BeReal Marketing Strategies: The Out-of-the-Box Marketing Guide in 2024 [+ Examples]

BeReal marketing is the next best thing for brands that want to connect with Gen Z and Millennial audiences. Because this social app is new to the scene, most brands don’t how to use BeReal marketing, what content to post or how to engage users.

The free BeReal app has developed impressive traction and popularity since its launch. In Germany, the BeReal app is the third best free social app. In the UK, Canada, and France, it’s rated the fourth best free social app.

Most of this app’s traffic comes from searches and referrals, highlighting how quickly BeReal is spreading through word-of-mouth marketing.

But why is this social app so popular?

What makes BeReal different from other social platforms like Instagram?

And how do brands leverage BeReal marketing to optimize audience engagement and boost brand awareness?

You don’t have to figure this out on your own!

We have an ultimate guide on BeReal marketing, how the app works and why businesses should use it for organic advertising in 2024!

Plus, we have the top three BeReal marketing examples and what you can learn from these brands.

Ready to learn about BeReal marketing and connect with customers like never before?

Here we go!

What is BeReal Marketing?

Launched in France in 2010, BeReal is a photo-sharing social app to connect people without the filtered façade typical social platforms promote. Concepts like influencer culture, filters, and photoshop are against the app’s premise. It’s about sharing raw photos that reflect your true self.

By August 2022, the app had 10 million daily active users, a shocking 29200% increase from the previous year. And as of September 2022, it sported 28 million downloads. 

Although BeReal is a French-based platform, the app is most popular in the US (12 mil downloads), the UK (5 mil downloads), and then France (2 mil downloads). The primary demographic of users downloading the BeReal app are female Gen Z and Millenials. 

With such rapid interest in authenticity, the BeReal app might be here to stay. Powerhouse social apps aren’t released often, but the excitement around BeReal suggests this may be another channel for brands to engage with targeted audiences.

The biggest obstacle to BeReal marketing is the app strictly prohibits commercial advertising and promotion. Businesses can’t make dedicated profiles for marketing at all. However, many brands have gone about BeReal marketing the right way and garnered impressive results. We’ll explore that soon!

Source: Latasha James 

Why Should You Market Your Brand on BeReal?

Authentic and Organic Advertising 

What makes BeReal unique compared to other social apps is promoting real, unfiltered content. Nothing is skewed in favor of the user posting it. Instead, this app encourages users to take off their social media masks and connect with others in a much more natural and relatable way.

This heavy advocacy for transparency and authenticity is an advantage for businesses. The app’s sentiment already lays the stage for organic, customer-centric advertising. Because brands can’t use paid advertising campaigns on BeReal, users won’t feel your content is as invasive as paid ads may be.

BeReal gives your brand the perfect platform to flaunt your human side and share your brand with people rather than sell it. You can share behind-the-scenes content, funny videos, or how your brand plans to impact its target audience. 

Customer Engagement 

Consistent, buyer-centric engagement strategies are the best route to building brand loyalty. The more you engage and interest your target audience, the more likely they will stay connected and invested in your brand. Users may also feel motivated to check out your website or other social channels if your content is captivating. 

There are many organic ways businesses can use BeReal to drive customer engagement. Remember, although you can’t outright use paid ads or influencer marketing, this is another bustling social channel to find and connect with ideal buyers.

The BeReal app unintentionally helps brands optimize customer engagements through one global daily push notification at a set time. All users receive one push notification daily, encouraging them to stop what they’re doing and post a real photo. You have two minutes to do this, so the content is in the moment and authentic. 

The downside is you can’t do much strategic content planning for BeReal marketing. However, this one mass push notification keeps users hooked on the platform and makes them look forward to a daily “task”. 

Community Marketing

Community marketing may be more vital to some businesses than others. But building a community helps secure loyal customers, steady referrals, and a positive online reputation. Community marketing provides many profitable perks to brands, and BeReal marketing can enhance this.

With so many users on the BeReal app, you’ll find target audience segments if your ideal buyer personas are Gen Z or Millennials. This means you’ll have another digital space to connect with targeted users and create awareness about your brand. 

The best way to use community marketing for BeReal marketing and vice versa is to encourage users to follow your profile. You can promote your BeReal profile on other social channels and your website. 

