This may not come as news to you, but the world has in fact gone Pinterest mad and here’s our guide to why you should be hopping onto the bandwagon.
Analytic analysts have debated for the last 18 months as to the long-term value of Pinterest. Retailers have seen an undeniable increase in sales referrals, more so than typically seen from Facebook, but keeping our feet on the ground we should really ask ourselves ‘What is the best way to get involved?’
There are no set rules for Pinterest and how best to increase brand awareness, until now.
Pinterest is still a relativity young site, both users and designers alike are still forging a path into what does and does not work but we have kindly compiled the best ways we believe will showcase your brand and increase sales.
1. Show off your products
There are a number of ways you can do this, our personal favourite is creating mood boards that show your products within various themes offered by Pinterest.
If your brand’s personality is bright, colourful and expressive then reflect this when naming your boards. This won’t just become your own naming convention but the repetition will carry a message that sticks. Your followers will learn which boards to look out for and retain your audience while attracting new people.
Look at what your competition is doing and create your own take on it. Make it applicable to your own and show off your creative side.2. Relate your brand to reflect a lifestyle
In the same way that wholesome food retailers relate their brand to a healthy lifestyle, customers don’t just view those retailers as a place to purchase food. Apple also does this very well, their products are not just fancy gadgets to their customer-base, they form part of a luxury and exclusive “club”.
Pick up your brands key themes and brand messages and create boards that reflect them. Create a “club” exclusively for your target audience so they feel like they belong to something more than just a business and you will see brand’s reputation soar and customer loyalty go through the roof.
It’s all about the competition!
“Pin it to Win it” competitions are rife across Pinterest right now and with good reason too, they get a response! There are various ways you could create your own competition and asking your followers to re-pin and share your content is an excellent way to maximise your exposure while giving something back.
American retailer, Land’s End recently ran a similar competition where they asked followers to re-pin 20 images from their website and Pinterest boards then email a URL of the resulting board. The payback to the competition entries was the chance to win all 20 items.
The result was 200 entrants, which may not sound like much but taking into consideration the brands reach and exposure within the newly created Pinterest boards from the competition entries, brand exposure went through the roof.
3. Coverage
London based fashion house, Dazed & Confused, covered fashion week in the UK in 2012. Their editorial team used a collaborative board to pin their favourite trends, photos and clips from the biggest event in UK fashion.
You can do the same for your business by pinning new products or samples for your audience to share and re-pin.
For help on how to improve your organisations coverage and SEO, click here.
4. Highlight your visual content
Here at Jungle, a big part of our coverage is visual as well as text based (click here to see more of our free SEO and PPC guides), if you use infographics and video content then Pinterest allows you to group everything together and place onto various boards.
What gives you the edge with Pinterest is compiling all of your best content in one place and dividing them into groups, making it much faster to digest and access rather than searching through your corporate website for the same content.
5. Crowdsource
There are few companies who are implementing this useful tool right now so use this as your opportunity to be a thought leader and set a trend!
There’s huge potential to ask your customers to pin an image of themselves wearing or using one of your products, then select the best to highlight as a superuser or work more closely with those people to become brand advocates. You may be thinking this is another competition model but crowdsourcing is a really effective long-term strategy for getting closer to those users that are active as opposed to reaching a high number of people quickly in the short-term.
As the saying goes “A day without learning is a day wasted” and it is worth remembering that Pinterest is not just about a bountiful of pretty pictures. People are more likely to engage with images and video, so use this to your advantage and get pinning!
British based charity, Unicef, spent 2012 showing the rest of us how best to educate your followers about its goals by pulling together all the materials it uses to reach their targets. Using Pinterest, Unicef created several boards each of which related to a specific campaign and localised profiles containing relevant case studies, projects and campaigns.
This transparency of what they do and how they do it encouraged people to get involved when they saw the benefits of the organisation to the people they were trying to help. Don’t be afraid to educate your audience, they can never know too much about how great your organisation is!
7. Use Pinterest like a focus group
Pinterest is unique in its own right as it has never been so easy for customers and an audience to align themselves alongside their favourite brands. Research shows that people are more likely to interact with brands that mirror their own personality traits and beliefs.
Therefore it’s worth spending some time looking at who your followers are, who they follow and what they are re-pinning. Those who are actively engaging with your brand are doing so for a reason, so take some time to find out why and how you can better tailor some of your content for them. The returns will be worth it!
8. Exclusive access
Everyone has a generic ‘Meet the Team’ page on their site, if you don’t then you should! What Pinterest offers is your chance to give your followers an insight into what exactly goes on in the office, how your products are built, packaged and designed. Give exclusive access and you will see brand loyalty and perception improved and sky rocket.
There you have it! 8 simple steps which can be incorporated into your 2013 Marketing strategy to bring your brand onto a bigger stage.
If you have any questions or require some helpful assistance then email our social media officer, Kaye, who will be more than happy to assist you in getting started!
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