Is Pinterest Right For Your Clients?

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It is much more than just a craft site.  Pinterest has been touted by branding and retail experts as an important part of most online commerce efforts and MediaPost explains why...

"Pinterest’s unique capabilities as a social shopping platform make it the gift that keeps on giving for brands and influencers who leverage the tool to increase ROI. In our experience, Pinterest leads all other social networks for driving traffic to our influencer community’s blogs: 67% of social referral traffic is directed from the platform.

We have studied the reach per influencer within our community, which has increased 1.3x from a year ago and 1.7x from two years ago. We have also seen the inclusion of “Promoted Pins” increase engagement in influencer campaigns by 1.8x, so it is clear that Pinterest is proving to be a top performing tool for both brands and influencers.

I recently spoke with Amy Vener, retail vertical strategy lead at Pinterest, to gain further insights into the platform. She shared, “200 million people around the world come to Pinterest monthly to plan meals, figure out what to wear, or how to style their homes. Shopping is a big part of this as people use Pinterest throughout the entire path to purchase, from inspiration to action. The visual nature of the platform helps people make discoveries, and oftentimes, those ideas inspire them to buy something. That’s what’s unique about Pinterest, it’s a completely organic part of the experience. Pinners can click through to the retailer's website, buy right on Pinterest, or go to the store—whatever's easiest.”

So, in what ways has Pinterest changed the online experience and expand the reach for brands? 

• People associate Pinterest with taking action; 98% of Pinners report trying new things found on Pinterest, compared to an average of 71% across all social media platforms, per Nielsen.

• Pinners shop and spend more than the general public. This held true across categories including retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG). For example: Pinners are 39% more likely to be active shoppers—and when shopping, they spend 29% more than non-Pinners, according to Oracle. 

• Pinners over index non-Pinners by 15-20% in likelihood to spend more than originally planned. In addition to over indexing on likelihood to purchase more products than intended, they are also more likely to shop across new categories.

• Pinners have a huge appetite for video content. Video is an important tool in a retailer’s arsenal. An Animoto study showed four out of five people think demo videos are important and 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. “In the past year, we’ve seen an increase in videos saved on Pinterest featuring everything from home projects to hair and beauty tutorials. Pinners have a huge appetite for video: 75% say they’re likely to watch videos about topics that interest them, compared to 55% of people on other platforms,” stated Vener, citing a 2016 Pinterest study.

• Visual recognition with Pinterest Lens will aid shopper’s product discovery. When people shop in the physical world, visual cues steer them to products. Pinterest uses visual content to replicate this browsing process digitally. Since everything on Pinterest is visual, it’s easy for people to recognize appealing ideas as they see them.

“With Pinterest Lens, which uses your mobile camera to search for ideas using objects seen in the real world, we're offering even more ways for people to find products—including things they didn’t know about before,” says Vener. “While search engines rely on text, we're focused on the untapped potential of searching and discovering with your camera.

“Consumers want to be able to discover ideas that are personal to individual tastes and once they discover these ideas they want to be able to shop — anytime, anywhere. Today, the digital shopping experience isn't great, discovery is hard and taking an action once you do discover something is even harder. Pinterest is enabling more personalized shopping experiences through human curation and machine learning. We're building a visual discovery engine that takes on where search left off — helping people discover their style and ideas they love that they didn’t know existed.” 

Pinterest is poised to be the platform to deliver the highest ROI among social platforms for retailers. It will be interesting to see how Pinterest balances the business need for monetization while protecting the inspirational, visual nature of the platform that was a huge attraction for its users."