranceX.com, or any of the other large retailers. If the consumers buying behavior favors buying through these 3rd party channels then that is where the sale will take place. While the percentage of online sales for a perfume brand varies wildly based on their distribution network, one thing is clear, if you can get the sale through your owned media (website) your profit margin will be much higher since wholesalers, distributors, and retailers aren’t taking any cuts. You should be prioritizing direct-to-consumer sales.
How should a perfume brand spend money in this stage?
Focus on capturing sales through your owned media allows you to have more brand touchpoints with consumers which can potentially lead to delighting the customer and increasing brand loyalty. If you get a sale through your website you control the packaging, shipping, including other products/samples, including any product customizations, etc. All of this, in addition to a larger profit margin and the customer’s information.
Here are two channels worth dedicating resources to for consumers in the decision stage:
Perfume brands should allocate money to robust email capture and email marketing campaigns to engage any leads they acquired from people visiting their website who were likely in the consideration stage. Outside of a standard discount popup, some effective ways to acquire leads can also include newsletter sign-ups, exclusive releases, exclusive content, live events, behind-the-scenes content, etc.
Retargeting ads on Facebook and Google based on event triggering can be a great way to capture interested leads. Running ads to cold traffic is a great way to waste a lot of money if you don’t have substantial brand recognition within the fragrance category. However, creating an event that triggers when somebody visits a product page allows you to effectively retarget that person with ads. The ad spend to this type of retargeting campaign is going to a ‘warm’ user who knows your brand and has shown purchase intent by visiting a product page. Any brand that is looking to expand its marketing budget in this category needs to run some math to determine if running retargeting campaigns is cost-effective.
In order to run profitable perfume advertising campaigns, you need to understand how to market to consumers based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. Every perfume brand will have a different full life-cycle marketing approach. If a perfume brand does not have a full life-cycle marketing plan then it is leaving money on the table. It is the perfume brand’s job to understand what its marketing strengths are, and then develop a omnichannel marketing strategy that takes into consideration the customer lifecycle.