Now, this is Pinteresting!

Pinterest, a visual discovery platform has a loyal group of users since in launch in 2010. Brands too have managed to use this platform in a very creative way and it has proved to work wonders so far.

Kotex’s women’s inspiration day

Kotex has secured its place in the history book of Pinterest by being the first brand to do a campaign on Pinterest. The campaign was aptly named as ‘Women’s day inspiration by Kotex’, executed by Smoyz – an Israeli advertising agency; the campaign targeted about 50 women.

The agency then went through the profiles of these 50 women and their Pinterest boards to understand what inspires them. In order to get their attention, they created a gift hamper from their Pinterest wish list and decorated the package. These women had to re-pin Kotex’s invitation in order to get their gift hamper.

Since the platform wasn’t experimented with before, it was an instant hit and was proved to be successful not only on Pinterest but also on other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, thanks to all the women who shared them.

P&Gs ‘Thank you mum’

P & G created a board, ‘Thank you mum’ featuring former Spice Girl Mel C and runner Paula Radcliffe. Procter & Gamble selected the perfect social media platform to place their campaign as its users mainly concentrate on clothing, food, home-décor and FMCG products. Marketing on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube would probably get more views but fewer impressions comparatively.

The campaign was a contest hosted for mums, that individual Pinterest users would want to thank by nominating them. The winner of the nomination would win a 4-day, 3-night all-expense-paid trip to 2012 summer Olympic Games in London to cheer Team USA.

Procter and Gamble found the exact audience they were looking via this platform.  Pinterest proved to be perfect for Procter.

Sephora

Pinterest is all about DIYs, make-up and has had a larger female audience relatively according to data. Sephora is one of the most successful beauty product companies. According to Sephora’s data, their users spend 15x more than on their Pinterest page than their Facebook page. In April, 2012 it encouraged its users to share the list of Sephora products they used and how. They used Pinterest as a medium to tell a visual story while curating a huge amount of user generated content.

Kraft

Kraft joined Pinterest in 2012, with the objective to make it easy for people to discover and share their recipes. Since, you get to see many recipes and food pictures on Pinterest; Kraft made the right decision to host a contest on this platform. ‘Pin it to win it’ was their campaign motto. Kraft products had to be used in the recipes in order to get them selected, this would increase the interaction of the brand with its audience.

Urban Decay

After their first contest on Pinterest proved to be a success, there was no looking back. Urban Decay used Pinterest to reach its target audience and launched its latest, Electric collection. It got more than 50,000 followers on "Get electric. Festival style" board. This resulted in fun interactions with its audience. The users were asked to pin how their favourite festival looks like in order to win tickets to the Coachella music festival.