Skincare Marketing That Works: Lessons From Today’s Top Brands

Consumer skincare habits are evolving. Thanks to social media and greater access to information, younger people are building skincare routines earlier, while ageing demographics are investing more in corrective care. The result? The global skincare market is expected to grow to more than $467.8 billion by 2036. 

Skincare brands that understand how to ride this wave of growth stand to win big in the years ahead. But success won’t come from great products alone: it will come from smart, data-driven skincare marketing strategies that resonate with the right audiences, at the right time, through the right channels. This is particularly important for market expansion strategies. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at which skincare brands are leading the way right now. We’ll dive deep into the strategies of the top 3 performing skincare brands to learn what they’re doing right. And we’ll reveal how to access more of these insights through the right metrics and benchmarking tools. 

So, whether you’re an established or emerging brand in the skincare space, these insights can help you craft powerful skincare marketing strategies that position your brand for long-term growth.

Benchmarking in Skincare Marketing: How to Do It & Why It Matters

It’s great to know that your brand is getting buzz. But how do you really measure it? Reach, impressions, followers and likes are known as vanity metrics for a reason: they look impressive on paper, but tell you little about your actual performance. Instead, you need context—the why behind the behavior—and actionable insights. 

That’s why performance benchmarking is so important to skincare brand growth. 

Tracking your own results over time can show whether your skincare marketing strategies are delivering, but competitive benchmarking takes it further. By comparing your performance to competitors, you can:

• Gain a clear view of where you stand in the market
• Uncover new opportunities from what others are doing well
• Identify emerging influencers shaping the space
• Spot weaknesses or threats before they become problems

Here’s the thing, though. For competitive benchmarking to deliver real value, you need to measure with consistency. Without a standardized way to measure performance, it’s difficult to compare brands accurately or track meaningful progress over time. Using a unified metric solves this problem.

Media Impact Value® (MIV®) provides a single, comparable way to quantify the value of brand visibility across different channels and Voices. Instead of relying on fragmented indicators, MIV translates performance into a consistent framework that makes benchmarking far more actionable.

To add deeper context, this can be paired with Voice Mix and Channel Mix. 

• Voice Mix breaks down where impact is coming from—Influencers, Media, Celebrities, Partners or Owned Media—helping you identify which Voices are driving the most value and where there may be untapped potential.
• Channel Mix complements this by showing which platforms are generating that impact, from social media to online publications and beyond.

Together, these metrics give skincare brands a clearer picture of not just how they’re performing, but why.

You can see these metrics in action below: we’ve used MIV to capture the top 10 performing skincare brands based on 2025 data. Below that, we’ve dug deeper into the top 3 best performing brands, showing how MIV, Voice Mix and Channel Mix can be used to gain strategic insights into skincare marketing performance.

Top 10 Skincare Brands by MIV

Insights from Top-Performing Skincare Brands

1. Lancôme: Influencer‑Led, Social‑First Skincare Strategy

As skincare consumers become more digitally driven and platform-native, Lancôme has built a strategy centered on continuous visibility through creators. In 2025, the brand generated $274M in MIV across 45.1K placements, maintaining strong efficiency at $6.08K MIV per placement and proving that scale and performance can go hand in hand when activity is executed strategically.

At the core of this strategy is a dominant Influencer Voice. 69% of Lancôme’s total MIV came from Influencers, with creator content driving the majority of top-performing placements. Rather than relying on campaign spikes, the brand maintained consistent month-to-month impact, pointing to an always-on approach that keeps it visible year-round.

This performance is heavily anchored in China, which generated $118M in MIV, including $105M from Influencers alone. A significant 34% of channel mix came from RED (Xiaohongshu), highlighting how Lancôme aligns its strategy with local platforms and behaviors instead of applying a one-size-fits-all global approach.

Importantly, the brand also takes care to balance scale with structure. All-Star influencers contributed $75.6M in MIV, supported by a broader influencer network.  Meanwhile, Owned regional channels like Lancôme Worldwide and Lancôme China ranked high among its top Voices, helping to amplify campaigns on a local level and maintain brand consistency across markets. 

While Influencers dominated the brand’s Voice Mix, Media still played a supporting role (18% of MIV), with the top Media placement—a Vogue x Amanda Seyfried video—generating $291K in MIV. The relatable, unfiltered feel of the video highlights how editorial and celebrity content can drive impact when it aligns with the authenticity audiences expect from creator-led strategies.

