L'Oréal's Makeup.com, a website featuring best-in-class beauty content, is dedicated to bringing beauty inspiration and education to women everywhere. Pinterest, the leading visual discovery platform, is the ideal vehicle for Makeup.com to share its beauty tutorials, infographics, tips and tricks, and inspirational looks to a broad audience ranging from beauty enthusiasts to novices looking for guidance on replicating looks with ease.
Makeup.com produces re-pinnable, broadly accessible beauty content that provides utility to their community. Makeup.com's objective on Pinterest is to leverage their content to grow a loyal Pinterest community and drive qualified traffic back to Makeup.com.
Makeup.com became a thought leader for brands on the Pinterest platform by relentlessly testing and analyzing all aspects of their strategy in order to drive results that exceeded their goals. The team employs a creative, data-driven approach and has built out and tested numerous revolutionary, disruptive concepts, like their Pin-Worthy video series that takes a Pinterest pin and brings it to life in video form. The Makeup.com team constantly re-evaluates its strategy, making any updates necessary based on the ever-evolving digital landscape, industry trends and platform updates. For example, when Pinterest launched its animated GIF functionality, the Makeup.com team quickly responded by testing their performance.
Makeup.com's Pinterest community currently has more than 122,000 engaged followers, its pins receive an average of 2,000 daily repins and 3.6 million daily views across Pinterest, which drive over 60% of the site's organic traffic.
Makeup.com's objectives on Pinterest are to grow a loyal follower base, drive traffic to Makeup.com, build relationships with the community, and create and share engaging, fresh beauty content. In order to meet these objectives, Makeup.com has built an ever-evolving Pinterest strategy around testing and innovation.
In 2014, Makeup.com's Pinterest:
• grew its following by 128%
• drove 60% of their organic site traffic
• had an average of 16mm monthly viewers
• pins receive an average of 3.6mm daily views on Pinterest
• pins received an average of 2,000 daily repins
Due to Makeup.com's emphasis on experimentation and testing, they continuously test various components and optimize based on their findings. Makeup.com is diligent about following digital trends and Pinterest platform updates, quickly adapting their strategy accordingly whenever necessary. For example, when Pinterest introduced guided search, Makeup.com responded by crafting longer, more descriptive copy to accompany their pins. As a result, they immediately saw a lift in engagement that in turn drove more site traffic.
Some of these key experiments included long-form pins, "teasy" pins, animated GIFs, video, description copy, board names, group boards, imagery, content, design, pinning times and pinning frequency. These experiments yielded significant learnings, which guided the team's strategy for everything from the length, color and size of pin images to the pinning frequency. For example, the team found that long-form pins are most likely to yield repins while teasy pins are most likely to drive clicks. Additionally, they found the Makeup.com audience is interested in learning how to do things "the right way" and prefers lighter shades of pink opposed to darker ones. Yet another example of a valuable learning is that pinning sporadically throughout the day is more effective than pinning a lot of content at once. All of these valuable insights are applied as optimizations to the strategy on an ongoing basis.
Makeup.com also had the amazing opportunity to participate in Pinterest's Promoted Pins pilot program in 2014 where the added boost in visibility enabled them to garner learnings at an accelerated rate.
As one of the thought leaders in this space, Makeup.com prides itself on creating and executing numerous groundbreaking, innovative concepts for Pinterest. This has included creating an on-site content strategy that is built around Pinterest performance. For example, because imagery is so vital on Pinterest, the Makeup.com team produces a majority of their own photography and all of their illustrations in-house to ensure they create the highest-quality original imagery optimized for Pinterest. They've taken great care to transfer the fresh, clean aesthetic from Makeup.com over to their Pinterest page. From their profile page, to an individual board to a single pin, you'll see that the look and feel is consistent and calculated. Pin descriptions are written with great detail to maximize SEO and user-experience, and boards are curated by closely tracking the priorities and interests of their Pinterest following.
Yet another example of the Makeup.com team's creativity and innovation is the original concept of a video pin. Always striving to be on the bleeding edge of beauty brand innovation, the Makeup.com team identified the opportunity to explore video pins. They created a video series, Pin-Worthy, where they took pre-existing long-form tutorial pins and brought them to life in video format. When syndicating these videos on Pinterest, the team went through multiple rounds of testing to identify the most efficient way to share video on the platform: pinning directly from YouTube, pinning from an article that housed the video on Makeup.com, adding a faux play button (larger than the one automatically generated by Pinterest) to an enticing image from the video to indicate that the pin was a video.
The Makeup.com Pinterest account is a clear result of a creative, innovative and data-driven strategy, which is executed with a combination of extensive testing and optimization and well-executed original creative concepts. It is for these reasons we consider Makeup.com's Pinterest presence worthy of a Shorty Award.
