Pinterest Marketing Kit Provides Insights and Tips

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Marketing Kit
Pinterest

Contents
Introduction 1

Social Media for Beautiful Things: Pinterest Soars 2

What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth 3

Should Marketers Be Pinterested? [Infographic] 6

Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for
Why They Aren’t on Pinterest 7

What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation 9

4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Pinterest 11

Additional Resources 12

Introduction

In just one glimpse, a picture speaks to our hearts, minds, and imaginations.

Harnessing our fascination with images, Pinterest, a relatively new social network, allows users to display their
favorite pictures and videos for the whole digital world to see and share.

Users create online pinboards on Pinterest and collect images and videos to pin on their boards—much like
old-school bulletin boards. Pinterest makes the process easy for users: A “Pin It” button can be added to users’
Web browsers, allowing them to add to their image collections as they traverse the Internet.

Now, businesses are also using Pinterest to tell their stories via pictures and extend their reach. By pinning
product images, infographics, how-to information, designs, bits of inspiration, and more, businesses are ap-
pealing to our proclivity to look when there’s something to see.

Want to know how you can use Pinterest for your business? Check out the articles in this kit. Among the things
you’ll learn:

• Stats about Pinterest’s meteoric rise and what’s driving its growth
• Why marketers should care about Pinterest and its users
• The top three excuses for not using Pinterest—and why they’re wrong
• The top five reasons to use Pinterest as a marketer

You’ll also find links to additional resources, including online seminars, articles, and a panel discussion.

By the time you reach the end of this collection, you’ll have pinned down the reasons for participating in
Pinterest—and picked up invaluable how-to advice and tips for making Pinterest part of your marketing mix.

©2012 MarketingProfs LLC • All rights reserved. 1

Social Media for Beautiful Things:
by By Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs
Pinterest Soars
Visits to the invitation-only social networking site Pinterest and Texas. But the Social Networking category as a whole
skyrocketed in the second half of 2011, reaching 11.0 million over-indexes on share of visits from Northeastern states
as of December 17, up nearly 40 times the level recorded six whereas Pinterest over-indexes on visits from the states in the
months earlier, according to data from Experian Hitwise. Northwest and Southeast.

As the name suggests, Pinterest is an online pin board that al- Moreover, nine of the top 10 over-indexed states for Pinterest
lows you to “organize and share all the beautiful things you find visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category
on the Web,” according to the company. Such things include (versus the online population), which is understandable consid-
images of food, home décor, clothing, and furniture, which ering the abundance of crafts content on the website.
users “pin” onto their pages.

The site was recently added to the Top 10 in Hitwise’s Social
Celebs, Brands on Pinterest?
Networking Forums category.
Pinterest is gaining popularity in the media and among some
Below, other findings from Experian Hitwise. brands. The site was recently named to Time Magazine’s Top 50
websites of 2011, alongside Google+, Klout, Quora, and Storify,
in the social media category.

Site Demographics
Although personalities such as Kim Kardashian and Lady
Not surprisingly, visitors to the site in the 12 rolling weeks Gaga don’t appear to have a presence on Pinterest (there is
ended December 17 skewed female (58%) and between the currently a waiting list), Paula Deen does have one, with more
age 25 and 44 (59%). than 25,000 followers, 20 bulletin boards (e.g., Game-day Party
Pleasers, Paula’s Picks, and Cupcake Cravings), and more than
However, Pinterest visitors do have a different geographic 440 “pins.”
profile compared with their counterparts visiting other social
networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube. Martha Stewart has more than 11,000 followers on Pinterest,
while the department store Nordstom has roughly 6,000
Pinterest and the Social Networking Forums category followers.
both attract the greatest share of their visits from California


What’s Driving Pinterest’s
by Lenna Garibian, MarketingProfs
Amazing Growth
Pinterest is arguably the hottest social media site on the though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search,
Internet—user traffic to the online social catalog has skyrock- which is technically misattributed content from other domains,
eted since mid-2011—but the website also boasts strong RJMetrics points out.
audience engagement, retention, and virality among its core
demographic, according to a report by RJMetrics.

The following are some of the key findings of the analysis of the
data collected by RJMetrics:

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2-3 times
more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a
similar time in its life cycle.

