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Page 1: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 2: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

The State of Pinterest Marketing

1. Visual discovery (browsing & guided search)

2. Visual content sharing (photo pinning and repinning)

3. Content-based conversation (liking and commenting)

From a marketing perspective, Pinterest also boasts im-

pressive stats for driving referral traffic and e-commerce

sales (particularly among women), including:

– 1 in 5 U.S. internet-using women have a Pinterest ac-

count. This demographic also skews young, affluent,

tech-savvy and early-adopter

– The vast majority of Pinterest content showcases at

least one consumer product. Only 20% of pins dis-

play people’s faces.

– Pinterest is now the #2 source of social referral traffic

to websites, trailing only Facebook

– According to Shopify, shoppers referred to e-com-

merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy

than referrals from other social networks, and also

buy more per shopping cart checkout

– Each “pin” that a user attaches to one of his or her

(usually her) boards is worth, on average, an esti-

mated $0.78 cents in additional sales to the brand

whose merchandise is featured

In addition, Pinterest is another example of a mobile-first

social network, with 75% of its daily traffic coming from

mobile apps. Pinterest users are 27% more likely to make

a mobile purchase from Pinterest than Facebook, and this

percentage is even higher for mothers on Pinterest.

Pinterest now has over 40 million monthly active U.S. users, making it one of the largest visually-driven social networks. Although Pinterest adoption trails leading mobile, visual platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram and Tumblr, it has grown quickly through an experience that revolves around three key features:

Pinterest: A 2014 snapshot

Pinterest Monthly Active Users

Total Users

Mobile Users

Mobile Only Users

Source: ComSource, BI Intelligence

Page 3: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

What Makes Pinterest Unique

Page 4: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Pinterest may also be introducing a new phase of visual

SEO, where content indexing for search is influenced not

only by traditional social meta-attributes like hashtags,

but also visual themes and characteristics. As Pinterest

expands its new Guided Search offering and integrates

more features like product price drop alerts on rich pins,

the platform is likely to win visual product search share

away from Google.

Of course, this opportunity hasn’t gone unnoticed by

brands. There are now more than 500,000 business ac-

counts on Pinterest, and 107 Fortune 500 companies with

branded Pinterest accounts, representing major year-over-

year growth.

Visual, mobile, brand-friendlyAt a time when the average person checks their phone nearly 150 times per day and 17% of people also use it to make purchases, Pinterest provides a different channel to engage female mobile and visual consumers. The platform also shows relatively high engagement, with the average user spending 14.2 minutes on Pinterest per visit.

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Percentage of Fortune 500 Brands on Pinterest

Source: ComSource, BI Intelligence% of F500 with Pinterest Accounts

Page 5: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Top Brands on Pinterest

Unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, most of the top

brands on Pinterest in terms of content engagement and

follower count are smaller brands not in the Fortune 500.

In particular, early-moving women’s fashion, beauty and

retail startups like ModCloth, Birchbox, Etsy and Refin-

ery29 consistently outperform larger retail brands in their

respective Pinterest categories.

Among the top 10 most followed brands on Pinterest,

only three -- Nordstrom, Lowe’s and Yahoo! -- are from the

Fortune 500, whereas virtually all -- with the possible ex-

ception of the last, Yahoo! Sports -- are focused on female

audiences from a content perspective.

Top Ten Brands on Pinterest by Followers

Pinterest Followers in Millions

Page 6: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Top Content on Pinterest

Page 7: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Top Content on Pinterest

Popular Pinterest Categories

Popular Pinterest Categories by Gender

Source: “Specialization, Homophily, and Gender in a Social Curation Site: Findings from Pinterest” http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~schang/papers/cscw14.pdf

Based on two metrics, shares (i.e., repins) and engagement (the % of likes and comments per post relative to impressions/board followers), analysis of the 1,000 most followed boards on Pinterest show five types of visual content captures the largest share of social attention:

1. Recipe Inspiration, Food & Drink (an estimated 20% of all pins)

2. DIY Crafts

3. Home Decor

4. Fashion

5. Weddings

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 8: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Making Your Brand Stand Out on Pinterest

Page 9: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

However, marketers should remember that Pinterests’

communities also respond positively to content centered

around inspiration, achievement, educational instruction,

personal connectedness and family values -- fertile ground

for almost any consumer brand to craft messaging and ex-

periences around. Ultimately, authenticity, creativity and

visual quality dictate content success on Pinterest, not the

category itself.