Key takeaway: Lancôme shows that winning in skincare today means treating Influencer marketing as a long-term, social-first ecosystem, grounded in local platforms and powered by both All-Star creators and strong Owned channels, rather than a series of isolated campaigns. Brands that adopt a similarly always-on, market-sensitive approach can build visibility that compounds over time instead of fading after each launch.

2. Clarins: Product-Driven Strategy Meets Consistent Messaging

If we look at Clarins’ Voice Mix from 2025, the breakdown is quite similar to Lancôme, with 66% of MIV driven by Influencers and 20% from Media. While Voice Mix can certainly vary across brands, this combination of influencer-led activity supported by media coverage is clearly a winning formula for global skincare players. (Estee Lauder, which rounds out the top 3 below, shows a similar pattern.)

However, while Clarins follows a similar influencer-led, social-first model to Lancôme, its execution appears more product-driven and performance-focused. The brand prioritizes high-efficiency creators, clear product storytelling and tightly integrated owned channels that keep the focus on results.

This is reflected in its top-performing Voices. Beauty Influencers Mariale Marrero and Nathalie Paris lead in MIV, not just through reach but through strong value per placement. At the same time, Clarins’ regional Owned channels feature prominently on the list, pointing to a regional, structured approach to amplifying campaigns across markets.

Notably, Clarins’ top-performing posts from its global account are all product-focused, suggesting an emphasis on showcasing benefits and results.

Key takeaway: Clarins proves that when you’re clear on what your brand stands for, your marketing strategy becomes much easier to execute as well as more effective. By consistently focusing on product benefits and its science-meets-nature approach, the brand builds messaging that feels cohesive and relevant to its audience. The lesson here is that for a skincare marketing strategy to create long-term growth, it must be rooted in the brand’s identity and purpose; if the messaging is inconsistent, audiences will notice.

3. Estée Lauder: Dominating China

Estée Lauder’s 2025 performance suggests the brand is doubling down in high-growth markets. The brand generated $212M in MIV across 46.6K placements, an MIV per placement of $4.56K—this shows solid scale even if efficiency per placement sits slightly lower than some of its peers.

Like Lancôme and Clarins, Estée Lauder leans on an influencer-led model, with 67% of MIV driven by Influencers and 16% from Media. Influencer content also dominates the brand’s top placements of 2025, reminding us of just how central influencers have become to driving visibility and desire in skincare.

Where Estée Lauder stands apart is in just how concentrated its strategy is geographically. China alone generated $133M in MIV, making it by far the brand’s most important market. This focus is reflected across the brand’s Channel Mix, with 87% of MIV coming from social media and a striking 48% driven by RED (Xiaohongshu)—the highest among the top 3 three brands.

This China-first approach is also visible in the brand’s top Voices. Regional-Owned channels take the top three spots, led by Estée Lauder China, with APAC influencers and media making up the rest of the top 10. This suggests a strategy that combines strong local Owned Media with region-specific creators, rather than relying primarily on global accounts.

Influencers still play a major role in delivering impact, especially at the upper tier. All-Star Influencers generated $65.2M in MIV, helping the brand generate high-value placements at scale. At the same time, Media coverage is more evenly spread across markets like the US, China and Japan, which gives the brand a broad editorial footprint even if it’s less concentrated than its social performance.

Key takeaway: Estée Lauder shows the power of going all-in on a key market. By prioritizing China across influencers, owned channels and platforms like RED, the brand has built a highly concentrated strategy that maximizes impact where it matters most. For other skincare brands, the lesson is to be clear about where your biggest opportunities lie, then build a locally tuned, influencer-led ecosystem around those markets rather than spreading efforts too thin.

Growth Starts With Data

As we’ve seen above, there is no single winning formula when it comes to skincare marketing, but there are clear patterns. An influencer-led, social-first approach, smart use of local platforms, and a strong backbone of regionally-focused Owned channels and clear brand storytelling are all elements that can push brands toward success. Of the top skincare brands above, each one leans into its own strengths and markets, yet all three succeed by being intentional about where their impact comes from and how it’s built over time.

This is where benchmarking with consistent metrics like MIV makes a real difference. Instead of guessing what works, brands can see exactly which markets, Voices and channels are driving value, how their performance compares to peers, and where their biggest opportunities or gaps lie.

More importantly, it gives structure to decision-making. Rather than reacting to trends or getting caught up in vanity metrics, brands can build strategies based on what consistently delivers real results, whether that’s doubling down on high-performing creators, refining their channel mix or investing more deeply in key markets.

With the skincare category continuing to grow, decisions need to be grounded in context, not isolated metrics. Launchmetrics Insights makes that comparison visible across brands and markets. Book a demo to see how your brand compares.

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