While brands like yours have traditionally focused marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram…Pinterest has rapidly evolved into a powerful platform that can be leveraged to differentiate Building Product Brands from competition.
And Pinterest continues to experience higher site engagement — as more people spend time at home — while remaining a significant driver of organic website traffic.
Consider the following stats:
- Global monthly active Pinterest users increased by 37% to 442 million from November 2019 to November 2020.
- 93% of users are actively researching to purchase.
- An estimated six million Pinners are engaging with content focused on the home and 48% of Pinners use the platform for shopping.
Following are eight Pinterest best practices to leverage right now… to better capitalize on the benefits of this powerful platform.
Optimize a Pinterest profile.
Although it only takes a few minutes to set up a Building Product Brand on Pinterest, it’s important to ensure every profile is optimized… to ensure visitors are able to quickly understand a brand’s specialized offering.
Including a high-res company logo in each profile picture and optimizing it according to Pinterest size guidelines is critical. It’s also important to create an eye-catching cover photo that reflects a brand‘s style and personality as well as to write a description that concisely – and clearly – defines a “unique selling proposition”. Which helps frame expectations for what followers can expect to see on the page.
What’s more, it’s important to highlight several of the most visually engaging user-experiences as “Featured Boards” to give visitors a preview of a brand’s offerings. These targets should showcase a mix of product imagery — along with application and lifestyle images — to help drive the visual story of each brand.
Set clear and attainable goals.
We define what our team expects to achieve as a result of our Pinterest marketing efforts. For example, are we looking to increase brand visibility and grow brand awareness? Do we want to drive more traffic to the brand’s website or specific campaign-directed landing pages? Maximize product sales? All of the above?
Similar to other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest can be an important element in achieving goals for our overall social media marketing strategy. It’s notable that, Pinterest – in particular – is a strong visual search engine with significant organic reach. The importance of search on Pinterest translates to a longer-lasting impact for both paid and organic content.
Develop a compelling content strategy.
Using Pinterest as part of brand promotion, it’s crucial to understand what types of content and images will most effectively engage audiences… prior to building a corresponding content strategy.
Here are the types of images K&A considers most valuable in a Pinterest content strategy:
- “Show me” – As with Instagram, Pinterest is a highly visual platform. So, using colorful, high-definition images that instantly catch the eye should be the focus of most strategies.
- Educate – Educational content is a key value proposition of Pinterest. In fact, 84% of “Pinners” report that they visit the platform to learn. For example, if your brand offers appliances, we might periodically share recipes or cooking tips that will engage followers and entice them to return to an online destination such as a micro-site regularly.
- Inspire – Many audiences visit Pinterest to get inspired. Provide followers with consistent visual inspiration that’s relevant to a particular niche. For example, to sell more outdoor kitchens or deck products, develop Pinterest boards that show ways to create beautiful and functional outdoor spaces.
Create pins with a “wow” factor.
Since Pinterest is an image-driven social networking site, the platform is ideally suited to brands that can share beautiful imagery, such as product photography and lifestyle montages.
Eye-catching imagery should be a key component of every Pinterest strategy. For some further analysis creative best practices provide tips for creating more visually engaging pins.
Publish at the right time for enhanced engagement.
Similar to other social media platforms, timing of narrative and posts makes a difference on Pinterest. However, unlike platforms such as Instagram, the visual content enjoys a much longer shelf life.
Posting at the optimal time to get in front of an active audience can help Pinterest content gain traction. Leveraging proprietary platforms as well as Sprout Social and Hoot Suite allows our team to take advantage of tools that enable determination of what times and which days of the week will optimize the most engagement. We use that data… as a guideline to refine the timing of future posts.
Add Pinterest “save” buttons to a Building Product brand site.
Regardless of the Pinterest goals for a brand, it’s important to encourage more people to pin our content to their boards. This not only exposes more Pinners to a brand and its offerings, but also incentivizes more people to visit a site and better increase the intent-to-purchase.
Get connected.
Pinterest sites should be linked to other social media networks. This will make it easy to leverage those followers already on Facebook and Twitter — enabling the potential to grow Pinterest followers even more quickly — via the account settings tab on the Pinterest profile.
Tracking performance.
As with other forms of marketing and promotion, it’s essential to employ a data-driven approach when evaluating a Pinterest program. Utilize performance analytics to determine what’s working and what isn’t. This will allow a team to see which pins are receiving the most clicks and impressions – and which ones are driving the most traffic – enabling refinement of strategies to offer content that resonates best with target audiences.
With competitors actively participating on Pinterest, it’s important to have an active and recurring presence via weekly tactics.
As a segment, there are strong signals to utilize Pinterest for architect and design influence. The platform’s architectural image search functionality actually outperforms Google and as such, has become a preferred method for searching and collecting images.
To successfully engage the A&D segment on Pinterest, we would advocate first, developing an overall strategy and benchmarks for an integrated social media program. From there, we would clearly define a content and optimization strategy based on platform indexing. With most Building Products, we find a diversity of material and countless design applications. As such it may be wise to create separate boards for Materials and Concepts… that would enhance other current curations.
While organic social is a great way to visualize a brand, it is often recommended to consider a potential paid social strategy, supporting all organic efforts. A targeted paid social effort on Pinterest will help increase brand awareness and reach – while providing for a good launch project for initial evaluation.
Interested in learning how to optimize your CRM, Pinterest – and other digital media platforms – for your building product brand? Send an email to Steve Kleber at skleber@kleberandassociates.com to find out more.