Optimizing your own brand’s Pinterest presence begins

with three steps:

1. Profile optimization

2. Board optimization

3. Brand consistency and guideline adherence

The first step, profile optimization, requires thoughtful

attention to detail in terms of how your brand integrates

with Pinterest. Remember to:

– Include relevant search keywords in your brand’s

profile title (i.e., “Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts”

instead of “Four Seasons”) and about description

– Verify your website using an HTML file or a META tag

– Link and display your Twitter profile

Next, turn to your boards and create at least 15, each

with at least 5 unique, interesting and high resolution

images per board. This way, any user visiting your profile

will see it completely filled out above the fold with strong

Any marketer approaching Pinterest as a brand-building platform should start by asking how their brand identity maps to Pinterest’s core content categories and user interests. For brands with pillars in food, fashion, beauty, home décor, DIY or sports, there’s a natural content-audience fit.

How to put your brand’s best foot forward

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 10: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

visual content. Put your brand’s best, most relevant boards

at the top, and include common Pinterest and Google

keywords in each board title. Pinterest boards are indexed

for search by both Google and Pinterest.

Finally, set consistent, clear brand guidelines for image as-

pect ratios, fonts, color palettes and other brand elements

within your posts. Visual consistency – across categories,

topics, boards and collections inside boards – is an import-

ant factor for driving content engagement on Pinterest.

More Efficient and Effective Pinterest MarketingNow that your brand has a presence and understands the

audience it’s trying to reach, it’s time to focus on optimiz-

ing your content. Data indicates content has a much longer

discoverable life on Pinterest than Facebook or Twitter,

making Pinterest less of a real-time marketing play and

more of an evergreen content ecosystem. Unlike Facebook

and Twitter, Pinterest boards can rank on Google, and a

larger percentage of content discovery is from search, rath-

er than feed browsing. As a result, your marketing team

needs to think about the longer-term relevance and appeal

of your content, since repins and category-based searches

will resurface it weeks and months after it was originally

posted. In fact, newer analysis indicates that almost 50%

percent of referral traffic and e-commerce purchases from

a branded Pinterest post happen more than 2.5 months

after the original pin.

But, just because pins have a longer discoverable life,

doesn’t mean infrequent pinning is an effective strategy.

Pinterest’s own best practice guidelines suggest pinning at

least once per day to keep fresh content appearing in your

followers’ feeds. Early research has also uncovered useful

guidance for how to tailor your image content on Pinterest

to attract higher engagement, including:

– Positive, aspirational content tends to outperform

more emotionally balanced content

– Use bright colors and broad color palettes: using

images with multiple dominant colors attract 3.25

times more repins per image than images with single

dominant color

– Use photo filters with modest saturation: images that

are 50% saturated have four times more repins than

images that are 100% saturated and ten times more

repins than images that are desaturated

– Pinterest users are attracted to warm colors, partic-

ularly red. Red, orange and brown images attract

twice as many repins as images whose dominant

color is blue

– Crop images for Pinterest: content with a vertical as-

pect ratio between 2:3 and 4:5 get 60% more repins

HastagsAfter creating your content, turn your attention to

hashtags. Although hashtags are extremely common-

place in digital, remember again how search has more

influence on discovery within Pinterest. In fact, aggregate

data suggests most brands -- surprisingly -- under-tag

their posts. When used correctly, the optimal number of

hashtags per pin is between five and eight, not the one

or two commonly seen on Twitter and Instagram. Analyze

your competition by using the Search feature with key-

words relevant to your brand, and take into account exist-

ing competition when selecting them. Also keep in mind

that hashtags will only help your content get discovered

when you include new, searchable keywords in your post

description. Above all, make sure to write clear, relevant

pin descriptions, then add hashtags at the end to index

them by element, topic or category.

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 11: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Deep Link & Rich PinsFor e-commerce retailers, remember to deep link pins with

referral URLs that send people to specific website product

pages or sections -- rather than your home page -- when

they click through. The easiest way to deep pin a product

is to pin an image directly from the original source page.

Finally, if your brand isn’t already using Rich Pins, now is

the time to start. Rich Pins add extra, valuable content to

your pins, and Rich Pins consistently drive nearly 2 times

more repins for branded content relative to normal pins.

