Marketing Your Startup

by Simona Covel

Pinterest, more than any other social network, is about buying stuff. A 2015 Millward Brown study found that 93 percent of users who were active in the previous six months used the site to plan purchases.5 You read that right: 93 percent.

  Pinterest users deliberately integrate brand relationships into life planning and major milestones: The Millward Brown study found that active Pinners were 47 percent more likely to experience a major life event in the next six months—and, more tellingly, were disproportionately using Pinterest to plan for their events. If your audience is on Pinterest—and that’s a big if—it’s a natural place to engage meaningfully with consumers and is a great way to quickly boost traffic to your website.

  This network may be the most underused, especially considering it has 150 million active monthly users and boasts what Popular Pays’ Corbett Drummey calls “amazing shopability.”6 It’s the ideal medium for any company that wants to sell fashion, home products, or other things to women sitting at their computers. “You can either use promoted pins or work with people who really know the medium.”

  Research Your Audience

  You may think of Pinterest as a site for recipes, weddings, and DIY home decorating. For that reason, you may be reluctant to use it—or, you may pigeonhole the content you choose to share there. It’s true that Pinterest is about those things—but not only those things.

  As with other social strategies, it’s important to first know who your audience is and where they are. If you know that your target audience hangs out on Pinterest, then you are in a prime position to learn more about them—even if they’re there to plan their wedding, and you make financial-planning software. Use Pinterest to see what your target audience is interested in: What problems do they have? What content do they engage with the most? Use that knowledge to your advantage as you create your products and services, and when you market them. Get a feel for how your competitors are using their pages, too.

  As with other social platforms, don’t be disingenuous. If you’re a financial services company, you better have a compelling reason to be pinning about interior decorating. Potential customers will see right through you. But if you can connect with your audience authentically in a moment that’s important to them—for example, financial planning when you’re getting married or buying a home—you maintain your credibility.

  Refine Your Profile

  Once you know who on Pinterest you want to attract, take some time to update your profile. Update your profile name, description, and profile image to make sure it’s immediately clear who you are and how you help people. Create clearly named and logically organized dedicated boards that are relevant to the themes, questions, challenges, and interests of the audience you want to be attracting, and fill them with relevant pins.

  If you’re already active on Pinterest, this may mean you need to remove some of your existing boards and pins that are not relevant to your defined target audience’s interest. (If you want to save those pins for your own reference later, switch the boards to private so that only you will be able to see them, and they won’t dilute the focus of your profile and brand.)

  Set Up Your Pinterest Business Page

  It’s important to make sure that you create a business page as opposed to a personal page because it gives you access to more features, such as analytics and rich pins.

  Most companies start out by creating a board and then uploading pins to that board.

  To create a board, you simply click Create a Board that will show up on your profile page, fill out the name of your board, description, category, if you want to include a map, if you want it to be a secret board (a board only you and those you invite can see), and any collaborators you want to add to the board. You may potentially want to add collaborators to make sure that someone in every department has access should they want to include something on Pinterest for your business. Click Create and you’re set.

  Once you’re on your homepage, you want to visit your profile page to see everything that your company has added. Click the Pin icon in the upper-right-hand corner. You will see all of your boards, and if you click each board, you will see your pins, or all the individual content you posted.

  Create Pins

  Once you’re set up, it’s time to start creating pins—the content people are going to see, repin to their own boards, and use to buy or share. In other words, your pins are crucial.

  To create a pin, visit the board you want to pin to and click Add a Pin. You then have the option to add a pin from the web or from your computer. In order to really stand out and hopefully earn some shares on the network, funny gifs and memes from the web are a great option, but the best option is to upload your own content. Regardless of which option you pick, web or upload, you’ll be able to write a description and then publish.

  Pinterest is really just a giant, visual search engine. Like on Google, when a user searches Pinterest for a particular term or string of words, they’re shown content that’s deemed the most relevant and high-quality results related to that search term. The goal is to have your pins show up in the top posts for the keywords that your audience is searching for.

  Defining your target audience likely helped surface some key terms and phrases that your audience is interested in, but Pinterest makes it easy to know what’s most relevant. When you type a general keyword into Pinterest’s search area, and hit enter, Pinterest will show and suggest popular keywords related to the original term you put in. This will give you great ideas for search terms to optimize for.

  Once you have a list of keywords, start adding them to the description area of your pins and your boards. If it’s possible and natural, try to weave them into your profile name and description, too.

