Establishing Your Brand and Maximizing ROI on Pinterest

This is a live blog post from the Online Marketing Summit. Day 2. Session presented by Danny Maloney of PinLeague.

Maximizing ROI in Pinterest

What Can Pinterest Do?

  • Mobilize fan base
  • Attract new customers
  • Analytics and Data

What Pinterest Is (and Isn’t)

  • Fastest to 10 MM monthly users – now 30 MM active monthly users
  • Average 175 repins on comments
  • Its NOT about status updates. It’s about conversation and real time. The average tweet lives to about 20 mins. The average facebook page lives for about 80 minutes. The average post on Pinterest is still being tested, but it’s averaging for over a week.
  • It’s an online Pin-Board = why do people care? They express life events, home projects, shopping, gifting, education, self-identity. This is EXTREMELY relevant and important.
  • Pinterest makes Discovery and Planning social.
  • It’s brand and product inclusive

What’s the difference?

  • Twitter – What Im Doing
  • Facebook – Who I am
  • Pinterest – Who I WANT TO BE (which is an incredibly powerful concept from a marketing perspective)

More referrals per user, more revenue per referral. Twitter & Facebook vs Pinterest – Pinterst wins by 14 times more.  Buyers have a higher average order value on Pinterest than on any other social network because it’s based on aspiration (who a person wants to be vs a need).

Building Your Brand on Pinterest

  • Pinterest can be (and should be) your #1 social referral site.
  • Yes, it can work for B2B and B2G as well, you just have to figure out how it can work for you (graphically) and keep going at it – it will build over time.
  • It’s FANTASTIC for B2C. – Top 1500 Brands are currently on Pinterest. You have to put enough time into it.
  • Early Brand “winners” remerging: Harper’s Bazaar 4MM followers, Better Homes and Gardens 300K followers, Seventeen 175K followers, etc
  • Good news: Pinterest has started to promote early adopters! Bad news: This window of opportunity will close.
  • 80% of focus is currently spent on company profile / boards HOWEVER 80% of buzz and revenue comes from USER Pins.

Maximizing Pinterest ROI

Step 1: Understand your audience profile

Step 2: Design content for the USER (make as list of 5 things they love, 5 things they have a hard time finding, 2 things about you = your first 12 boards)

Cover Photos are CRITITAL! First line of boards COUNTS! If your cover photos are no good, they will move on and not click through.

Step 3: Engage Your Fan Base

  • Integration.
  • Contests and Charity – “Pin It and Win It” – Note – have your contests run for LONGER than a week. Shorter term ones don’t work well.
  • Cross promote – if you have something successful happen on Facebook or Twitter – use your success on one platform to cross promote that on Pinterest if it’s relevant and interesting. Use Jeep as an example. They did something on Facebook that mentioned Pinterest in a contest and got 1000 Pinterest followers in 2 days and growth triples from 35 to 100 / week.

Maximizing Pinterest ROI

  • The Marginal Cost of growth on Pinterest is lower than Facebook. Pinterest is $0.01 – $0.40 per fan on Pinterest and $0.50 – $2.50 per like on Facebook.
  • Energizing your base in the fastest path to critical mass
  • Most companies use a single blast: this is a flawed approach
  • Engage users who haven’t followed your or engaged with you yet
  • Use Pinterest data and analytics to track competitor data

Tip: Text 954 404 8008 with first name and email and get a free Analytics Pinterest account and a cool info-graphic 🙂 Woot!