SBM 075 : How to Create a Sales Funnel on Pinterest with Alisa Meredith

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How to Create Sales Funnels in Pinterest

When it comes to content marketing, no other platform out there has been untapped and misunderstood more than Pinterest. Not that there’s anything wrong the site’s appeal, mind you, but it can look like a shallow place where pretty people place their pretty pictures from the outside.

But does this mean that Pinterest should be disregarded as a platform for marketing online? The answer no.

More often than not, Pinterest can be used to market your content online and has been known to generate a modest amount of leads and funnels. The real question here is if there is a way to maximize the results in this platform.

The answer is in the positive and here’s how:

Who’s the Audience?

As a marketer, you should know that every social media platform out there was built to cater to or eventually catered to a group of people. You can say that Pinterest is catering to women from the young adult to middle adult range and, well, that would be true.

However, that is a gross oversimplification of what Pinterest’s community is truly made of. If you really want to be successful here, you should have an insight on the groups that make Pinterest their home channel.

• 1. By Gender

  As of now, Pinterest is still a preferred site for women when compared to men. As a matter of fact, only 17% of Pinterest’s community is made up of males (or those that identify as male) while a staggering 45% of it is comprised by females.

  

  So why does Pinterest attract the attention of women? The answer is simple: its features are designed for topics that interest women in general.

  Topics like food, fashion, interior design, and lifestyle are what make up the bulk of the topics being covered by the site. Also, the site caters to many event planning sectors, businesses where women are dominating compared to men.

  As for major companies, the brands that advertise the most in Pinterest include the likes of L’Oreal as well as influencers like Katherine Accettura. It’s safe to say that the stereotype for the site does hold some truth but this is never to Pinterest’s detriment.

• 2. By Age

  So, which of the age groups have the most presence in Pinterest? Generally, there are three here:

  • Boomers
  • Gen Xers
  • Millennials

  

  Of those three, it would be the millennials that make up 39% of all Pinterest users which means that most users there right now are in the ages of 16 to 30. This would be followed by the Gen X group that make up 34% and then the Boomers that make up 18% of the community.

  Since millennials make up the majority of the population, it goes without saying that they dictate consumer behavior here. As a matter of fact, Millennials favor purchasing their items through Pinterest more than any other social media platform out there.

  As for engagement, Millennials are known to congregate the most in accounts that offer educational value such as How-To articles or step-by-step Pins. This means that what people here favor the most are solutions to their problems and not the popularity of the brands selling their products.

• 3. By Income

  

  According to survey, 35% of Pinterest users earn more than $75,000 per year. This only means that, combined with Pinterest being their preferred channel for transactions, there is a lot of money going through the site on a daily basis.

  This is also reflected in the brands that do their advertising here. Most of the companies that are advertising here are luxury brands like L’Oréal, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and some other well-known fashion brands.

  Aside from advertising, there is also a general consensus in the community that they would want to be richer within a few years. What does this all mean? Pinterest is simply a platform where high-value products are being traded by people of the above than average income grade.

Pinterest vs. Instagram: Which Should You Use More?

There is one other image-sharing site that we have so far managed to not talk about and this is Interest. How similar are these two sites from each other? For starters, both are image-based platforms and provide users with tools that can help them produce, share, and re-used such content.

Now, how different are they from each other? The answer lies in the way that they are used. Here is how in several aspects.

• 1. General Design
  

  Instagram is mainly used for image creation, sharing, and image-based marketing and networking. With Instagram, you are giving your audience a more personal connection to your business.
  With Pinterest, on the other hand, the focus here is on the curation of content. Simply put, it is like a self-contained search engine for images and is designed to help users search for very specific content.
   

• 2. Linking
  

  In Pinterest, linking works by the Pins being a direct link to the source of the image. As such, the best way for businesses to use Pinterest is through generating traffic to their main pages here and to increase their presence in the search engines for SEO purposes.
   
   
   

• 3. Target Audience
  

  What makes Instagram far different from Pinterest is the fact that the ratio of demographics is more evenly spaced out here. Basically, men and women are evenly represented here and 50% of the community is located outside of the United States. As for age, the millennials still make up 2/3 of the community which is the same with Pinterest.
   
   
   

• 4. Hashtags
  

  Both Pinterest and Instagram encourage the use of hashtags but the way they are used are different from each other. For instance, Pinterest does not really encourage your hashtags to go beyond 3. On the flip side, Instagram has no limits to the number of hashtags that you use. Although, going beyond 10 tends to make your Instagram posts look too cluttered.
   