Relevant Marketing 

If you want to scale your business, you have to get in with the trends. Right now, the BeReal app is blowing up, and more users join every day. There’s no certainty BeReal will stand through time like Twitter or Facebook. This social photo-sharing app could fall out of fashion tomorrow and, in a couple of years, be replaced by another app.

You don’t know how long BeReal will have this hype, so leverage this platform while it’s trending. Don’t miss out on the potential it could offer your brand. And for startups or businesses that are stagnating, a new, fresh platform with tons of buzz could be just what you need. 

6 Top BeReal Marketing Strategies 

1.Market Behind-the-Scenes Content

Behind-the-scenes content is a fantastic way to personalize your social media presence and connect with users. This content gives your audience a peek into your brand and what goes into your products. It’s a great time to share your brand identity, voice, and values and build personal relationships with users.

Your audience would most likely enjoy such native content. Users find it easier to relate to and engage with genuine brands that evoke emotion. A few ideas of behind-the-scenes content include meetings, team-building exercises, daily office life, and projects. Market whatever you want to share with your audience to personify your brand. 

2.Promote Mental Health and Wellbeing

Mental health is a popular topic among Gen Z and Millennial audiences because they seem impacted by it the most. 35% of Millennials receive mental health treatment, and Gen Z individuals were the most to rate their mental health as fair or poor.

Despite how typical mental health is among Gen Z and Millennials, they still struggle with conveying how they feel. In response, many brands like Maybelline have started mental health awareness campaigns and provided a WhatsApp hotline to offer support. 

This campaign will matter to buyers because it’s personal and relates to what they experience. You’re dealing with the same demographics for BeReal Marketing, so approach mental health awareness and promote concepts like self-love and self-acceptance. Let your audience know you love them for who they are, and so should they!

Be consistent and passionate about your efforts, and ensure you support and believe in the cause as much as you claim to. There’s no better way to get a bad reputation quickly than being the “brand who capitalized on poor mental health”. 

3.Use Relatable, Buyer-Centric Content

Talking about promoting mental health awareness because it’s relatable to BeReal’s user base; all your content must be customer-centric. BeReal marketing is about being transparent and genuine with your audience, making customer-centric content imperative. 

Your audience must respond to your content for you to engage them and build a community. How well you curate your content determines how likely your BeReal marketing campaign will succeed. Based on customer analytics, understand what content your target audience would like to see. Evaluate your performance to see if this is accurately aligned with the user’s interacting with your brand.

You may find that the content you’re promoting is attracting the wrong buyers, or you could uncover a new market segment for your brand.

Find different approaches to test content and evaluate if your angle works. But if you have established followings on other social channels, testing your content for BeReal marketing is much easier. Base your content on the content you use on social channels that share the same characteristics as your BeReal audience. 

If you expand your current social communities to BeReal, you’ll know what content to use, based on what content interests these followers. Track your engagement consistently to pin down impactful content that engages your audiences and conveys your brand message and value. 

4.Expand or Build a Community

If you don’t already have an established online community, you can create one on BeReal. But if you have a community, expand it through BeReal marketing. 

To expand your community to BeReal, or build one, market your BeReal profile on other social channels. Ensure your BeReal profile isn’t too salesy. Remember, BeReal doesn’t allow commercial advertising.

You can use posts, stories, or other forms of content to promote your BeReal profile. To give users extra motivation to follow your BeReal profile, consider incentives. These incentives can be discounts, coupon codes, or exclusive access to gated content. Be creative in your approach and ensure your incentive matters to your buyers.

After developing traffic to your BeReal community, you must maintain consistency. Stick to regular posting, engage with other users, share organic content and follow the rest of these strategies!

Your BeReal community matters because it remains a powerful resource after your campaign. Communities welcome opportunities for referral marketing, customer loyalty, and user-generated content to secure credibility and authority. 

5.Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)

BeReal marketing provides a fantastic opportunity to leverage UGC. Collaborate with your followers to create unique, branded content to boost brand awareness, customer engagement, and your online presence.

There are many ways to do this, depending on your audience. If your followers are a bunch of professionals, you could create fun and informative content to share expert tips or advice. Or, perhaps your users are dog lovers. You can create quirky photos of followers interacting with their dogs in a silly or loving way.