• “Pins” link to a huge array of websites. For example,
Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it
accounts for only 3% of pins.

• 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting to the viral nature of
the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point
in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were
re-tweets, according to a 2009 study by HubSpot.
Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out
• The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (quality the top 5, after which no domain accounts for more than 1% of
is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likeli- pins.
hood to remain active) is high, albeit declining. Users
who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2-3
times less active during their first month than users
The Viral Nature of Re-Pins
who joined before them.
The analysis also broke out the population of pins by how those
Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report titled pins were posted to Pinterest. Remarkably, over 80% of pins are
“Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.” re-pins, demonstrating the impressive level of virality at work in
the Pinterest community.

Pins Connect to a Vast Array of Web
Sources
On Pinterest, every pin (or linked image) ties back to an external
link. Among a sample of roughly 1 million pins, more than
100,000 distinct source domains were found.

Among those 100,000 domains, the following chart shows
the top 20 sources. The most popular domain was Etsy, which
powered just over 3% of pins. Google was a close second,


What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth

Among most companies, even highly successful ones, similar
cohort analyses show lines that steadily decay toward a more
By contrast, a study conducted by HubSpot at a similar point in horizontal slope over time, RJMetrics points out. The effect
Twitter’s history found roughly 1.4% of tweets were retweets. occurs because there is some natural attrition, causing the
incremental engagement of the typical user to drop off.
Surprisingly, a relatively low proportion of pins originate from
pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Pinterest. Instead,
content from any website via one click. the lines show little to no decay. Their slopes remain consistent,
indicating a net attrition rate of close to 0%.

Why no decay in engagement? The reason, according to the
User Engagement: Cohort Analysis
study, is possibly one of two factors: (1) no one who starts using
Cohort Analysis is a tool that allows marketers to study different Pinterest ever stops; or, more likely (2) users who continue to
groups of users at identical points in time in their lifecycles, use Pinterest become so much more engaged over time that
regardless of when they actually joined the site. their activities fully make up for those users who quit the site.

In the following chart, each line represents a cohort, or a To explore the issue further, RJMetrics broke out the data on
segment of users who made their first pin in a specific month. a weekly basis for the eight weeks ended December 18, 2011.
For example, the June 2011 cohort consists of users who made The analysis found that between 40% and 60% of unique users
their first pin in June 2011. The line itself shows the “average were still actively returning back to the site to pin again in each
cumulative pins made per cohort member.” So, the “Month 1” of the first eight weeks of their life cycle. Although that may
data-point for the June 2011 cohort shows us how many items seem like a steep drop-off, the results are exceptionally strong,
were pinned in June 2011 among users who joined in June particularly for a consumer Internet business, RJMetrics notes.
2011. The “Month 2” data-point on that same line shows how
many pins were made by the typical user in that cohort by the
end of July 2011, and so forth.


What’s Driving Pinterest’s Amazing Growth

The drop is likely caused by flocks of curious onlookers who
By contrast, when Twitter was at a similar point in its life cycle are outside of Pinterest’s core audience; although registering
(late 2009), Twitter’s decay rate was twice that of Pinterest, accounts, they are failing to become engaged.
with user activity (measured by tweets) rapidly plummeting to
roughly 20% before stabilizing, according to a 2009 analysis of
Twitter by RJMetrics, published by Techcrunch.
Growth Stats
To put the RJMetrics research in context, it’s interesting to
note Pinterest’s growth trends, particularly over the past six
Growing Pains: Quality Decay
months. The following are some key Pinterest stats, according
Among most fast-growing consumer startups, however, an to separate research from Compete:
increase in media coverage inevitably drives a big spike in the
number of registered users and a drop-off in the quality of the • Pinterest attracted 11,140,641 unique visitors to the
typical user, RJMetrics points out. (Similarly, quality is defined site on January 20, 2011, up 815% from 1,217,935
in the study by levels of engagement and likelihood to remain visitors six months earlier.
active.)
• On a monthly basis, the number of unique visitors to
Pinterest is no exception to that rule. The following chart Pinterest grew 54.6% in January over mid-December
shows how the typical new user who has joined Pinterest in levels.
November and December 2011 is using the site far less than
their counterparts from previous months. • Over the past six months, traffic growth has averaged
63.7% month over month.

