Lauren Luke: YouTube Marketing Masterclass

Lauren Luke is a YouTube marketing phenomenon.  Her home-made YouTube make-up videos have had 75 million views and spawned a thriving multinational retail business.  Lauren remains incredibly down-to-earth, warm and genuine.  To the calculating marketers at the Google Think Ecommerce conference, she talks to in this video, Lauren’s natural marketing instinct may just as well have come from the moon!

Just two years earlier, Lauren quit her dead-end job to sell make-up on eBay.  “I would buy in makeup, because it was something I was interested in doing, and take photos of it all applied to my eyes in different ways. Other eBay sellers weren’t doing much. People were buying in their droves, and also asking a lot of questions about how I’d applied it. They were sort of looking at me as if I was a professional. And I wasn’t. I’d never had any training, I just loved art. And so I started to reply, but I was replying that often I never got time to sell.

“So I decided to use YouTube and put a video on there showing how to apply the smoky eye.  And it just went crazy, within a couple of weeks I had a hundred views, up and up and up. And one night someone asked for a Leona Lewis look… I was panicking, I thought I’m going to let everyone down here, that’s a hard one. But it didn’t take long until it had over a million views. And that’s added up to everything else. Over 212 videos later, 75 million viewers in total.”

As well as internet sales, Lauren now has her own make-up range in 135 shops in the U.S., a top selling book of make-up tips and even a Nintendo game: supermodel makeover with Lauren Luke.

Watch the video for an online marketing masterclass.  Prowess 2.0 has extracted a few nuggets of LL wisdom which are listed below:

• When I do the videos I talk to them as if they are  my friend and they’re in the room. They’re not a faceless person. And that’s exactly how I want them to feel about me.
• I didn’t have a plan. There was no business plan. It was just me having a hobby wanting to share what I knew with people.
• With social media – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – you are doing a bit of selling, you’re having a bit of fun and you’re getting a community together and that’s what people love.
• As long as you take care of the people, the money takes care of itself.
• It’s all real. I don’t edit my videos…It’s not polished, it’s not fake – and I think people have had enough of fake. They’ve had enough airbrushed, ‘you should be this, you should be that’, when really it’s just ‘be yourself, be happy about it’ and I’m going to try and help you feel a little bit happier every day.

*Thanks to Think with Google for enabling this video to be shared. Check out the channel for insights and outlook on the digital future.