It’s the shopping season and retailers faced intense competition to grab their customers’ attention. Who’s been doing a great job? What are some of our favorite campaigns? Here are three companies producing amazing results on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Facebook Ads – Adore Me had incredible response to their Black Friday strategies

Hate ‘em or love ‘em, Facebook Ads are very effective for generating leads. The key to success is targeting the right individuals. “Business2community” did a mini case study on Adore Me, an online lingerie retailer, that had an incredibly successful Black Friday-Cyber Monday social campaign. Adore Me focused on professional women between 18 and 36, and the results from the campaign were:

Adore Me reached their goal for new member sign-ups in their target audience with two methods and tools: 1) Enhanced ad targeting with Facebook marketing partner Nanigans’ ad automation software and 2) Optimized delivery with Facebook’s Audience Insights.

In addition, Adore Me optimized every part of the customer experience from ad clicks to the landing page sign-ups. The retailer went a step further to enhance their customer experience with a sleek, black theme color and design for Black Friday and a wintery scene on Cyber Monday. Adore Me also used these strategies to motivate their customers to purchase on these days:

  • % off discounts
  • Limited time offers
  • Comparisons showing sales vs regular pricing
  • Reminders about free shipping

Pinterest – Wayfair pinned their way to an impressive increase in revenue

Pinterest is one of the top social platforms where people go to be inspired by products, making it the perfect place to build retail marketing campaigns. According to “Social Media Today,” there are 2 million product pins daily. As Pinterest develops more features for retailers to attract customers, it’s becoming essential for brands to have a strong presence there. One example is a feature called “Pinterest rich pins” which allow you to notify followers when you’ve discounted a product they had previously posted.

One important note is that the most re-pinned items are actually recipes and brands engaging their pinning communities best, don’t stop at sharing products. Special events and the holidays give them ample reason to get creative with boards featuring a variety of content, including food and drink recipes. The key to Pinterest is to be creative and build content around a whole lifestyle for your products.

J. Crew, Nordstrom, Etsy, Target, Wayfair.com and Poshmark are just some of the brands using Pinterest successfully to boost sales. One campaign that really impressed us was Wayfair’s “Turkey Day Table” promotion in November 2013. The campaign asked participants to curate their own boards with 5 or more pins about their ideal “Turkey Day Table” from the Wayfair Thanksgiving boards.

The campaign was a huge success, from page views to revenue:

Instagram – Marketing Profs schooled B2B companies on how to do it right

We all know that social media is not just for B2C retailers and brands. There are a number of companies impressively using channels like Instagram to develop their audience and increase sales. Have a look at Cisco, GoToMeeting or Novartis on Instagram and you’ll see what we mean. One of our favorite B2B companies that used Instagram to increase brand awareness was Marketing Profs. As an industry leader in teaching marketing strategy, Marketing Profs knew that Instagram could help them grow their business if used in the right way. The company had been regularly sharing a variety of photos, quotes and valuable content in their feed, but they wanted to greatly increase engagement with their followers. In order to achieve their goals, Marketing Profs approached a company called Short Stack to come up with a new strategy.

Short Stack helped the company develop contests for Instagram which were four different giveaways over a 13-day period.  Five posts served as the basis of their campaign, four posts were about the giveaways and one linked to a blog post. With each post fans were asked to follow the link in the bio to learn more. The bio link lead to the Instagram campaign and gave the follower a chance to win that day’s prize.

The results? Goals were met! :

Have you seen any impressive social media campaigns lately? Drop us a line! We’d love to hear what your favorites are and who is doing a great job with some new and interesting content.