Pinterest for Marketers

I have to preface this post, as it seems natural that should our team promote something, like a platform, or a media type, or anything for that matter, we should have some first hand, practical experience. In the case with Pinterest, our team has no formal experience with the platform. Although we have done some testing, we are not veterans of Pinterest. That being said, here we go…

Pinterest has grown to more than 12 million unique visitors, making it one of the fastest growing platforms ever. comScore noted that Pinterest was the fastest site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. It’s valuable to note that 83% of users are women, and the average age is 35 – 44. The only exception to this was in Britain, where interesting 56% of users were men and the average age was 25 – 34. The time on platform is approximately 90 minutes per month – double that of Facebook.

Pinterest is free to use, and users can upload, save, sort and manage images, making it a personalized social or media platform. It’s seen some interesting growth for teachers and students, who can pin, organize and collaborate on projects. It’s a natural for collaboration.

As well, it’s certainly easy to use, being one of the simplest social media sites. Pinterest has the potential for retailers to impact business and sales.  Pinterest can drive interest, engagement, drive traffic, generate leads and lead to sales.

About Pinterest – Video

Here are some reasons why retailers should be using Pinterest and engaging consumers with this social platform:

1) Pinterest converts Browsers into Buyers

Pinterest is very unique in the fact that reduces the number of steps from discovery to conversion. Thus, this means that visitors from Pinterest convert to sales or leads faster than from other social media sources. Businesses love this because it makes it easier on them to convert leads to sales.

2) Pinterest Drives Traffic

Ten millions unique views is nothing to underestimate. Most businesses rely on their website to fuel sales and marketing, but it’s important to generate traffic and drive leads to your website, and Pinterest can do that for you. It’s a great tool to help increase links back to your website and drive more traffic as a result.

3) Pins get you more Inbound Links

Marketers love when people share our content and link it back to them. Pinterest is great because every pin on the website includes a link leading back to the source of the image. Hub spot informs us that 95% of images on the Pinterest are either pinned or re-pinned from the web.

With it’s ever growing popularity in the social sphere, Pinterest could provide marketers with very valuable inbound links. Any link that provides you link back to your website is always a benefit to you.

Read more about Backlinks.

4) User Engagement – Addicted to Pinterest?

It happens; users are noted to become addicted to Pinterest. Some just love scrolling through all the beautiful pictures, images, and looking up all the delicious food. Pinterest users seem to lose themselves while pinning and re-pinning and before they know it, hours have passed by.

John Jantsch tells us a little more about Pinterest users:

“Unlike many social sites, where the game is to get followers, Pinterest users seem very content to simply find stuff and share it with small groups. Pinterest users are keenly interested in what’s hot and what’s cool – a behavior that translates well into the kind of influencer marketers desire to attract.”

What John tells us is interesting, and is a good sign for marketers because this means that your pins are more likely to be seen, re-pinned or can even go viral.

5) Pinterest Integrates with your website, Facebook and Twitter

It is absolutely crucial nowadays for social media platforms be connected to other websites. Pinterest has made it easy for users to share pins on their Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Although this is useful, and while consumers can share pins on their Facebook page, brands cannot share pins on their business pages on Facebook, so there is no way that marketers can automatically share pins. In order for marketers to share a pin they must manually do it, which can be time consuming.

Fortunately, marketers can add a plugin in to their website (Pin it), this makes it easier for people to pin products or visual content that they like.

6) Discover what your target market Loves

Pinterest is also a great place to discover trends. Users can search practically anything from marketing to DIY projects to fashion. There is something for everyone on Pinterest. As an example, if you’re planning a birthday party for your child, you can make a board and pin what inspires you in order to make your ideas come to life.

Pinterest is basically a portal where people can share their ideas with others, and people love content that they can be a part of. With Pinterest you will always know what’s hot and trending in today’s world.

We recommend Pinterest to all retailers for a consumer engagement tool. Promote your products and let your customers know you are there; give them a handout with the address (works for Facebook and other social networks as well). If you want to build engagement, provide a “special” offer to your social fans. Use a free gift, a special discount, a BOGO program or even a complimentary “private sale”. As we suggest with all social networks, make the offers special and specific to your social followers to develop and test offerings.

A picture with worth a 1,000 words; Pinterest is proof.

Want to learn some more? Check out Pinterest’s interest.

Michael Bickerton, (@mjbickerton) Raven5 Ltd. (@raven5) March 2015

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