Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Standing room only at the “Competitive Intelligence: The Power of Pinterest” event Monday night at High Point Market, proved that for brands, big and small, Pinterest is a platform with potential. Crystalyn Stuart, president of 5Loom powered by IMRE, provided insight on how best to turn that potential into power for your brand. Additionally, our four panelists provided diverse insight and best practices from the publishing, retail, brand and design industries.

7 Tips for Harnessing the Power of Pinterest for Your Brand

One of our pins from High Point Market

1. Understand and optimize for social discovery. Social discovery is adding a new layer of opportunity for brands to reach consumers in the discovery mode—before they’ve refined their want and conducted a keyword search for the item. This change in how users are acquiring knowledge is shifting the consumer-purchasing funnel. Social discovery allows users to discover products and quickly move to purchase with a simple click-through.

2. Identify industry influence. Sixty-five percent of top brands across the home category including furnishings and housewares are active on Pinterest. Look at how others in your industry are using the platform as well as how you can utilize the platform for your brand.

3. Create a balance of content. It is important to strike a balance with content that shows a brand’s personality while still promoting your business to customers. Boards can be organized in a myriad of ways depending on who is contributing, the seasonality of your boards, and what you personally consider to be important. Remember, however, that many followers don’t ever make it to your boards. Each pin is more likely to be viewed as a part rather than a whole of a themed board.

“At Furbish our ultimate goal is to build a lifestyle brand and to create an experience that people want to be part of and a lifestyle that they want to live. Throughout pins of rooms or funny sayings or dogs I will pepper in a piece of jewelry or a new pillow that we have, to engage someone who didn’t realize that I was a retailer. I’ve found that if I’m true to what I really like and continue pinning interesting images then the followers will come.” – panelist Jamie Meares, Owner, Furbish Studio

4. Attract a different audience. Brands are able to reach new readers, customers and influencers through Pinterest. Those who engage with your brand online may be a very different audience than those that gain information via traditional media channels.

“ Our online audience is traditionally very different than our print audience. The best part is when someone looks at a pin, clicks through and lands on Country Living and they’re like ‘I would never guess that this beautiful living room came from Country Living magazine.’” – panelist Rachel DeSchepper, Web Editor, Country Living

“We saw registration [for High Point Market] start to rise especially among those people we were trying to hit with Pinterest which were interior designers and small hip retailers.” – panelist Cheminne Taylor-Smith, Vice President of Marketing, High Point Market Authority

5. Get to know your customers, and let them get to know you. Pinterest provides a way for both the brand and the customer to get to know each other. The platform provides a space to express your personality and preferences allowing for a more harmonious relationship to be developed.

“Most of my clients follow me on Pinterest. If all of my kitchens I have pinned they find completely atrocious they aren’t going to hire me which is good because we aren’t going to work well together. On the flip side of that I’m thrilled if my clients use Pinterest to collect their dream kitchens because it’s a much faster and easier way than them sending me 1,000 emails of things they are interested in. I have the opportunity to look through their pin boards to get a better sense of who they are.” – panelist Traci Zeller, Associate ASID, Traci Zeller Designs

6. Mitigate your liability on Pinterest. Pin carefully. If you post original images, include a watermark on your image to retain your copyrighted material. As a brand pinning images that aren’t yours, we recommend placing a disclaimer on your profile and boards to state your intentions clearly. For more about Pinterest liability best practices, click here.

7. Build a promotional engine. Pinning great content is fun, but now it is time to get serious on Pinterest and build your promotional engine—the driver that takes Pinterest from a simple pilot to a top contributor to your marketing mix. This is your strategic plan for driving awareness, quantifying and increasing user engagement and building loyalty among your followers. A few ways to build a promotional engine include:

• Cross-promote across your branded channels – Link pins to your website and other social channels to activate the way users discover your online services.
• Loyalty Offers –Pinners collaborate and share with others for a special offer to unlock.
• Blogger partnerships – Leverage or build your relationships with bloggers by repining their content to a specific board on your platform, or allowing them to curate or contribute to a board.
• Contests and Sweepstakes – These are great for building excitement and increasing fan volumes but be careful to not overuse contests and sweepstakes. If conducted too frequently, brands can suffer high attrition rates and lower quality fan base.