Junior Scott Pence, CMO/creative director at Peace Out Skincare, spoke with us about the marketing opportunities on TikTok, how the brand is targeting different generations across Instagram and TikTok, and the future of the metaverse.

Nearly three-quarters of TikTok shoppers worldwide shop on TikTok when they stumble across something in the feed, per Bazaarvoice. Read more from our latest report about the trends we are seeing across TikTok and ecommerce shopping.

Insider Intelligence: What role does TikTok have in promoting marketing efforts of skincare products?

Junior Scott Pence: TikTok is our No. 1 platform. During the pandemic, TikTok was a child and it hadn't taken off. When everyone was shut inside, individuals started sharing skin concerns, skin issues, and asking questions. It became a really important space for us to create a community and introduce new products. As a brand, we strive to promote skin positivity, inclusion, and gender nonspecific skincare.

TikTok allows the founder, Enrico, to have the ability to openly communicate with other acne sufferers in real time, even though TikTok at that time was not live. One of our biggest moments was when TikTok’s No. 1 skinfluencer Hyram Yarbro did a pore strip side-by-side with a nano-influencer, and we sold six months of product in 24 hours, which is roughly a little over 15,000 units.

TikTok is a place where you have to be authentic, because if you aren't, you will get annihilated. Consumers are really aware and educate themselves. From that perspective, TikTok has elevated people's ability to understand exactly what goes into a product, and then have a conversation about it with other people from around the world in real time.

II: What are the demographic differences among the customers you target on TikTok versus more traditional marketing mediums?

JSP: For us, TikTok is a generational thing because early TikTokers have now grown into Zillennials–so they've brought along their younger brothers and sisters and at the same time pulled in their older siblings or parents. We are selling generationally on TikTok. We do our ad campaigns specific to generations, but we also think about how this consumer is growing older with us.

Now we're watching the Gen Z generation really care about anti-aging, which drove our retinol eye stick and face stick to become bestsellers at Sephora and on our D2C platform.

II: What challenges did you encounter as you started creating TikTok content?

JSP: Being able to create content that was 5, 10, 15 seconds long was a learning curve for us because we had to deal with a quick-video format. We were going from static photos to creating moving imagery. I have a product where the grosser the video is, the more it sells – if there is a video that goes up of somebody ripping their pore strip off and it is covered in gunk, our D2C and Sephora sales go through the roof.

Longer content video is becoming a big portion of what we're going to be doing on Instagram. Reels is now a huge part of what we're doing. Static is great, but you're not going to win if you're not moving into what we're calling the motion picture business of TikTok, or even Instagram with Reels now.

II: Are there any other channels you are looking at to promote your skincare products?

JSP: The metaverse – I am really into it. The ability to create a virtual reality of your brand within this universe, which the younger generation takes as being reality, is fascinating. It's the ability for them to not necessarily be somebody else, but interact with people in other places or find out about a brand. We're thinking through how to put our brand into the metaverse. Is it a sales strategy? How do you buy skincare? Can you buy off the metaverse and then push it to your D2C? All these things are going to become a business strategy for us.

You are going to be able to buy anything you want on the metaverse. It's fascinating. Already a consumer can buy perfume, shoes, and clothing, and soon you will be able to buy skincare, too.