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Beauty and Cosmetics brands are discovering the incredible potential of user-generated content (UGC) to create meaningful connections with their audience. From Instagram beauty influencers to TikTok makeup artists, customers are becoming powerful brand advocates through their personal beauty journeys and authentic content.
UGC represents a huge marketing opportunity, offering cosmetics brands a cost-effective way to showcase their products in real-life applications. As modern customers begin to seek inspiration from peers rather than traditional advertising, UGC becomes invaluable for building trust and driving engagement.
According to UGC statistics, the impact of user-generated content goes beyond social proof. It creates a dynamic, interactive relationship between beauty brands and their community, turning customers into active participants in the brand’s beauty narrative. From makeup tutorials to skincare routines, genuine user experiences help potential customers visualise products in real-world scenarios.
In this guide, we’ll explore how leading cosmetics brands have effectively leveraged UGC to enhance their digital presence, build authentic connections, and stand out in an increasingly competitive beauty market.
Table of Contents
User-generated content has emerged as an invaluable asset for beauty and cosmetics brands, consistently proving its effectiveness in building trust and driving sales through authentic representation.
UGC allow beauty and cosmetics brands to motivate shoppers by showing how other people use their products, provide customers with authentic and natural inspiration, and give a better idea of how well their products work.
This genuine, customer-created content format provides unique opportunities to showcase products and connect with beauty enthusiasts:
By leveraging UGC, beauty and cosmetics brands can create a more inclusive, authentic, and engaging marketing strategy that resonates with modern consumers while addressing industry-specific challenges.
Let’s check some real Beauty and Cosmetics brands’ results with UGC and start creating a community of online customers who keep coming back to your brand.
KICKS, the leading Nordic beauty retailer, recognises that their community members are valuable co-creators of authentic brand experiences. In eCommerce, where trust and authenticity are crucial, real customer voices have become instrumental in building confidence and inspiring potential buyers.
Through their digital channels, KICKS has cultivated an engaged community where customers share their product experiences and reviews, creating a trusted source of inspiration for others.
There is a unique challenge in selling skincare, beauty, and cosmetics products; they aren’t something that once opened is easy to return, and because of this, customer reviews have become essential in these industries. Learn how KICKS benefits from UGC.
“I think UGC is important to the customer who wants to try a new product in the cosmetics or skincare industries. Today the customer can read a lot of reviews and do a lot of research themselves. I think it’s easier to believe in and get inspired by what you see and hear about a new product when you see other people like yourself using the products.”
Tina Bergeskans, CRM Project Leader and Teamlead at KICKS
The brand leverages their online platform to foster connections, featuring detailed product reviews, application tips, and beauty advice. This approach enables customers to make informed decisions about high-value beauty purchases while engaging with fellow customers.
The impact of this strategy has been significant – KICKS has seen remarkable results, including a 41.57% increase in average order size and a 23.37% uplift in order value. These metrics demonstrate how user-generated content not only builds trust but also directly influences purchasing behaviour, making it a powerful tool for driving business growth.
Maquillalia, one of Spain’s leading online cosmetics retailer, understands that their community members are vital creators of authentic brand experiences. With online shoppers increasingly seeking authenticity, real customer experiences have become the most powerful tool for winning their trust.
Through their eCommerce platform, Maquillalia has built a thriving community where their users share product experiences and reviews. Learn how Maquillalia benefits from UGC.
“We’re good at listening and are very attentive to our customers. If they want to see a certain palette in action because they want to know how it will end up looking, the texture, etc. – we do it. And this is exactly how we’re using the Flowbox tool: to show how well our products work.”
Sara Varo – Marketing Manager at Maquillalia
The brand utilises Flowbox technology to showcase customer-generated content throughout their website, featuring genuine product reviews and application demonstrations. This approach helps overcome the challenge of customers not being able to try products before purchase, while building trust through authentic user experiences.
The results have been impressive – Maquillalia has seen an 11.20% increase in conversion rate and a 15.68% increase in average order value. These results showcase the power of authentic customer voices in driving real business success.