What we love most about this BeReal marketing strategy is that it goes a longer way than quick customer interactions. You get to collaborate with your audience and include them in your marketing strategy. 

6.Implement Lifestyle Marketing Tactics

You don’t have to be a lifestyle marketing brand to steal a few lifestyle marketing tricks. The aim of lifestyle marketing is for brands to sell a way of life rather than a product. You’re not going to be doing any selling on BeReal. But you can promote a way of life that resonates with your brand identity and values. 

If your brand is passionate about a movement or trend, encompass that in BeReal marketing. Use this platform as a medium to show your audience how to practice your values and share your brand’s mission. 

Let’s go back to selling products for dog lovers. You can use content that promotes values and concepts like how to care for dogs, contributing to dog shelters, or volunteering in animal awareness campaigns and movements.

BeReal marketing gives you a unique opportunity to be raw and honest to your audience. There’s no better chance to create and promote a way of life packed with your brand’s values and missions and aimed to add value to your audience and connect them to your brand. 

3 Best BeReal Marketing Examples

1.Chipotle

Chipotle once again proved they got the assignment and jumped on the BeReal marketing bandwagon before any brand could. Because Gen Z and Millennials make up more than half of Chipotle’s customer base, it made sense to give BeReal marketing a go.

To get started, Chipotle wanted to boost its profile. They designed their campaign with this objective and rewarded the first 100 followers with a promo code to get a free entrée.

This tactic worked, and within 30 minutes, all the promo codes were gone! Thanks to their fiery start, Chipotle now has over 2000 BeReal friends. 

Chipotle posts every day when the notification strikes! They keep their content as natural as possible and avoid advertising and sales tactics.

The key takeaways:

• Use a valuable and quick incentive to build a BeReal following.
• Keep your first attempt simple and small to test the waters before going all in.
• Be as organic about your approach and content as possible.

2.e.l.f. Cosmetics

Although e.l.f. Cosmetics didn’t beat Chipotle to BeReal marketing, this was the first beauty brand on the platform. e.l.f. Cosmetics chose to launch its BeReal profile on Friday, August 5th, 2022. Compared to Chipotle, this cosmetics brand was much grander about its BeReal marketing entrance.

e.l.f. Cosmetics offered the first 150 followers limited-time promo codes to a five-piece skincare collection. 

This beauty brand took it a step further and gave users reason to stick around on the platform. e.l.f. Cosmetics promised behind-the-scenes content and sneak peeks into office life and product development. 

Once the campaign got on its feet, e.l.f. Cosmetics stuck to what they promised and posted various forms of organic content. Followers would view content like daily office life, co-worker banter, and “unfiltered insights” into product campaigns and development.

As e.l.f. Cosmetics already has a solid connection with their audience, BeReal Marketing was a little easier. 

The key takeaways:

• Find ways to motivate your audience to want to remain engaged on BeReal.
• Understand how you can combine your and BeReal’s values to promote this platform’s premise and what you want to achieve. 
• Follow through on your promises!

3.Trident X Sour Patch Kids

Once noticing the potential of BeReal marketing from brands like Chipotle, the Trident and Sour Patch collaboration decided to leverage this platform too!

BeReal marketing made sense to these brands because the user demographics met their target audience demographics. Using BeReal marketing, Trident and Sour Patch Kids hoped to create awareness and drive traction to their product collaborations. Although it’s unclear how exactly these brands went about BeReal marketing, they’re one of the few that’s tried and tested this social channel!

The key takeaways:

• Stay ahead of trends among your audience demographics.
• Consider BeReal marketing for a specific campaign if marketing your overall brand doesn’t appeal to you.

Conclusion

BeReal marketing is the next best thing, and brands like Chipotle and e.l.f. Cosmetics show us the potential of this social app. With BeReal, you can connect to your audience through organic and authentic content that promotes your brand values.

BeReal goes against the grain and motivates users to share raw, unfiltered pictures to embrace themselves and each other. With such strong messaging, BeReal marketing is a fantastic way to build audience relationships like never before.

References

Business of Apps: BeReal Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)

ChConline: Generation Z Reported the Most Mental Health Problems

Data.ai: BeReal Surpassed 10 Million Cumulative Downloads to Date

SimilarWeb: BeReal Statistics

The Information: BeReal Counts 10 Million Daily Users