  Keep in mind, whatever you want to upload to Pinterest must include an image or a video in order to be accepted and added by the network. Rules aside, Pinterest is a visual medium with a sophisticated visual search engine: Every pin should be as visually compelling as possible. This doesn’t mean sticking to product photography, though: Pinners love infographics, step-by-step tutorials (“instructographics”), and before-and-afters. Convey your brand philosophy and messages in high-quality images and use text sparingly. Pay attention to trending images and categories, and learn by example.

  Pinterest is all about aspiration or utility, notes Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’re selling wine, teach people about how to read a label, what’s significant about a new wine you just received, or the difference between varietals. “People are shopping on Pinterest, so they’re spending more time on the content and looking at it with a critical eye,” he says.

  Do Some Quick Repinning

  A “repin” means that you pin content other users have added onto your boards. Like on Twitter and Facebook, browsing and repinning others’ content is important for visibility. This helps you get noticed by others on Pinterest and hopefully jumpstart your own pins.

  To find content you may want to repin to your boards, you can search keywords in the search bar, look through categories that are similar, or just scroll through your homefeed. Hover over the image, click Pin It, choose the board you want the pin to go to, and you’re done.

  Rich pins allow you to add extra information to all of your pins. By adding rich pins, you can help give visitors more information about your brand, which can help you stand out more among your competition. There are five different types of rich pins, including recipe and movie pins, but below are the three most often used for small businesses (and particularly B2B businesses):

  Place pins. This means that those who pin something you have enabled with place pins will be able to put it on their map.

  Article pins. This is a pin that has an image along with an article link.

  Product pins. This shows users where they can purchase the pin they’re looking at, the price, and the website link to make the purchase. Users can even buy directly through Pinterest.

  Schedule and Loop Your Pins

  Pinterest’s algorithm strongly wei
ghs how often you pin quality content, and prioritizes accounts that are adding it every day. While this might seem overwhelming, there are ways to make it less of a burden on your calendar.

  Certain tools allow you to loop your pins, or repin the content you’ve already pinned to help create a steady stream of activity. The result is that your account always looks active and engaged.

  But using a scheduler isn’t an excuse to neglect “live” pinning, since Pinterest also likes recent and new content, too. A few minutes each day will pay off. Pinterest’s algorithm also weighs engagement pretty heavily when it’s ranking content, seeing comments, likes, and repins as a sign that content is high quality. This means it’s important for you to engage with (and earn engagement from) other pinners in order to drive up your placement in search results.

  Make Sure You’re Traffic Ready

  But optimizing your Pinterest presence is really just the first step. Once users click a pin and head to your website, you need to have optimized the path you want them to take, such as signing up for your email list or joining a course.

  You’re in trouble if you spent all of your time on pins leading to your website, but your site isn’t ready for the traffic. Wherever a pinner lands on your site, it should be clear what the site is and what the user will get out of it. That’s critically important since you’re likely connecting with a new audience.

  If you’re using Pinterest to grow your email list, be sure to add opt-in registration forms on your website in multiple places so that new visitors will be invited to join. As a bonus, you can offer an incentive for users to join the list. For digital product or service-based businesses, that could be checklists, worksheets, or guidebooks. For software as a service (SaaS) businesses, free trials are a great option.

  You also want to build a mailing list of people who love what you do. While this may not be a way to directly earn income, it is definitely a piece of the puzzle. Use Pinterest as a path to get people to sign up for your mailing list.

  If you have a service-based business, Pinterest is a great way for you to connect with your potential clients. Use it to share testimonials, your portfolio, motivational quotes, and even tips and tools that they can use. Show them what they stand to gain by working with you.

  How Measurable Is It?

  Pinterest has a robust built-in analytics platform. It includes the usual suspects:

  Average daily impressions

  Average daily viewers

  Audience location

  Gender and language of audience

  Number of repins

  Amount of clicks

  Total likes

  You can also see which pins are driving traffic to your website.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Setting up a profile and pinning is free. Ads on Pinterest are called Promoted Pins—they are like regular pins, but you’re paying so that they appear in more of your desired audiences’ feeds. Like other social media channels, you pay per 1,000 impressions—there’s no minimum fee. You simply choose the already-created pin you want to promote and specify a budget and a maximum bid.

  Pinterest’s built-in analytics will show you all the standard fare, such as impressions, engagement, and clicks. You can also pay a third-party vendor for deeper analysis of just about any metric, like conversion to in-store sales. You may pay a subscription or a percentage of conversions.

  Find Affiliates

  Many companies and small business owners offer their customers the opportunity to become an affiliate. An affiliate is someone who uses a product or service and then promotes that product in exchange for a portion of the profit when someone decides to place an order through their link.

