Brief:

• Manscaped, a company that focuses on men's "below-the-belt" grooming, ran a marketing campaign on Pinterest that boosted brand awareness, web traffic and sales, according to a case study shared with Mobile Marketer. The campaign delivered a 13% increase in web traffic, a 9% increase in customer acquisitions and an 11% increase in online sales, beating benchmarks.
• Working with Pinterest, the company uploaded a customer list of people who previously purchased Manscaped products, created a list of prospects with characteristics similar to its customers and then used interest targeting and keyword targeting to find top performing keywords.
• Pinterest Analytics allowed Manscaped to understand which targeting options and Promoted Pins were getting the best response, so they could adjust the campaign to optimize performance.

Insight:

As Manscaped's Vice President of Marketing Ryan Fiore notes, Pinterest has "a stigma for being heavily skewed towards women." The results of Manscaped's campaign suggests that marketers looking to reach male audiences to raise awareness and boost web traffic can also have success on the image-posting site and app.

Pinterest is seeking to boost its appeal among major brands in various ways. The company this month started offering a bigger video ad format to all brands after testing it with Adidas, Warner Bros. and U.K. retailer John Lewis, according to a blog post. Pinterest's "max.width" format is about four times bigger than its standard video ads and fills out the width of a smartphone screen.

These changes may have helped boost the company's bottom line, as Pinterest is poised to double its ad revenue this year to nearly $1 billion. The success comes with unverified reports by unnamed sources of its initial public offering (IPO) in mid-2019. The platform is seeing strong results with mobile ads among its more than 200 million active monthly users, 80% of whom use Pinterest's app, the company reports. CNBC said that advertisers are also attracted to Pinterest's mobile search capabilities.

Social commerce shows some promising results for brands as consumers seek product information on social media platforms, which also are adding transactions tools to boost shopping. About 55% of consumers have made purchases via social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, according to the 2018 Consumer Expectations Report from Avionos.