Pinterest has proven itself to be an extremely valuable social network by becoming the third most popular sharing channel behind Facebook and Twitter. It emerged in 2009, and within this short span of time has caught the eyes of the blogosphere, receiving more than 70 million visitors, who are mobile, active and more tactile; driving massive social sharing. Pinterest has changed from the social network of choice for mums to an essential marketing tool for businesses, with enormous e-commerce potential for increasing offline retail and lifestyle influence. With its focus on striking imagery and visuals, by encouraging its users to pin their favorite photos and images that depict style, recipes, craft, children, pets, recipes etc., it drives tons of referral traffic with an engaged and active community.
Pinterest is a massive virtual pinboard that allows people to look through interesting material, pin them while leaving comments. Every pin is a link to the source of the image, usually an external site – in this case, a link to your site, with every repin leading users to your site. Pinterest is all about converting a passerby to a future customer in a fun and creative way. Statistics prove why visual marketing on Pinterest may be a discreet medium with high reach potential to further promote your business.
- Pinterest has more than 12 million US users.
- 1% of Pinterest users has an annual household income of at least $100,000.
- US users spend an average of one hour and 17 minutes on the site.
- 25% of Fortune Global 100 companies have Pinterest accounts.
- 43% of Pinterest members use it to associate with retailers or brands they identify with, compared to just 24% users who do the same on Facebook.
- According to a Bizrate report, 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase as compared to only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook.
Why Pinterest is good for business
1. High Reach
Reach is the first step in the purchase funnel and Pinterest has an average monthly reach of 2.5x higher than Facebook. In comparison to other social media platforms, Pinterest’s’ reach may be higher because of the viral nature of content, where more than 80% pins are re-pins. Since people only see pins that have already been re-pinned by lots of other people, great content is important. Whereas in other social sharing platforms, an update stops with your follower base, on Pinterest a single pin can be promoted repeatedly over a long period of time, multiplying reach, clicks and sales. The visual focused layout of Pinterest helps it stand out among other social network sites, as all brand updates have the potential to be seen and allows people to scroll through 5 to 20 updates at a time.
2. Phenomenal Click-through Rate
Pinterest, like Google, is driving live leads to the virtual doorstep of your business. People use Pinterest to find things to click. They are actively seeking out content and products on Pinterest and are therefore more likely to click from the image to your websites. Data across 1.1 billion impressions resulted in an average click-through rate of 1.1%, which is much better than click-through rates of banners ads, which hover around 0.1%. The click-through rate on Pinterest is very close to the 1% to 3% average organic search click rate on Google. These numbers show once again the superiority of Pinterest as a marketing platform. If you sell online or can calculate the value of inbound web visitors, Pinterest makes it very easy for you to improve your ROI.
3. Acquire Sales
Producing creative pins is great, but as a business you ultimately want to drive traffic to your website to motivate a purchase. Pinterest aligns very well with ecommerce as its users use the site to gain ideas for a wide range of activities, from home improvement to cooking and travel. According to RJMetrics’ analysis 80 percent of Pinterest users are female and more than 90 percent of all pins are created by women. This insight is important as women control the household spending in developed countries such as, in the US, around 70+ percent of spending is decided by women. The number of sales via Pinterest typically exceeds Facebook and Twitter, and the average order value is also higher, as most of its female users are primed to buy. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined and Pinterest pins with prices get 36 percent more likes than those without. As a business you should ensure to include a price tag in the pins you create. But it is just as important to not solely use Pinterest to push your product. It is best to get the right balance with a healthy mix of utility, inspiration, and product information on your pins.
Pinterest offers a variety of tools to help ecommerce merchants leverage the platform to make sales.
- Rich pins include key information such as pricing, product availability, and where to buy pinned items.
- Guided search helps with product discovery.
- Group boards help grow followers and expose products to a wider audience.
- Pin It button can be added to product pages to promote sharing.
- Promoted pins is a form of advertising similar to Facebook’s Promoted Posts.
4. Business Intelligence
Pinterest Analytics is a bonus to marketers seeking business intelligence from Pinterest users. It’s features include –
Profile, which measures how well a business or brand is doing on its own Pinterest account with,
- impressions, repins and clicks on Pins and Boards that a business created.
- the top 50 Pins created in the last month, sorted by impressions, repins or clicks.
- All Time button that shows the highest performing Pins the account has ever created.
Audience, which provides aggregate details about unique viewers, featuring:
- age, gender, language and location demographics of those users.
- interest data, showing the Pinterest categories and topics that an account’s audience has shown interest in and what other Pinterest accounts they follow.
Domain, which shows Pinterest activity for a business’ domain, such as
- performance data on Pins, that point back to a website.
- the ability to break down the data by app (iPhone, iPad, Android phone, tablet, etc.) used to interact with the content.
- performance numbers for PinIt buttons on a site, including real-time data (in rolling seven-day aggregate totals) for clicks on the buttons and how much referral traffic those clicks are generating.
Businesses with Pinterest advertising accounts are able to compare results for organic and Promoted Pins. With this useful data at hand, Pinterest can be a game changer for your businesses.
Pinterest impacts businesses, with its simple system and user friendly interface to drive traffic to your website. Businesses should begin to commit to Pinterest, as there are substantial signs of its positive ROI – with much better results than other social media channels. Happy Pinning!
