Pinterest – Pinning your way to Success
Pinterest has really taken off, especially with women who are looking for ideas for things like cooking and fashion to crafts and home decorating. As of February, 2015, Pinterest has a reach of 47.1 million people in the United States. As of June of 2014, the total percentage of people in the United States that use Pinterest was 85% and the percentage of women who are online who have Pinterest accounts is about 42%. These numbers are absolutely incredible.
One thing that is fairly obvious when you go to the Pinterest website is that you do not see any ads. Nothing in a side bar or anywhere else. Yet companies are still paying to get their pins to be placed at the top of the screen and you would barely notice except for the small words in very light grey that says “Promoted by”.
With the user base and the main reason for using Pinterest, the site is being used by companies that you would not think of as an outlet to potential customers and having great success. Bank of America is one such success story. They opened their business account at the end of 2014 when they launched the Better Money Habits program. The idea was to reach millennials, a group going through many financial firsts in their lives. They started to post creative pins that generate organic discovery and drive people to an action. They created boards for different life moments, such as Buying a Home or Wedding Planning. Over all, there are just 7 boards on the site and just over 100 pins, each one leading back to their site for further information through a call to action. With a board that is relatively small, they have more than 3,500 followers in just a few months with a steady stream of referrals to their website from their Pinterest board.
“We’ve been successful because we’ve listened to what the community wants to know more about based on what people are searching for and customized our content to meet those needs,” said Christopher Smith, enterprise social media executive at Bank of America.
Another company that has been successful is the pharmacy giant, Walgreens. The specific boards that Walgreens has created goes from topics about hair care and cosmetics to their seasonal displays and even wedding planning. Over all through the use of promoted pin, Walgreens reported that they have more than tripled their average referral traffic back to their website.
With online marketing, it isn’t enough to just put out a message and hope that the right people see it. The companies that are successful are the ones that do not wait for people to see the message. They are the ones to take their message to the people who they want to see it. When you think of Pinterest and the foodies and the crafts and the home décor, you don’t think of banks and pharmacies, but these companies used creative thinking to take their message to the people they were looking for and it proved to be a huge success.