   
   

• 5. Engagement
  

  In Pinterest, you are encouraged to use theme boards to keep your audience engaged with your brand. Here, storytelling takes center stage as you use images to guided your audience from one part of the story to another.

  On the flip side, Instagram encourages for a more personal approach to customer engagement. You do this through constant posting of short videos, pictures, and status updates. The more you post, the more you keep your audience engaged with you.
   

So which should you choose if you have to between the two platforms? That really depends on your marketing goals. If you want to generate as much website traffic to your site which should lead to sales, then Pinterest is the best option for you.

Also, if you tend to create more engaging and valuable content for your site, Pinterest would be the ideal fit for your marketing campaign. By offering more valuable content instead of the more spontaneous, in-the-moment updates in Instagram, Pinterest should be able to help you keep interest for your brand at a high for as long as possible.

How Do I Drive Sales in Pinterest Exactly?

So, how do we go about making our stay in Pinterest sales-generating? The strategies you will develop should all boil down to completing one goal: Making all of your Pins count. Here’s how:

• 1. Use the Rich Pins
  

  When you make your Pins eligible for curation, you are effectively making them more visible and discoverable. With Rich Pins, you also have the added advantage of informing your subscribers of any changes in your offerings.

  For example, if you are offering clothing accessories and would want to notify your market that there have been changes in the pricing, you can do so by editing the information in your Rich Pins. People who repined that image will be given a notification that there has been changes in the information provided, allowing you to do both price notifications and remarketing at the same time.

• 2. Quality over Quantity
  

  As was stated before, the goal in Pinterest is not to post often but to post smartly. This means that you should plan for the images you publish here. Better yet, when taking pictures for your Pins, you must keep in mind a few qualities that should make your Pins, well, highly Re-pinnable.
   
   
   

  • Anonymity
    

    Images without any identifying marks as to who owns it tend to be re-pinned the most on Pinterest. Plan your images in a way that no one can attribute it to you so that people can also re-use it without worrying about doing direct marketing for you.
     

  • Color use
    

    This may be a highly subject area but survey does show that images with multiple dominant colors tend to be shared the most in the website. Also, images with red shades tend to fare better shares-wise as opposed to cooler colors like blue.
     

  • Timing
    

    Simply put, you must publish your content at times when you are certain that your target market are the most active in Pinterest. The times between 2pm to 4pm and 8pm to 11pm are ideal but this really depends on who your target market is.
     

• 3. Sell The Lifestyle
  

  In Pinterest, brand matters less compared to the lifestyle, believe it or not. When you publish your content here, it must be arranged in a way that it looks less like an online product catalogue and more of a lifestyle that your audience can base their own daily activities with.

  If possible, use pictures that complement each other well and use colors that evoke the qualities of your brand (without being too market-y about it, of course). The goal here is to make all of your pins form a part of a bigger narrative, not just a collection of random pictures.

• 4. Ride on what is Popular

  Although basing your entire Pinterest marketing strategy on what is viral is not recommended, it does not hurt to tap into recent fads, either.

  For example, if you are catering towards a male audience, you can publish pins based on hobbies such as biking, the arts, photography, toy collecting, and interior design.

  If you are a food brand, you can post pins about popular recipes that use your products. If you are a fitness guru, you can publish pictures with inspirational quotes (AKA the most shareable content in every social media platform out there). And so on and so forth.

• 5. Engage
  

  Lastly, one of the most important strategies in generating sales in your Pinterest profile is through keeping your engagement with the community at a certain level. One of the best ways to get your audience involved is through group boards where your audiences can share content with you, your business’s staff, and even your guest pinners and social influences.

  Granted, this self-contained community will need moderation in order to function but nothing beats the chance to directly interact with your audience.

  You can even tap into your audience’s innate narcissism with contests that would, for example, have them post a selfie with your products. This has proven to be a great tactic for fashion brands as photo contests have allowed engagement with their brand to go to considerable high levels for days on end while the contest was happening.

  Of course, contests are not the only method out there to engage with your audience. You can create your own strategies in Pinterest but your goal should always be this: directly engage with your audience which should hopefully lead them to convert.

In Conclusion

As with any social media site out there, it takes some getting used to Pinterest. Should you really use Pinterest as part of your marketing campaign? The answer is no. How you use Pinterest depends greatly on what your goals are in there.

However, if you do use Pinterest, you can find that the platform can provide you with a lot of opportunities to engage with your audience and convert them into paying customers. The secret to success in Pinterest, as with every other social media, is the same: make your stay here count.

Have you used Pinterest for your marketing campaigns? What other problems have you faced while using it? Let us know in the comments below!

References:

ALISA IN ACTION

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