• Ranked by numbers of unique visitors, Pinterest was
No. 119 in January by Compete, up 87 spots from No.
206 one month earlier.


Should Marketers Be Pinterested?
by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs
[Infographic]
When the time came to consider whether Pinterest was a good 3. To be successful on Pinterest, you should promote a
fit for the MarketingProfs brand, we had to consider a few factors: lifestyle (broadly speaking).

• What goal can it accomplish? To follow the MarketingProfs boards, click on over to our
• How do we measure success? Pinterest account.
• Who will manage it?
• What added value does it provide over other social
networks?

Because Pinterest is becoming an increasingly important
channel for marketers, we though it only right to take a stab at
it ourselves:

• Our goal? Branding/awareness of free (“Basic”)
MarketingProfs membership.
• Measuring success? All shared links are tracked with
Google Analytics to test conversions and referral
traffic.
• Who will do it? The great thing about Pinterest is that
you can divide the work by assigning contributors, so
we chose four team members across the marketing
and content teams.
• What’s the added value? We think it allows us a new
way to tell our story—how MarketingProfs views
and loves marketing—a story that isn’t as easily told
elsewhere.

I’ll admit it. It’s been fun, really fun—and we are tracking nicely
toward our success metrics.

But like all new things, we have to take a step back and analyze
whether this channel is really an effective one for marketers
everywhere.

Here’s the good news: Monetate, a company that provides mar-
keting agility products and expert optimization resources, has
done the digging for us and packaged it nicely in an infograph-
ic. Here are my top three takeaways from that infographic:

1. Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google+.
2. Pinterest’s unique visitors increased 329% from
September to December 2011.


Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop
by Jesse Noyes, Eloqua
Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest
If you went to your CMO and said, “I want to allocate time to 1. “It’s not our audience.”
a website that is primarily used by furniture restoration geeks
and women designing their dream wedding,” what kind of This is perhaps the most common excuse B2B marketers give
response would you expect? for skipping out on just about any social platform. It’s the same
argument you likely heard about Facebook, or even Twitter, in
Now, if you went to that same CMO and said, “I want to inves- their early days.
tigate a new social platform that’s driving more referrals than
Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined,” how do you think At this point, Pinterest is dominated by links to mid-century
that would go over? lamps and Etsy projects (it skews toward women and the
25-44 age group). But as awareness grows at a rapid clip,
The problem is that B2B marketers too often think about people with business interests are going to jump in. (In fact,
Pinterest in terms of the former approach. But that type of it’s already happening.) Saying it’s just for knitters is like say-
reasoning holds B2B marketers back from exploring the most ing Tumblr is just for hipsters. (Check out the MarketingProfs
exciting platforms in their early days. Pinterest account here.)

For the uninitiated, Pinterest is the still “invitation-only” social
bookmarking site where people can display their interests in
a highly visual way. Users “pin” various pages from the Web to
their “boards,” which are self-organized by category.

Today, Pinterest is most heavily used for topics such as fashion,
furniture, and food. But here are the facts that make Pinterest
compelling for B2B marketing:

• Pinterest’s visitor traffic rose to 11 million visits in
December, 40 times what it was six months before.

• It accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic in January, on
par with Twitter.

• It’s sticky, with users spending an average of 88.3
minutes on the site, ranking behind only Facebook
and Tumblr among the top social networks.

You’d think that with trends like that... Pinterest should be mak-
ing marketers of all stripes drool. But many aren’t. 2. “Pinterest is purely visual.”

Here are three excuses you might hear from B2B marketers for B2B marketing is prone to spreadsheets and verbose product
avoiding Pinterest—and why they’re wrong. spec sheets. So where does our text-heavy marketing fit on
Pinterest?


Three Excuses B2B Marketers Should Stop Making for Why They Aren’t on Pinterest

It doesn’t. But a picture’s worth a thousand slogans. Our con-
tent is becoming more aesthetically driven as the competition
for attention heats up.

Pinterest is a great way to attract people to your words by
highlighting your images. (For a prime example, check out Joe
Chernov’s “Infographics” board.)