Rich product pins also trigger price alert notifications to

interested pinners via email when an item’s price drops,

creating a built-in call-to-action for your product. Third,

Rich Pins enable products to be included in Pinterest’s gift

feed, a curated, aggregated wish list of pinned products

segmented by retail price.

Currently, Pinterest offers five types of Rich Pins: movie,

recipe, article, product, and place. To get started, you’ll

need to add meta tags to your website, test out your Rich

Pins and apply to get them on Pinterest.

Have your development team refer to the documentation

at https://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/ for more

detail on how to set them up.

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 12: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Optimizing for Audience Engagement

Page 13: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Examples from Shinola show audience-building efforts

segmented across products, locations, brand elements,

events, activities, styles, time periods and even materials.

Once your brand is actively created targeted content,

your team’s next measurement steps and KPIs should

center around generating followers, repins and referral

click-throughs. Three notable Pinterest engagement tactics

for increasing these top-line metrics are:

1. Contests

2. Engaging influencers

3. Creative platform integrations

For marketers, Pinterest’s categories provides a build-in structure for high-level audience segmentation. Next, content can also be organized at the board level around different topics, elements, events and collections to attract different audience groups.

Strategies for optimizing your Pinterest presence

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 14: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Contests

In the early days of Pinterest, contests were largely unreg-

ulated and provided brands with a relatively easy chan-

nel to drive pins, repins and board followers. However, in

the past six months, Pinterest contest guidelines and gover-

nance has grown stricter. Of particular note, the Federal

Trade Commission (FTC) recently defined Pinterest as an

endorsement tool, ruling that branded Pinterest contests

must include full product-endorsement disclosures.

The case that led to the FTC’s review was Cole Haan’s

“Wandering Sole” contest, which asked contestants to pin

images of Cole Haan shoes along with their favorite plac-

es on a dedicated contest board with the hashtag #Wan-

deringSole. The entrant with the most creative #Wander-

ingSole pin would be awarded a $1,000 in Cole Haan

merchandise. In the case, the FTC ruled that because the

average consumer couldn’t easily identify these pins/re-

pins as incentivized endorsements of Cole Haan products,

this type of social giveaway was “deceptive” and “violat-

ed Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.”

While the FTC’s ruling doesn’t mean the Pinterest contest

is dead, it brings up several important considerations for

marketers looking to use social contests as a proxy form

of paid media to build their Pinterest audience:

1. If your brand is going to host a contest on Pinterest,

you must include the appropriate legal disclaimers

and product-endorsement disclosures.

2. You cannot require contestants to pin your contest rules

or promotional materials.

3. You cannot run a sweepstakes or raffle where each

pin, like or board follow represents an entry.

4. Your brand cannot require a user to pin from a specific

board or website. Instead, suggest a place where your

Pinterest fans can find “inspiration” for pinning, rather

than making it mandatory to pin from a specific board

or location. While you can’t exclude people who pin

from different locations, you can include a contest

link to the inspiration location to drive traffic to your

target destination.

Of course, this guidance is informational, not legal advice,

and we encourage aspiring Pinterest marketers to consult

with their legal team and Pinterest’s latest Acceptable Use

Policy (AUP) before launching a promotion. Similarly, mar-

keters on Pinterest should also consult with legal around

collecting and pinning user-generated content (UGC), since

an estimated 80% of all pins on the platform aren’t original

content the pinner owns the rights to. Because of this, we

recommend marketers source visual UGC from Twitter and

Instagram, using a brand-compliant tool like FanBranded.

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 15: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

For example, Target recently partnered with popular pin-

ners Joy Cho, Jan Halvarson and Kate Arends to create

limited collections for party décor, paper products and

serving pieces designed after each influencer’s signature

aesthetic. Cho’s first board “Party With Pinners,” which in-

cludes Rich Pins of Target products, has already garnered

over 800,000 followers, four times more followers than

Target’s official Pinterest brand page. At smaller scale,

specialty coffee retailer Caribou Coffee recently created

and marketed a coffee blend inspired by its Pinterest fans.

After asking Pinterest fans to share what inspires them

with the hashtag #caribouinspires, Caribou then creat-

ed a blend of coffee based on the submissions called

“Real Inspiration.” To extend the digital experience of the

product launch offline, Caribou also set up a 64 foot-tall

“Living Pinterest Board” in Mall of America, the U.S.’s

largest mall, to showcase interactive content and provide

free tastings.