  Pinterest banned affiliate links in 2015 and then reopened the platform to them in 2016. Today, you can use popular images and your customized affiliate link to catch people’s attention, tell them about the product, and send them to where they need to go to place an order.

  A good affiliate marketing program should have leveraged income. When people you sign up have others sign up, you can make money from those sales as well.

  Affiliate marketing on Pinterest can be a low-cost way to widen your audience. You only pay if the affiliate generates a sale for you. The commission could be anywhere from single digits to 30 percent or more, depending on your industry and the size of a typical sale.

  SNAPCHAT

  Let’s just clear the air: You may think of Snapchat as the “sexting” app. That’s the reputation Snapchat started with, though the company has worked hard to shed it. Known for so-called “ephemeral” messaging (because its main feature is quickly disappearing messages, known as snaps), Snapchat has the youngest audience of any major messaging app.

  If your goal is to connect with a younger audience, Snapchat may be a great place to do that. Its stigma shed, you can now find companies as large as airlines and as small as solo entrepreneurs building their image and engaging with followers. The content they’re sharing through stories and videos is unlike anything you can find on other platforms, which is why many businesses are hesitant to jump into these less-tested waters.

  Snapchat works like other social media channels. You can follow people and they can follow you back. There’s a twist, though. When people take pictures or videos and send them to their friends on Snapchat, those images don’t hang around in a timeline forever like they do on Instagram. Instead, they’re deleted after at most ten seconds (the exact amount of time is determined by the sender). Users can also send stories. Those are collections of snaps and videos that are broadcast to all followers instead of individual users—a usage more relevant to most businesses than individual snaps.

  During the fourth quarter of 2016, Snapchat reached 70 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, according to analysis from MoffettNathanson.7 While older users are tiptoeing in, the channel still skews very young. Those who do use it, however, tend to spend a lot of time there, making it ripe ground for brands that target younger markets and want to get in early.

  How to Use It

  Snapchat’s point of differentiation is its urgency. If content is going to disappear, users are more likely to engage with it now, before it’s gone forever. Users are more likely to click on a twenty-four-hour Snapshot Story if they’ll be unable to view that same content the following day. The fear of missing something important can be potent.

  Because snaps are understood to be of-the-moment, unpolished, and personal, there’s a genuine and authentic element associated with them—they’re intended to be unvarnished, conversational, spontaneous. This is why Snapchat users tend to use the platform to engage with close ties and romantic interests more than with the distant acquaintances they may engage with via Facebook.

  Some things you can do:

  Take users behind the scenes

  Offer exclusive videos and image content

  Run contests

  Preview new products

  Offer tips or hacks for using your products

  Announce promotions or sales

  If you’re not regularly posting content, then people have no reason to follow you. They’re not going to talk about you, or engage with you, when you never show up in their “recent” section.

  You don’t necessarily need a posting calendar for Snapchat, but you should be posting something daily so you have fresh content every twenty-four hours (since old snaps are done at the twenty-four-hour mark and are removed). This way your brand is always in followers’ recent updates section.

  Whenever you snap, save the content and be sure to share it in other places with a call to action to follow you for fun, entertainment, news, promotions, exclusive discounts, giveaways, etc., so you’re leveraging those who aren’t on the platform and drawing attention to it.

  Snapchat’s closest social media cousin is Instagram: Both feature timed videos and visual content. At the moment, the main points of differentiation are audience and reach: For now, Instagram Stories has a significantly wide
r reach and receives more engagement, but Snapchat continues to dominate among younger users. Snapchat is a natural place to deliver calls to action; because Snapchat content disappears quickly, those CTAs come with built in urgency.

  Like Instagram, Snapchat offers lenses and filters that allow a user to manipulate an image—those are some of the platform’s most-used features. As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be increasingly selective about which ones they invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return.

  Can I DIY?

  Definitely. Users on the platform expect content that’s less polished and doesn’t feel like a commercial. If you choose to go it alone, however, know that the platform is constantly evolving. You’ll need to be diligent to keep up with new features and capabilities.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Snapchat has been adding new paid features in an effort to attract more advertisers, including video ads and sponsored geofilters and lenses. Three of Snapchat’s most popular paid marketing options are sponsored lenses, geofilters, and Snap Ad videos.

  Snapchat has upped its game for small businesses—perhaps following a page from Facebook’s playbook. For example, Snapchat has introduced a self-serve ad buying platform as well as a new creative tool called Snapchat Publisher, which lets advertisers of all sizes create full screen video ads in less than two minutes. So once Snapchat gets new advertisers on board to try advertising on it through incentives, it can then easily point them in the direction of the self-serve and creative publisher tools.