Can New Zealand’s fashion retailers afford to ignore Pinterest? I think not.
Below is a excellent article from Solutionists talking about the emerging role the Pinterest plays in fashion retailing.
PINTEREST – WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR RETAILERS?
As the third most popular social media site in the US, and boasting over 10.4 million users, it is no surprise that Pinterest has recently opened itself up to the wider public, as opposed to its previous “request an invite” sign up method. Despite its youth, Pinterest is already posing interesting and important implications for retailers and their social strategies.
Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that allows users to save images, links and ideas they see online. Users can create multiple boards, and browse other people’s boards or pins by keyword or user, with the ability to “re-pin” interesting content they see along the way.
There is a big opportunity for New Zealand retailers to get their products out to a global audience by having users “pin” your products onto their boards, and add comments and keywords. Retailers are seeing increased referrals from the site – the viral nature of Pinterest means that there is a fairly high chance that your product links will then be repined onto other user’s boards. This can help to increase brand awareness, top of mind awareness, and traffic to your website. With 80% of Pinterest users being female, women’s fashion labels are more suited to target this social medium. Retailers are finding that the conversion from Pinterest into sales is higher than that of Facebook, suggesting that the Pinterest audience is more involved with the items they are pinning, than Facebookers are with the pages they are liking. With pinners from all over the world getting involved, there is a huge opportunity for New Zealand retailers to be “discovered” by an international audience.
There are several ways you can incorporate Pinterest into your social media strategy that can help to increase brand and website exposure:
Create a Pinterest account:
The main thing to remember when launching a Pinterest account for your brand – Do NOT just pin your products from your website. If people want to browse your product range they will go to your website. You should use your boards as branding tools, not hard sales tools – consider themes such as season inspirations, behind the scenes, media coverage, general trends and so on. Pinterest is almost entirely based around beautiful imagery, the idea is to create content that people want to consume and share, and you will get brand exposure if you can deliver this. Create board themes that support and enhance your brand and pin accordingly!
Add Pin It buttons:
An easy way to encourage people to Pin your products to their own boards is to add “Pin It” buttons to your product pages. Solestruck.com have handled their social media icons, including Pinterest, in a particularly elegant way if you are concerned about the branding implications associated with adding another social icon to your website.
Run a competition:
A good way to get people involved with your Pinterest account is to run a competition. There are a lot of ways to run competitions utilising Pinterest but a few examples include:
1. Have users pin their favourite content from your site, whether it’s a product, look book image etc. and either use a hash tag with an identifying keyword on the pin, or send you their Pinterest board URL via Facebook/Twitter/Email/Website form.
2. Pick a relevant theme and have users pin related content with an identifying hash tag. You can then create your own board and re-pin the entries, scoring brownie points with your fans.
3. Crowd source content of fans in your brand – Have your customers pin photos of themselves in your product with an identifying hash tag. Again, create a board of this content. You should encourage the continuation of this kind of content post competition as much as possible.
Re pin other people’s content:
Re-pinning content is basically necessary to generate content in the first place, but consider a little bit of strategy when doing so. Users can see who re-pins their content so target people to re-pin from based off attributes such as location, interests and pinned content. Look up people who have pinned stuff from your brand already, or search for known brand advocates and re-pin content of theirs. This can not only get your more followers, but increase engagement with people in your target audience.
Courtesy of Solutionists Blog