With over 81% of businesses using video marketing on Facebook, 93% of social media advertisers using Facebook ads regularly, and nearly 50% of the world’s population using various social media platforms, it is understandable how crucial digital platforms have become for companies that seek to create a substantial online presence amongst their potential consumer base.
However, while 80% of the companies believe that their social media marketing is spot on, only 8% of their customers agree. Therefore, it is apparent that the digital space has become increasingly challenging for brands to penetrate.
Today companies have to think out-of-the-box to create strong brand awareness and deliver a consistent brand message that helps their existing clientele and prospective customers relate to their brand more often.
According to the Strategic Planning Institute, aggressive marketing and advertising are instrumental in enhancing brand awareness, which was proved by these three following companies that joined hands with Pinterest to create and execute memorable brand awareness campaigns.
1. Burberry
This British heritage beauty brand wanted to replicate the personalized and unique experience that people enjoy in a shop by launching Cat Lashes Mascara. This way, they wanted to reach out to a new audience and urge them to try their beauty products.
Objectives
Burberry wanted to appeal to a new consumer base and make headway into an audience comprising of mostly millennials. Their goal was to boost their brand awareness amongst this younger populace, who would subsequently drive their sales.
Approach and Solution
As the company was trying to woo the younger audience, which comprised of mostly beauty-obsessed millennials, it partnered with Pinterest, which has the largest digital beauty audience. This helped Burberry connect with potential customers and brand their product in such a way that it appealed to these young buyers.
Burberry and Pinterest created the first customized beauty experience on Pinterest, backed by the Pinterest API. Pinterest users or Pinners filled in short questionnaires about their beauty habits and practices. After they answered these questionnaires, they received automatically generated but highly customized board with the perfect mix of product information and beauty tips. These custom pins proved instrumental in driving Burberry’s brand awareness as they helped the Pinners evaluate how Cat Lashes Mascara could fit into their existing stock of beauty items.
The Result
The campaign resulted in increased product awareness for Burberry. Pinners answered the questionnaires to create more than 30,000 personalized boards resulting in over 1 million make-up Pins. This culminated with people snagging all 5,000 samples within the first five days of the campaign.
The combination of Pinterest’s API with customized content worked wonders for Burberry’s Cat Lashes Mascara, which prompted them to try it for the second time in Christmas 2016 during which the Burberry Gift Finder helped Pinners create boards with custom gift ideas.
2. Estee Lauder
Estee Lauder wanted to launch a new fragrance in the lead-up to the 2018 festive season. So they came up with Beautiful Belle, which was the newest scent in Estee Lauder’s Beautiful fragrance line.
Objectives
With Beautiful Bell’s launch, Estee Lauder wanted to increase the awareness about its new formula and wanted to take the feminine quotient of the iconic perfume a notch higher. For this, they were specifically targeting a younger market segment. Also, with the festive season approaching, they wanted it to become a favourite amongst the gift-givers.
Approach and Solution
As Estee Lauder wanted to make inroads into a new audience, it made sense for them to team up with Pinterest which has a highly engaged beauty audience and shopping environment. Thus, it was an ideal platform for the brand to reach out to new people, especially the ones who were looking for new products.
Estee Lauder created a full-funnel marketing strategy that was aimed at boosting its brand awareness and give a serious push to purchase consideration for its latest product. To that end, it ran Pinterest ads in several formats, including max-width video, in its first phase. This introduced the scent to its target audience and helped them establish an emotional connection with the fragrance.
The second phase, which involved the digital sampling component, saw Estee Lauder team up with SoPost. Together, they focused on people who had demonstrated an engagement with the ads shown in the first phase. This was determined on the basis of people visiting the company’s website and actalike groups based on this audience. Thus, they reached an interested audience, comprising of people who mere likely to claim a sample and purchase the scent later.
These ads were created with imagery from the awareness campaign and gift-themes. The strong messaging encouraged people to come forward to claim their free samples. People were directed to a microsite where they had to fill in their address details to receive a sample via the mail. They could follow another link there to learn more about the fragrance and find from where they could purchase it.
The Result
The Beautiful Belle campaign achieved a 12% higher opt-in rate and a 2% higher response rate. Also, its click-through rate to online retailers was twice as high as SoPost’s benchmarks. All this resulted in strong sales, significantly boosting the awareness metrics and lifting the ad recall by over 3% by the use of max-width video.
3. La Mer
The luxury skincare and makeup brand, La Mer, wanted to deliver a targeted sampling campaign, which would showcase their iconic moisturizers to consumers who had engaged with ads in the past or browsed through their product samples.
Objectives
Their main objective behind displaying their products was to gain new consumers and grow their CRM database. Also, they wanted to drive the number of reviews on their website.
Approach and Solution
As La Mer wanted access to a new audience, they chose Pinterest because of its ability to weave a rich story around the brands that they partnered with.
La Mer developed a full-funnel strategy, which encompassed everything from awareness to consideration to conversion. During the ‘Awareness’ phase, La Mer wanted to highlight their five different moisturizer textures, which would give the Pinners insights into each one of them. For this, they launched Video ads, backed by targeted keywords, that used to be displayed throughout with day-to-day moments to make it more relevant.
During the ‘Purchase Consideration’ phase, La Mer again targeted people who had shown engagement in the previous phase. This was easy to find with ads that prompted Pinners to claim their sample of the texture that they preferred.
The ‘Conversion’ phase was designed around the users who had claimed a sample. By using personalized and product-oriented static pins featuring a call to action, they drove high engagement and sales.
The Result
The campaign was highly successful and ensured that La Mer sent product samples to its qualified leads. They tracked KPIs to consistently monitor their developments, which allowed them to improve throughout their campaign. Pinners who received samples demonstrated a high engagement toward the brand and got into further communications with a 34% higher rate than the brand’s average.
Also, the number of reviews on La Mer’s site for their five moisturizers grew by a massive 150%, which was much higher than their original goal of 50% hike. Also, their CRM database grew by 15% against their goal of 7%. Also, the engagement rate amongst the people who had claimed a sample was 500% higher than their benchmarks, making their ‘Conversion’ phase immensely successful.
So, What Are You Doing to Boost Your Brand Awareness?
Not being afraid to learn and try new things could be the first thing you could start with! After all, the beauty of the digital space is that it gives you the ability for a quick campaign turn-around in real-time. Learn from other platforms, take your time, think long-term, and remember that regardless of the hard work that it demands, the benefits will surely make your efforts worthwhile.