Pins and Boards! How this visual search engine inspires and influences pinners around the world

Friday: Collaborate and Innovate FROM THE DESK OF MILES EVERSON: Who would’ve thought that PINS and BOARDS can help make your brand more visible online? In case you’re wondering, we’re not pertaining to literal pins and boards here. These things are part of a social media platform that you’ve probably encountered in your Google search, too! Curious? Read more to know how you can connect with your target market online through this social media platform. CEO, MBO Partners Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

Pins and Boards! How this visual search engine inspires and influences pinners around the world PINTEREST An American image sharing platform designed to enable users to post, save, and discover creative ideas or information. Pinners (users of Pinterest) usually visit the site for shopping, makeover ideas, planning social activities, or even planning out major life events. They find ideas by browsing through various pins that appear on their home feeds. These pins are based on pinners’ search history and boards. Boards are the space where users can save, collect, and organize pins. As long as the pinner does not set the board to “secret,” anyone browsing on the site can take a look at the collection. Like most social media platforms, pinners can follow each other and leave comments. They can even collaborate on boards. Today, Pinterest has: More than 335 million monthly active users worldwide. More than 2 billion searches every month. More than 200 billion pins that have been saved on the platform. The site, however, is more than just a social media platform. It’s also a powerful search engine and advertising platform that connects consumers to businesses through the concept of idea discovery. Many marketers and businesses use this platform to raise awareness of their brands or products through creatively showcasing them on boards or pins. How can Pinterest help your target market find you and your brand online? Through Pinterest Ads! Pinterest ads is a feature that enables users to create videos or images as an ad campaign for their brand or business. Users that already have personal accounts can convert those into business accounts for FREE. All types of businesses, large or small, startup or mature, can create strong content and engage with a large number of people on the platform through these ads. Pinterest ads can: Increase Conversion.You have to know what content would work for your business. The right content will give you the opportunity to obtain higher engagement and higher purchase intent for your brand. According to a survey conducted by Pinterest: 61% of its respondents said that Pinterest is where they can get inspiration for great ideas. 73% said Pinterest content from different brands they encounter is useful. 61% said that they’ve discovered new brands or products from promoted pins—half of them purchased after seeing a pin. Help Brands Gain Exposure. Over the years, Pinterest has been a great venue for businesses to gain exposure. In an article published by WSJ, 97% of Pinterest’s search queries don’t mention a specific brand—making it beneficial for small and startup businesses to be visible to the target market and generate purchases.   Drive Traffic. With over 2 billion monthly searches on this platform, Pinterest is undeniably a gateway for your brand or business to create traffic online. In an average of 100 million monthly active users, Pinterest reports that: 93% of pinners use the platform to plan purchases. 96% of Pinterest users use the network to gather product information. 87% of them decided to purchase through this network. Engage with A Lot of People. With a lot of business accounts and users, there is no doubt that promoting your brand on Pinterest can help increase your brand engagement. According to Pinterest, brands get an average of 30% free engagement when they conduct/post pin campaigns. Video Pins/Ads This is one of the best ways to create an ad campaign using the platform. Advertisers can include a cover image that is designed to capture the attention of a target audience. These video pins are around 30-90 seconds long. Through this, you will have the ability to tell more comprehensive stories about your brand, idea, or project. Video pins appear in a user’s home feed, the “following” tab, and related search results. Absolut Lime (a flavored vodka with the true taste of lime) created one of the more effective marketing campaigns using video pins that also featured the brand’s iconic frosted bottle. The video shows cocktail recipes by tossing the various ingredients into the air and labelling them with overlay text that showed more details about the recipe. Absolut grabbed the attention of Pinterest users by showing them how to make cocktails at home. They disrupted users’ feed by capturing different ingredients exploding in slow motion. According to a study by Pinterest, this video pin influenced a boost in offline sales for Absolut. Incremental sales and generated household penetration increased by 4%. What was Absolut’s strategy? Used expanded targeting to achieve upper-funnel metrics such as brand awareness. Optimized an impressive mix of creative content. “In order to maximize engagement and conversion, we focused on creating content in conjunction with our consumer insights and platform behaviors. Our campaigns are designed to encourage people to enjoy Absolut Lime online, but also inspire them to experience the product at home too.” – Simon de Beauregard, Senior Brand Manager, Absolut Corrine Bolanos, a Creative Strategist at Pinterest said that one of the reasons why Absolut Lime’s campaign was so impactful is that it is clear that the campaign and its creative content were designed with Pinterest in mind. Advertising is almost everywhere, especially online. The challenge for you is exploring your creativity and how you deliver the right message to the right audience on the right platform. It’s your turn to create a captivating campaign for your brand or business. Be a pinner and create a video pin! See how much of an impact it’ll make! Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for next Friday’s Collaborate and Innovate! Learn more about Snapchat Ads and how they can be useful on next week’s Collaborate and Innovate!