Influencer marketingCompared to contests, influencer marketing on Pinterest may prove a more effective audience-building tactic with lower legal risk. Although marketers should remember that outside of promoted pins advertisers can’t “buy and sell pins or pay people per pin or follow,” brands can and should tap their influencers for product inspiration and brand advocacy.

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 16: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Platform Integrations

Finally, in addition to exploring promotional campaigns

and influencer-recruitment, think about how your team can

capitalize on Pinterest integrations to drive better social

marketing ROI. Examples include, but are certainly not

limited to:

– Add a “pin it” button to your e-commerce site’s

product pages

– Surface top pins on your website and merchandise

trending pins

– Keep your product boards and look-books updated

with in-stock inventory that deep link back to your

product pages

– If your brand has a stronger presence on Facebook,

consider driving traffic from your Facebook page

with the Pinterest for Facebook app tab. For many

retail and consumer brands there will be meaningful

demographic overlap between their Facebook and

Pinterest audiences.

– Use targeted, Pinterest-themed emails to get your

email subscribers to engage with your content on

Pinterest and follow your boards.

Like all major social platforms, Pinterest has a unique

user-base that favors specific demographic segments (fe-

male, digital, affluent), content preferences and audience

behaviors. Approach your Pinterest audience-building

efforts from a top-down (i.e., how can I align my brand

identity and mission with the content Pinterest users want

to see?) and bottom-up (i.e., how can I build audience

sub-segments around tailored brand moments and expe-

riences?) direction to achieve a content-audience fit that

drives ROI. In Pinterest’s own words: “The most successful

businesses on Pinterest create and curate pins that help

people pursue their interests,” rather than “interrupting

people or blasting out brand messages.”

The State of Pinterest Marketing

Page 17: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

The Future of Pinterest Marketing

Page 18: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

1. Paid media will come to Pinterest in mobile ad units

that help people explore their own interests. So far, Pinter-

est is following a similar ad rollout path as Instagram: (1)

partner with a handful of advertisers who understand the

platform and the audience they’re trying to reach, (2) de-

velop rich, “native” ad units that are transparent, authen-

tic and integrate well with the core user experience, and

(3) go through multiple rounds of testing to find the right

creative and delivery approach. Monetization will play

an important role in the future of Pinterest, but its introduc-

tion will be slow, transparent and thoughtful.

In many regards, similar to the way Google gave internet users a better search engine to find website information, Pinterest appears to be driven by a similar mission: providing web and mobile users with a better way to discover, explore and organize their interests. Whether Pinterest truly defines itself as a new type of search engine remains to be seen, but the platform’s future is clearly bright.

What does this mean for marketers?

The State of Pinterest Marketing

2. Pinterest marketing will enter an API-driven second

phase. In a pre-API era, the first generation of Pinterest

marketing tools relied on website scraping and contest

management to provide value-added services to market-

ers. In the next phase of Pinterest marketing technology,

we expect marketers will be able to post, request data

and have website visitors authenticate via Pinterest’s

expected, upcoming API.

Page 19: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Percolate Analytics now features official data from the Pinterest Insights API.

To learn more or request a demo, please visit http://learn.percolate.com/pinterest-insights-api-analytics

The State of Pinterest Marketing

3. Pinterest will be the platform where [female] consum-

ers discover e-commerce products on mobile and tablet.

As a destination for exploring interests and finding inspi-

ration, most users go to Pinterest to discover new things.

Since the majority of Pinterest’s traffic comes from mobile

and tablet, this makes it one of the first places mobile,

women consumers will experience a product for the first

time. This makes it important for marketers to think about

mobile brand recall, how to deliver related or recom-

mended follow-on experiences, and how to optimize their

mobile e-commerce path-to-purchase from Pinterest.

A first principle of social platforms is the need for brands

to put personal connection-building ahead of direct prod-

uct messaging, and Pinterest is no different. The marketers

that succeed on Pinterest will be the ones who deliver the

types of authentic content experiences that build connec-

tions and start conversations within their target audience.

Page 20: The State of Pinterest Marketingread.prclt.com/the-state-of-pinterest-marketing.pdf · merce sites from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy than referrals from other social networks,

Beyond 1.3 Billion: Undertsanding China & Social Media

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