Since its debut in 2010, Pinterest has captivated over 70 million users around the globe, making it the fastest growing social platform today. Even though it’s still relatively new to the social networking scene, Pinterest is already having a significant impact for businesses, as it has become the 3rd most popular social media channel in the world.
Pinterest is incredibly simple and can make a huge difference for your business as it’s exceptional at driving traffic to your site and generating more leads and sales. Here are 3 key reasons why you need to consider Pinterest for your business today:
1. Converting Browsers into Buyers
What’s impeccable about Pinterest is that compared to most social media sites, it reduces the amount of steps from discovery to conversion. Visitors to your site from Pinterest convert into leads or sales faster than from Facebook or Twitter. This is because the ‘see it, like it, buy it’ action happens quickly and frequently. Pins are clear and social proof of the desire a user has for an item. Once they see a picture of it, they are only one or two clicks away from actually purchasing it. In fact, according to a report by marketing intelligence from Visioncritical, nearly half (47%) of Pinterest purchases say they pinned and purchased something after simply stumbling across it on the site. 29% said these were impulse purchases, as they had never even planned on buying that item.
This is a dream come true for businesses! Increase conversion rates with reduced sales cycles? Yes please!
2. Generate More Traffic
40 million monthly active Pinners is a large pool of potential visitors you can pull from into your site. If one of the main purposes of your website is to generate sales and marketing, you need to increase traffic to make this happen. And Pinterest is an ideal tool for increasing links back to your site, and therefore, driving traffic. That’s because every pin is literally a link leading back to the source of the image. And 95% of these pins were originally pinned or re-pinned from the web.
There’s a lot of research that shows just how effective Pinterest has become at guiding web browsers back to a website in comparison to other social media channels.
• BuzzFeed first saw an increase from their Pinterest traffic in 2012 when they posted an article for DIY projects. Since that post, they have experienced over 2.3 million views and have expanded their post categories. Pinterest is now their second largest social network referrer, and also generates longer lifecycles. BuzzFeed reported that traffic from Pinterest goes to posts that were published more than 2 months ago.
• Piqora analyzed their customer’s data from January - June of 2014 and concluded that the referral traffic from Pinterest increased 8.3% in comparison to the previous year.
They also discovered that the average visit-per-pin increased 172% and the average page views-per-pin escalated 304%!
• Even bloggers have seen great success with Pinterest. Take Kate Bryan for example, who blogged about her interests and hairstyling profession, but at the start had only 7 readers. Once she started pinning her work on Pinterest, incoming traffic skyrocketed and she quickly gained 16,000 blog subscribers in few short months. Her blog has now had over 10 million pageviews.
These stories are only the beginning, and prove that each of your pins has the potential to drive more traffic back to your website.
3. Learn More About Your Audience
It’s no secret that knowing your customers’ needs and interests is at the center of every successful business story. When you have this knowledge, you can use it to your advantage to influence your customers and truly engage with them - and an engaged customer is more likely to convert.
With Pinterest, you can learn about new trends and then use that information to position your own offers and products. You can even discover what your customers love to share and what inspires them. Pinterest users’ likes and interests are easily viewable for the public to see. They pin products they love, places they enjoy, foods to indulge in, things that make them laugh, and more. They’re volunteering a lot of personal information in a more natural way on Pinterest than they would in a survey or even on Facebook. We, as marketers, have all this information at our fingertips and it can provide powerful insights about our target consumers.
As Pinterest continues to pick up steam in the social media world, we anticipate there will be even more great reasons to leverage this popular channel. What do you think? Will you create a business presence on Pinterest for your marketing efforts in 2015? And if you’re already using Pinterest to your advantage, what tips would you add?
If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your businesses through social channels, contact us at [email protected] today, and start making your social media strategy more intriguing one pin at a time.