What is Nu Skin’s strategy for building customer relationships and expanding the warm market?
In a world where social commerce is really driving both the exploration and experience with brands and products, we have doubled down on our digital toolsets and work to create digitally enabled customer journeys. Our strategy starts by giving our salesforce digital tools to help them meet customers where they are, which is often on social, and help them nurture and deepen their relationships with those customers by connecting, educating, and following up with them. We have found this is key to helping our salesforce build and retain their customer base.
Nu Skin’s strategy is all about personalization, whether that’s how we design our products or the digital experiences we give our customers. Our digital tools are built with personalization in mind so that our salesforce can share links to social media channels that reflect their personal brand story and passion for our products. Many of Nu Skin’s salesforce currently use social media to sell products, so we ensure that everything we build is seamlessly integrated with the external social media landscape.
Also key to our strategy is the importance of investing in brand awareness so that our salesforce has a solid foundation to build from. From a social and SEO perspective, we optimize content and create digital touchpoints that instill confidence in the products and efficacy of our solutions. That way, when the salesforce approaches someone, they can build on Nu Skin’s strong reputation and the great things that we’re doing, whether that’s media coverage, awards, or our corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. We formulated this strategy around pivotal reputation drivers.
What is the focus of the company’s consumer channel? Can you provide examples?
Nu Skin’s consumer channels are focused on products and their benefits. Our social content features our award-winning products that are backed by clinical research and our in-house scientists. And in a world where consumers value clean ingredients and transparency around what’s in products, we are grateful to have that at the heart of what we do. That’s been one of our core drivers since the very beginning—to deliver products with “all the good, and none of the bad.”
For us, the strongest asset in our consumer channel is our salesforce. As a result, a lot of what we do is to help consumers connect with affiliates and build those relationships. We have found for more than thirty years, our salesforce is the best way to build consumer loyalty, expand product awareness, and drive revenue. Our mission is to empower them to be more effective in their business.
In fact, we recently participated in a roundtable discussion with beauty executives and the question was posed, “How do you drive such high adoption rates online?” We know that our differentiator and the driver of growth is our salesforce sharing their stories and passion for the products. We are uniquely positioned for growth as a result, whether that’s the adoption of new products or developing an online community.
Did 2020 and the effects of the pandemic force Nu Skin to rethink its digital strategies?
We’ve been focused on our digital plays for years now, but what 2020 brought was unexpected growth and acceleration to that strategy. We’ve been watching the social commerce wave for a while and observing how our affiliates were changing their selling patterns. Our salesforce was already moving to a social selling model, which was just accelerated by the pandemic and move to virtual. So it was easy for them to quickly adopt tools and move their conversations almost entirely to social and SMS.
As part of our digital transformation at Nu Skin, we’ve been working on weaving digital elements across everything we do and building out a robust digital ecosystem of tools. That has helped our teams to be virtual as well as to meet the acceleration of the business. This work is being led by subject matter experts in app development, UX, CX, social media, SEO, data and analytics, and integrated digital. With Bluetooth, IoT, and our apps, we are even marrying our digital strategy with our beauty and wellness product strategy. This cross-functional team touches every aspect of the work happening at Nu Skin. The end-game for us is to create frictionless, connected digital experiences that wow our salesforce, customers, and employees.
Were you forced to adopt new social in the wake of the pandemic?
We feel fortunate that we had teams and people in place who were already active in this space. Our culture at Nu Skin has always been about creating a community of people who are passionate about beauty and wellness. So social media has always been a strong play for us. As we’ve worked to better understand our customer for several years, even prior to the pandemic, we recognized how social media was crucial to connecting and engaging with our customers.
A key element of our social strategy is recognizing the needs and patterns of different audiences. We set up different channels for each of our audiences with content that is most relevant and helpful to them. With the pandemic, we could tailor our content and messaging very specifically to help them through some of those challenges.
One aspect of our business that is unique is helping our affiliates who may be considered as micro-influencers to leverage their social networks as effectively as larger influencers. We’ve found that our digital tools are critical to their success.
What major challenges did you face in your digital strategy during the last year?
A major challenge we faced was a stronger need for alignment across all departments and channels. Since everyone was working from home, and we couldn’t meet in person, we coordinated the alignment through collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls. One interesting thing was the rate of adoption of collaboration tools and the fact that we could quickly adapt to the new working style.
