A Marketer's Guide To Pinterest For Business, Brand Marketing & E-Commerce Success

A Marketer's Guide To Pinterest For Business, Brand Marketing & E-Commerce Success by John Clark

What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that lets user organize and share things they find on the web. It is essentially taking the analog bulletin board and bringing it online. So instead of a large room with bulletin boards to visually organize ideas/themes you can do this now online with Pinterest pinboards and ‘pin’ items on them. People use pinboards to do things like plan their dream wedding, make wish fashion wish lists, organize recipes and more. Users also browse the pinboards of others to get inspiration from people who share their interests. Why Does It Matter? At present, Pinterest is in its infancy so it is still growing but when 12 million people show up anywhere it matters! Figure 1 - Pinterest Growth There are already over 12 million monthly visitors to Pinterest.com and 82% of the visitors are women with $50-75k+ in annual household income on average. According to comScore, the average Pinterest users spend 98 minutes on the site per month. Compared with Facebook, where users spend an average of 7 hours per month, that may seem insignificant. But considering how new Pinterest is, this is a significant amount of time to take away from any other social network like Facebook or Twitter. Now if you’re a guy you might be asking yourself, who cares? Well women account for 85% of all consumer purchases and she most likely bought the underwear or socks you’re wearing right now. Do not underestimate this demographic for your business. When it comes to macro trends and keeping your business ahead of others, Pinterest also matters. Pinterest is the first Web 3.0 website to go mainstream. Web 3.0 is defined as the 3 C’s: content, commerce and community. Pinterest leverages all of these. Putt your business ahead of the curve and see how Pinterest can turn a product image into a sale through its community of pinners. Can It Be Used For Marketing? Yes, of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book! And Pinterest is already being used for marketing. Some of the best brands are naturally benefitting from Pinterest traffic. Companies like Etsy, Amazon, Walmart, Target and Gemvara are naturally inclined to get products pinned. Etsy specifically has a lot of hand made and visually appealing goods which fit perfectly with the Pinterest audience. Pinterest works best with mainly consumer focused companies. You’ll normally see images of wedding dresses, fashion and home décor on the homepage of Pinterest. Pinterest is great for retailers offering accessories, food, home décor, fashion, fitness products and other visually appealing products online. Travel companies that make boards like “Miami on a Budget” also can leverage Pinterest to drive bookings. How-to and educational companies we also believe will thrive on Pinterest. So can creative companies like photographers or film makers. We don’t think functional products like books or electronics will do as well as they are not visually appealing products. We don’t see many B2B companies successfully marketing on this website; however this could change as more companies start to thing in visual instead of plain old text terms. If your company doesn’t fit with anything above don’t worry - get creative. Your audience is out there on Pinterest and this book will help get your creative juices flowing to help market your company on Pinterest. Continues...