The Flowbox UGC Platform has many great tools and capabilities that can help any Cosmetics brand, no matter how big or small. Here is an overview of the key platform features:
Flowbox stands out with its sophisticated content collection system that automatically monitors and gathers user-generated content across social media platforms. The system springs into action whenever users mention your brand, tag you in their posts, or use your designated hashtags, ensuring no valuable content slips through the cracks.
The platform’s social media integration capabilities allow your brand to collect content from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and other platforms, all from a single dashboard. Check out this collection of articles to see all the platforms you can connect to Flowbox as a source.
Flowbox’s content moderation tools represent a significant advancement in UGC management, combining artificial intelligence with sophisticated quality assessment capabilities. The tool offers comprehensive solutions for brands seeking to streamline their content curation process while maintaining high standards.
The great thing about using Flowbox is that you can send rights requests directly to the users and easily track their responses. Additionally, you can create templates to message the user for a request, and personalise this message however you like.
Once the request is granted, Flowbox’s auto-approve functionality automatically approves the content for use, making the whole process even easier for your team. Check out this article if you want to know more about rights requests and permissions: User Generated Content Permission, Rights, Laws & Legal Issues.
Flowbox’s Smart Tags feature leverages artificial intelligence to streamline content categorisation and moderation. The system automatically identifies key elements within posts and assigns relevant tags, significantly reducing manual moderation time while maintaining accuracy.
This AI-powered system can detect objects, scenes, colours, and even sentiment within content, making it easier to organise and filter large volumes of UGC. The technology also helps identify brand-relevant content and automatically flags potentially inappropriate material, ensuring both efficiency and brand safety.
The Quality Rate tool employs sophisticated AI algorithms to evaluate both technical and aesthetic aspects of user-generated photos. Drawing from a vast database of over 340,000 Instagram images, it assigns scores from 1-100, enabling efficient bulk moderation based on image quality standards.
This scoring system considers factors like lighting, composition, focus clarity, and overall visual appeal to ensure only the highest quality content is selected for brand campaigns.
An effective way to ensure that you’re only collecting content that you want to use is with tools like Blocked Users and Whitelisted Users. These are 2 Flowbox tools that allow your brand to block spam content while giving a green light to content that you know you’ll be interested in seeing.
From there, managing your content is easy, as you just need to approve the images and videos that you would like to appear on your eCommerce.
The advanced Publish feature enables seamless organisation and distribution of user-generated and brand content across multiple platforms. This integration helps maintain a cohesive brand presence while preserving the authentic voice that resonates with audiences.
The tool’s interface allows users to create, customise, schedule, and publish content directly to their social media accounts. Which greatly reduces the time spent by social media managers on planning and shooting content to post manually on a variety of platforms. It can all be done within the Flowbox platform.
Track UGC performance across all channels with comprehensive analytics features, helping you make data-driven decisions about your content strategy. With Flowbox’s Google Analytics 4 integration, you can send analytics events directly from your Flows.
This enables you to monitor user interactions, track conversion paths, and measure the impact of your UGC campaigns alongside your other marketing metrics in a single, unified dashboard. Find out more on Flowbox’s advanced website analytics and how you can harness data-driven marketing.
For beauty and cosmetics brands, implementing a UGC strategy has become essential for building authentic connections with beauty customers. Success stories from KICKS and Maquillalia demonstrate that leveraging customer content can significantly impact both brand trust and purchasing confidence.
A well-executed UGC strategy in beauty serves multiple purposes: it showcases real results on diverse skin types and tones, demonstrates application techniques, validates product claims through genuine reviews, and builds an engaged beauty community.
By incorporating customer before-and-after photos, tutorial videos, and detailed reviews into their marketing mix, beauty brands can create a more transparent and relatable shopping experience.
The key to success isn’t just collecting beauty content, but strategically integrating it throughout the customer journey. Customer content should be woven into the brand’s identity, creating an authentic showcase of beauty transformations that inspires and empowers both existing and potential customers.
Book a demo with Flowbox and we’ll show you how a UGC platform can boost your brand sales.