By getting involved with the Pinterest community now, you’ll
be more likely to become a power user when opportunities like
brand pages and ads open up.

3. “Pinterest doesn’t have brand pages.”

No, it doesn’t. And that may be the best reason to join.

If history is any indicator, social networks don’t hook a rabid fan
base by offering brand pages. As Pinterest grows organically,
the time to build your personal brand is now.

Remember: Pinterest is novel, but it isn’t new. It works much like the
bookmarking services we know (think StumbleUpon or Reddit)—
only more visually enticing. You can pin charts, infographics,
slideshows, ebooks, and more. (As an example, I started boards for
“Good Content Marketing” and Eloqua’s “Chart of the Week” series.)


What Pinterest Teaches Us About
by Chad McCloud, Jabian Consulting
Innovation
Innovations from businesses are continually changing our 1. Make innovation a visual experience.
world via new products and customer experiences. But anyone
who has ever been locked in a brainstorming session knows Traditional brainstorming sessions use whiteboards to capture
that the hard part is the process that leads to the innovation. ideas with words, but the use of images and videos brings
something much more sensory.
True innovation is difficult to generate and even harder to repeat.
That scarcity of inspiration is what drives companies to look for new For example, a product manager for a software company might
and interesting ways to acquire it. view a visually appealing trend graphic from Mint.com and
find an applicable enhancement to her own product—via a
Pinterest, a relatively new social network, provides a refreshing much more interesting medium than a verbal description of
perspective on the pursuit of inspiration. Quickly becoming enhanced reporting.
one of the more addictive sites on the Web, Pinterest is a global
bulletin board for images that inspire, trigger laughter, or 2. Participation breeds innovation.
amuse... because they are just plain cool.
As Thomas Edison quipped, “To have a great idea, have a lot
Members can post images of virtually anything, categorize of them.” When more than 4 million people use Pinterest to
them for easy reference, and create their own pinboards that post ideas, you’re bound to find some pretty amazing doses
contain other images of interest to them. Some of us have “lost” of inspiration. The site makes it uncommonly easy for millions
loved ones to Facebook or reality TV; it’s a good bet that within of members to pin, search, and browse through volumes of
the next year you will “lose” a loved one to Pinterest. content quickly.

People use Pinterest for more reasons that I can fathom, but Just think about what could be possible if businesses were to
what struck me instantly was the spirit of innovation within expand innovation efforts across the entire company, or even
the posted images. Some images show a creative combination to customers.
of concepts that aren’t typically associated with one another.
For example, this image merges a staircase and a bookshelf by 3. Quick! Innovate in the next 10 minutes!
turning each step into a shelf of books.
Many of us have a hard time innovating when our time for
The collection of such images, when viewed together on a page, innovation is locked in a schedule between 9 AM and 10 AM
starts to form a neural network of interconnected and inspira- on Tuesday. If your best ideas come while using the treadmill,
tional ideas. showering, or enjoying a cup of coffee on Saturday morning,
then a place to post ideas allows innovation to occur beyond
calendar and time constraints. Pinterest does that exceed-
ingly well.
Three Innovation Lessons
So, what can your business learn from Pinterest? Here are Expanding the number of ideas, however, will take businesses
three key lessons about innovating that businesses can bor- only so far. Companies that are famous for innovation use
row from Pinterest. structured approaches to channel their inspirations into new
products and experiences that generate real revenue.


What Pinterest Teaches Us About Innovation

Structure for Maximum Impact
Here are three structural steps that can maximize the impact of
those three lessons Pinterest teaches us.

1. Start with a goal.

Pinterest members use the site for everything from collecting
and expressing their own styles to finding sources of good
ideas. Business innovation works only when a defined goal is
combined with facilitation toward that goal. Examples of goals
include generating new product ideas and enhancing current
ones, or creating different ways to search, catalog, and connect.

2. Inspire innovation by building upon the ‘known.’

Most people have a hard time generating inspiring ideas out of
thin air. When presented with a tangible idea, however, many of
us can build upon that idea and take it a few steps further... or
in a new direction entirely.

Connections are made when you associate two ideas that
seemingly don’t have anything to do with each other.
Thermostats and iPods perform completely separate functions,
but when brought together they help inspire products such as
the Nest self-programming home thermostat.

