The beauty industry has been an early adopter of AI. From experimenting with skin diagnostics to product personalization, beauty brands have accelerated investments in personalized AI-powered innovations—such as Sephora’s Smart Skin Scan diagnostic tool—since the pandemic, according to analysis from SwiftERM. These innovative technologies have offered consumers a creative canvas to explore beauty trends while opening doors to new possibilities for brand discovery and connection.

As AI advances, a new era of creativity has unfolded for beauty brands. With more opportunities to leverage AI for advertising, beauty brands can reach consumers in ways never before possible.

Here are three ways that beauty brands can infuse AI into their online ad strategies with Meta:

Foundation is key: Finding the right AI tools for your brand

The perfect foundation for an AI-driven campaign varies from brand to brand. Much like shoppers exploring and discovering new products to find their perfect makeup shade, the same principles apply when leveraging AI in a brand’s marketing mix. Testing various AI tools is key to finding the ideal formula that resonates with shoppers while simultaneously enhancing ad performance.

For example, advertisers can test different AI tools in Meta’s Advantage Suite, like Advantage+ shopping campaigns (ASC), which streamlines ad creation, simultaneously automating up to 150 creative combinations. During the critically important Cyber Five period, the beauty vertical leaned heavily into ASC, driving significantly stronger return on ad spend (ROAS) and more efficient cost per acquisition.

Illuminate your creative: Leveraging AI to highlight creativity and efficiency

For advertisers, compelling digital creative is not only more enjoyable for audiences, it’s measurably better for their business. AI allows advertisers to fuel experimentation by refining strategies, iterating on creatives, and informing stronger marketing campaigns. Brands like Agency by Curology have used AI and creative differentiation tactics to help identify what creative works faster so they can devote more time to creating ads that resonate best. For Agency by Curology, this led to increased conversion rates and decreased cost per acquisition against its key demographics.

And with Meta’s new generative AI tools, brands can uplevel their ad creative and identify key focus areas that will drive business results. The generative AI-powered features for ad creatives in Meta’s Ads Manager, for instance, providea testing ground to experiment with visual and copy enhancements. Brands can experiment with background generation, which creates multiple backgrounds giving advertisers the power to tailor their creative assets for different audiences, image expansion to easily adjust assets to fit different formats across multiple surfaces, and text variation to generate multiple versions of ad copy based on the advertiser’s original content brief.

End with a flawless outcome: Integrate AI’s precision even after your campaign

As the advertising ecosystem continues to evolve, performance matters more than ever. By tracking the right metrics with AI, brands can pinpoint the most effective tactics for maximizing ad performance, determine the best approach specific to their business, and allocate resources and ad spend effectively. Ulta Beauty’s retail media network, UB Media, for example, faced the challenge of basket-level reporting that made it difficult to share brand-level results with its clients. Meta’s advanced measurement tools allowed Ulta Beauty to share omnichannel sales insights at the brand level while increasing its ROAS.

AI is an exciting territory for driving both creativity and efficiency in the beauty industry. With Meta’s suite of AI tools, beauty brands can create the “ideal look” by crafting impactful ads for shoppers and gain valuable metrics to help drive the next era of growth.

—Matt Rice, Industry Manager, Beauty, Meta