Using Pinterest for Customer Engagement

Copyright © 2012 by IQ Agency

OVERVIEW

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The impressive growth of Pinterest over the last year has caught the attention of brands, particularly retailers who are attracted both by the size of the audience and by the referral traffic reported by brands with more mature Pinterest strategies. IQ has received questions from clients about using Pinterest and we’re excited to help.

Topics:

• Pinterest Overview

• Brands Using Pinterest

• Recommendations for Brands

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PINTEREST OVERVIEW

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PINTEREST.COM

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Pinterest is a social media service that allows users to simply and easily create virtual pinboards of images. Pinterest boards are analogous to “inspiration files” full of magazine clippings, swatches, and notes used to collect decorating, gift, or recipe ideas. These curated collections are generally created by scrolling through lists of friends’ pins and selecting the ones you like best.

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HOW DOES PINTEREST WORK?

Pinterest is an invitation-only service, but appears to send invitations to all who request them. Through Facebook’s Open Graph API (accounts can also be created using Twitter), users are connected to their Facebook friends and can immediately see their pins (along with the pins of some super users). This means the first time user experience is rich with images to view and re-pin. Users’ activity on Pinterest (and that of their friends) can be automatically published to other social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Each time a user has a new interest or need, they can create a new board on which they can start attaching images. For instance, if a user is planning a party, he or she can create a board and select food, decoration, invitation, and clothing images to pin to that board, as well as select other users to contribute to the board. The site’s search engine and categories make it easy to search outside the user’s list of friends.

Adding images from the websites outside of Pinterest is easy with the installable “Pin It” bookmark. Some sites are even adding this button to their site to make it even easier to add their images to boards. As we’ll see on the next slide, this is a relatively small percentage of the overall pinning behavior.

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PINTEREST USER DEMOGRAPHICS

This infographic from Modea shows some key facts about Pinterest users that brands should be aware of:

• Nearly 70% are women.

• Household incomes are high.

• Users spend an average of 15 minutes per pinning session.

• They tend to be in the 25-44 age range.

• Most repin rather than pin new items from the web.

• The service is growing rapidly, attracting over 11 million visitors in January 2012.

• The service refers traffic to websites, particularly apparel retailers.














BENEFITS TO BRANDS

Pinterest has many benefits to brands including:

• Search engine rankings: Brands may recognize an SEO boost from having more links to pages.

• Referral traffic: It is estimated that Pinterest drives more traffic than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

• Brand awareness: This is especially important as prospects contemplate purchases across many brands.

• Customer engagement and loyalty: For customers who have already purchased your product and are enjoying it, interacting on Pinterest is a way for you to learn about their experiences and encourage them to share it with others.

• Lifestyle promotion: For lifestyle brands, borrowing relevance from the lives of customers through Pinterest is a great way to engage and re-engage.

• Contest reach: Many brands are launching contests which require entrants to create boards based on entry qualifications. This promotes the sponsoring brand and increases reach.

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THE BOTTOM LINE

Pinterest represents a shift in the way people connect with information. The era when a search engine (likely Google) was the primary method for discovering products and ideas seems to be ending. Users are now more interested in what their friends and other like-minded people are consuming as a shortcut to dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available online. It is often called “curation” and brands are finding ways to be a part of this transition.

What Pinterest allows brands to do is promote a lifestyle, engage consumers in a non-advertorial manner, and share the content they create with a large and growing audience.

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BRANDS USING PINTEREST

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WHOLE FOODS - PROMOTING A LIFESTYLE

• Whole Foods shoppers share many characteristics with Pinterest users — they are affluent, love food and cooking, and are interested in beautiful experiences. This makes Pinterest the perfect place for engaging with customers.

• Whole Foods has created and curates many boards based on the interests of their customer base including healthy eating, cooking gadgets, and gardening. They pin and re-pin non-Whole Foods images just as non-brand users would.

• This borrowed relevance strategy (rather than pure product-based approach) makes it easy and pleasurable for customers to interact with the brand by repinning images that re-enforce Whole Foods’ overall value proposition.














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VOLKSWAGEN USA - PROMOTING PRODUCTS

• Volkswagen takes a different approach. It has attractive products with design that people are passionate about. They have created boards to house product images which puts them into the Pinterest environment for easy re-pinning.

• This approach is not advertorial, but rather editorial with more than just exterior shots of each model. Interesting photography is appreciated by Pinterest users so this approach fits well with the audience.

• For higher-end items like a car, this kind of Pinterest brand use is more about engaging loyal fans and keeping their cars top of mind for those already in a car-buying frame of mind.














ETSY — PROMOTING PRODUCTS

• Etsy allows users to easily sell and buy handmade and vintage items online.

• Their audience very much overlaps with Pinterest’s, making it the perfect place to promote products.

• Couple this with the fact that Etsy products are easily purchasable online, this is a more direct sales approach than is possible for most brands.

• Etsy’s strong community management and history of content curation on Twitter and through its “Treasuries” and homepage features make a transition to Pinterest natural.














REAL SIMPLE — FORMING CONTENT PARTNERSHIPS

• Real Simple is using Pinterest to not only promote a lifestyle that its readers aspire to, but also form partnerships with other content creators.

• By sharing a board with Big Girls Small Kitchen, they connect both brand’s audiences.

• Pinterest refers more traffic to RealSimple.com than any other source besides Google.














RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BRANDS

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OVERVIEW OF RECOMMENDATIONS

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In order to reap the potential brand benefits of Pinterest, we have 4 easy recommendations for brands:

• Ready your site

• Create a brand presence

• Engage with other users

• Measure your reach














READY YOUR SITE

• For people interested in your brand who are already Pinterest users, a Pin It button makes it easy for them to add your images to Pinterest, provided they are not embedded in Flash or restricted in some other manner.

• The button also serves as a subtle reminder that this may be an image they’d want to pin and remember later (perhaps as part of their buying journey.)

• All of the users who follow the initial pinner see the image as part of their feed which extends the reach of your brand.

• Those users can click on the image and be brought to the page on which the users pinned the image which drives referral traffic.

• Other users may repin the image increasing reach further.

Pinterest button launches a popup that allows the user to choose a board to pin the item to.














CREATE A BRAND PRESENCE

The vast majority of pinning activity is actually a repin. This means that users are interacting more often with content already in the Pinterest environment. To accelerate the rate at which your brand’s content is being shared, we recommend that you create a brand presence.

In the case studies, we looked at two approaches — a product-focused approach and a lifestyle-focused approach. We believe a hybrid approach would work best when creating boards.

As we saw with Real Simple, non-competing brands with a similar customer profiles may be able to connect to increase both brands’ audiences.

If you already have a Facebook presence, it will be easy for you to follow all your existing Facebook fans who are already on Pinterest.

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ENGAGE WITH OTHER USERS

• Like all social networking, the goal for Pinterest is to engage with other users who are interested in your brand.

• You can interact with them by commenting on their photos and repinning them to your boards.

• Users receive notifications when another user comments or repins their pins telling them which accounts are interacting with them. They likely visit and/or follow those users growing their Pinterest network.














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MEASURE YOUR REACH

• Pinpuff.com is a free service that allows you to see the “pinfluence” of your activity on Pinterest.

• By comparing your Pinterest traffic to paid media, brands can get a sense of the dollar value of their Pinterest program.

• Pinpuff also recommends easy actions to take to increase your “Pinfluence” such as driving more traffic to your profile and creating strong board names.

• Pinclout.com also measures influence of individual Pinterest accounts.














THANK YOU.

To get in touch with IQ, call us at: 678.449.2021Or visit: iqagency.com















Using Pinterest for Customer Engagement

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