3. Encourage collaboration on top of affirmation

Many of the comments on Pinterest are affirmative (e.g., “I
like it!”). Though positive feedback encourages participation,
encouraging collaboration among the innovators can iteratively
lead to improvisational (yet critical) steps toward a break-
through idea.

Facilitators who draw out and link ideas via contiguity and con-
trast help focus the chaos of creativity into applied solutions.

As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.”

***
Companies that infuse some of the lessons from Pinterest into
their own innovation efforts are bound to find ideas that they
never dreamed possible. At the very least, they’ll walk away
with new visions for remodeling the kitchen.


4 Reasons Marketers Should Pay
by Corey O’Loughlin, MarketingProfs
Attention to Pinterest
Let’s not beat around the bush, by now you’ve heard of 4. Pinterest can help humanize your brand.
Pinterest and are wondering if it’s worth your time and effort
to start yet another social presence. While it probably isn’t right To most of your clients and prospects, your company is a thing,
for all brands, here are four things you should know about a logo, a service—Pinterest gives you the chance to human-
Pinterest: ize your brand through Boards that reflect your culture, your
employees, and your values. Sure, you can humanize your
1. Pinterest is driving serious referral traffic. brand in other places, like your Facebook page or on Twitter,
but Pinterest lends you the unique opportunity to display the
Pinterest’s popularity is soaring and as a result, Pinterest users “WHO” of your company right next to the “WHAT.” Is your brand
are driving serious traffic to websites. According to data from committed to giving back to charity? Pin blog posts about your
late January 2012, Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than work using a great picture. Are your employees part of an inter-
Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Take a minute to mural sports team or athletic league? Start a Board chronicling
digest that. Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Combined! That’s their athletic prowess. Does your office welcome furry friends?
a lot of referral traffic and figures like that shouldn’t be ignored. Pin those puppies right up, you can humanize with animals too!

2. Pinterest users are highly engaged. Is Pinterest right for your brand? Pinterest, like all social media
sites, is just a means to an end—you need to look at what you
Pinterest’s user base has grown exponentially and traffic to the are trying to achieve with your marketing programs before
site has increased 40x in the last six months. There are more you can determine if Pinterest is an appropriate tool for you.
than 10.4 million registered users, and the Pinterest traffic In 2012, the demographics of Pinterest users and their pinning
graphs look like the mythical growth charts you see in clip art. habits and interests may change. So even if you determine that
Potential users can remain on a waitlist for over a week to be Pinterest isn’t right for you now—keep an eye on it, it may be
admitted to the site and are clamoring to get in. Not only are right later.
users banging at the gates, once they are in, they are spend-
ing an average of 98 minutes per month on the site and daily
use of the site increased more than 145% since the start of
2012. Pinterest is growing at a rapid rate and attracting a very
engaged user base.

3. Pinterest can be good for your SEO.

Pinterest is a massive social network with great domain author-
ity. It is indexed frequently by search engines and there are SEO
opportunities in how you name and describe your Boards. You
can (and should) create descriptions of your Boards and of the
content you pin in alignment with your keyword strategy (don’t
name boards “Great Stuff” or “Things I Like” or forget to add a
description with SEO value). There are great backlink possibili-
ties too—the easier you make it for people to pin your content,
the better.


Additional Resources

Panel Discussion: The Rise of Pinterest in B2B
Post: http://www.focus.com/roundtables/rise-pinterest-b2b/
Audio file: https://www.hidefcorporate.com/wav/rec/30/conf50230_11379910.mp3

Online Seminar: The Rising Power of Visual Content on Social Networks (March 12, 2012)
http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/482

Online Seminar: How to Select Images That Make Your Marketing More Effective (a Take 10 webcast)
http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/400

How-To Article: How to Evolve Your B2B Customer Experience Using Images
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2011/5435/how-to-evolve-your-b2b-customer-experience-using-images

Short Article: How to Choose Stock Images for Your Email Campaigns
http://www.marketingprofs.com/short-articles/2491/how-to-choose-stock-images-for-your-email-campaigns

Slide Show: Top 12 Overused Stock Photos
http://www.marketingprofs.com/pics/2011/5542/top-12-overused-stock-photos-slide-show


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