With affiliates, we’ve encouraged them to embrace social commerce and utilize social media to enhance their business because they can reach more people and have more consistent and authentic conversations with their customers.
As a direct selling company, you have a wide audience for social: customers, your field, and prospective customers with whom you want to share your brand. What channels are best for each audience?
Our salesforce, customers, and prospects cross channels. So it is important for us to have an omnichannel approach. Essentially, since all our audiences don’t have boundaries, and digital properties are available to everyone, we tailor content on channels set up specifically for each audience. For example, on Instagram, there is an account set up for customers, and an account for our sales leaders. Each account posts content directed to each audience. Again, it goes back to being customer obsessed and understanding each audience’s needs.
What is your social media content mostly composed of? What drives your decisions in what you share on social media?
Our consumer social media channels focus mostly on product information and awards; however, as our objective is to build Nu Skin’s brand, oftentimes other content around sustainability, culture, and CSR topics are shared. It is through this reputation strategy that we build our brand positively online. On our salesforce social media channels, we focus on recognition, promotions, and training. As we talk to our salesforce and understand what topics they find important in building their business, we will create content that helps them.
What are you doing to identify improper usage of social media and to correct it? What are you doing to ensure your field is compliant?
Nu Skin’s Global Compliance team is heavily integrated into our social strategies and this year has been no exception. In addition to proactively monitoring the marketplace for claims and promoting accuracy and honesty in the direct selling industry, they provide ongoing training and education to our employees and sales leaders, they create guidance documents that help clarify what constitutes an appropriate versus an inappropriate claim, and they work tirelessly to set a standard for marketplace trust. One of the five pillars of any compliance program is enforcement. This means that our Global Compliance team must also, on occasion, work with sales leaders who violate policy and impose disciplinary action when needed. As part of its ongoing self-regulation efforts, our Global Compliance team works very closely with the Direct Selling Self-Regulatory Council, BBB National Programs, and other consumer protection groups in order to continually encourage and support best practices.
Some consumers have complained about direct sellers constantly promoting their products and opportunities on social media. How are you addressing that with your salesforce?
Social training happens in sales leader groups with their teams, through our Learning Center, or in our corporate social media accounts set up for our salesforce. These training opportunities help our salesforce engage in the right behaviors on social media. Training sessions may include best practices like using hashtags, filters, or compliance topics; how to create lifestyle content, where products are integrated into their daily life; ways to build relationships to help drive conversion; and pointing out the difference between being persistent and being overbearing, to name a few. Many of these best practices can be found on nuskin.com in our compliance corner.
With social commerce evolving much faster than expected, it will not be long before salesforces start managing their own shops on social media channels. What social media trends are you most excited about?
We agree! In fact, the digital tools we have been launching allow an affiliate to launch a personalized shop with the products and bundles they are most passionate about. Longer-term, we are also excited about community, and really more specifically owned community or private community. This will provide a specific way for people with similar interests to engage and, ultimately, help us really bring together people who are passionate about beauty and wellness.
Is Nu Skin on board with the entire customer journey taking place within social selling over the next year, or is it moving towards it in the future?
We are fully embracing how our affiliates want to grow their businesses, which increasingly is online and specifically on social. Our digital ecosystem of tools is built with that in mind, but also serves the needs of our more traditional affiliates. We’ve found ways to bridge the two and help them both be successful.
What are you doing to enhance the customer journey on social media?
To enhance the customer journey on social media, we’ve determined four different phases in their journey. We look at specific KPIs in each phase to help us understand if our customers are being provided with the right type of content to enhance their experience. As we track these KPIs we can better understand their needs and figure out how we can best serve them in each phase as they learn about Nu Skin and decide to purchase our products.
In 2020, the use of video on social media expanded greatly. Did Nu Skin participate much in live streaming, or does the company have plans to do so in the coming year?
Video is critical for us, whether that’s video tutorials on our products, promotional videos driving brand awareness, or giving our affiliates the tools and assets to make their own videos. We see higher consumption rates of video and recognize that it has to be a key component of our content strategy.
Similarly, like most of the world, we had to pivot and change to live stream events in 2020. This included regional meetings and global meetings. We’ve learned that when done well, a live stream event will reach more than in-person events, and we have seen numbers as high as twenty times more people. We’re looking at providing streaming options to future events, as well as a hybrid model to accommodate both in-person and live stream.
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