The impressive growth of Pinterest over the last year has caught the attention of brands, particularly retailers who are attracted both by the size of the audience and by the referral traffic reported by brands with more mature Pinterest strategies. IQ has received questions from clients about using Pinterest and we’re excited to help. Topics: Pinterest Overview Brands Using Pinterest Recommendations for Brands

1. Copyright © 2012 by IQ Agency 1

2. OVERVIEW
The impressive growth of Pinterest over the last year has caught the
attention of brands, particularly retailers who are attracted both by
the size of the audience and by the referral traffic reported by
brands with more mature Pinterest strategies. IQ has received
questions from clients about using Pinterest and we’re excited to
help.
Topics:
• Pinterest Overview
• Brands Using Pinterest
• Recommendations for Brands
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3. PINTEREST OVERVIEW
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4. PINTEREST.COM
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5. Pinterest is a social media service
that allows users to simply and
easily create virtual pinboards of
images. Pinterest boards are
analogous to “inspiration files”
full of magazine clippings,
swatches, and notes used to
collect decorating, gift, or recipe
ideas. These curated collections
are generally created by scrolling
through lists of friends’ pins and
selecting the ones you like best.
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6. HOW DOES PINTEREST WORK?
Pinterest is an invitation-only service, but appears to send
invitations to all who request them. Through Facebook’s Open
Graph API (accounts can also be created using Twitter), users
are connected to their Facebook friends and can immediately
see their pins (along with the pins of some super users). This
means the first time user experience is rich with images to
view and re-pin. Users’ activity on Pinterest (and that of their
friends) can be automatically published to other social sites
like Facebook and Twitter.
Each time a user has a new interest or need, they can create a
new board on which they can start attaching images. For
instance, if a user is planning a party, he or she can create a
board and select food, decoration, invitation, and clothing
images to pin to that board, as well as select other users to
contribute to the board. The site’s search engine and
categories make it easy to search outside the user’s list of
friends.
Adding images from the websites outside of Pinterest is easy
with the installable “Pin It” bookmark. Some sites are even
adding this button to their site to make it even easier to add
their images to boards. As we’ll see on the next slide, this is a
relatively small percentage of the overall pinning behavior.
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7. PINTEREST USER
DEMOGRAPHICS
This infographic from Modea shows
some key facts about Pinterest users
that brands should be aware of:
• Nearly 70% are women.
• Household incomes are high.
• Users spend an average of 15
minutes per pinning session.
• They tend to be in the 25-44 age
range.
• Most repin rather than pin new
items from the web.
• The service is growing rapidly,
attracting over 11 million visitors in
January 2012.
• The service refers traffic to websites,
particularly apparel retailers.
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8. BENEFITS TO BRANDS
Pinterest has many benefits to brands including:
• Search engine rankings: Brands may recognize an SEO boost from having more links to pages.
• Referral traffic: It is estimated that Pinterest drives more traffic than LinkedIn, YouTube, and
Google+.
• Brand awareness: This is especially important as prospects contemplate purchases across many
brands.
• Customer engagement and loyalty: For customers who have already purchased your product
and are enjoying it, interacting on Pinterest is a way for you to learn about their experiences and
encourage them to share it with others.
• Lifestyle promotion: For lifestyle brands, borrowing relevance from the lives of customers
through Pinterest is a great way to engage and re-engage.
• Contest reach: Many brands are launching contests which require entrants to create boards
based on entry qualifications. This promotes the sponsoring brand and increases reach.
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9. THE BOTTOM LINE
Pinterest represents a shift in the way people connect with information.
The era when a search engine (likely Google) was the primary method for
discovering products and ideas seems to be ending. Users are now more
interested in what their friends and other like-minded people are
consuming as a shortcut to dealing with the overwhelming amount of
information available online. It is often called “curation” and brands are
finding ways to be a part of this transition.
What Pinterest allows brands to do is promote a lifestyle, engage
consumers in a non-advertorial manner, and share the content they
create with a large and growing audience.
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10. BRANDS USING PINTEREST
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11. WHOLE FOODS -
PROMOTING A
LIFESTYLE
• Whole Foods shoppers share many
characteristics with Pinterest users —
they are affluent, love food and
cooking, and are interested in
beautiful experiences. This makes
Pinterest the perfect place for
engaging with customers.
• Whole Foods has created and curates
many boards based on the interests
of their customer base including
healthy eating, cooking gadgets, and
gardening. They pin and re-pin non-
Whole Foods images just as non-
brand users would.
• This borrowed relevance strategy
(rather than pure product-based
approach) makes it easy and
pleasurable for customers to interact
with the brand by repinning images
that re-enforce Whole Foods’ overall
value proposition.
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12. VOLKSWAGEN USA -
PROMOTING PRODUCTS
1
• Volkswagen takes a different
approach. It has attractive
products with design that people
1 are passionate about. They have
created boards to house product
images which puts them into the
Pinterest environment for easy
re-pinning.
• This approach is not advertorial,
but rather editorial with more
1 than just exterior shots of each
model. Interesting photography
is appreciated by Pinterest users
so this approach fits well with
the audience.
• For higher-end items like a car,
this kind of Pinterest brand use
is more about engaging loyal fans
and keeping their cars top of
mind for those already in a car-
buying frame of mind.
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13. ETSY — PROMOTING
PRODUCTS
• Etsy allows users to easily sell
and buy handmade and vintage
items online.
• Their audience very much
overlaps with Pinterest’s, making
it the perfect place to promote
products.
• Couple this with the fact that
Etsy products are easily
purchasable online, this is a
more direct sales approach than
is possible for most brands.
• Etsy’s strong community
management and history of
content curation on Twitter and
through its “Treasuries” and
homepage features make a
transition to Pinterest natural.
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14. REAL SIMPLE —
FORMING CONTENT
PARTNERSHIPS
• Real Simple is using Pinterest to
not only promote a lifestyle that
its readers aspire to, but also
form partnerships with other
content creators.
• By sharing a board with Big Girls
Small Kitchen, they connect both
brand’s audiences.
• Pinterest refers more traffic to
RealSimple.com than any other
source besides Google.
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15. RECOMMENDATIONS
FOR BRANDS
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16. OVERVIEW OF RECOMMENDATIONS
In order to reap the potential brand benefits of Pinterest, we have 4
easy recommendations for brands:
• Ready your site
• Create a brand presence
• Engage with other users
• Measure your reach
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17. READY YOUR SITE
Pinterest button launches a • For people interested in your brand
popup that allows the user to who are already Pinterest users, a Pin It
choose a board to pin the button makes it easy for them to add
item to. your images to Pinterest, provided they
are not embedded in Flash or restricted
in some other manner.
• The button also serves as a subtle
reminder that this may be an image
they’d want to pin and remember later
(perhaps as part of their buying
journey.)
• All of the users who follow the initial
pinner see the image as part of their
feed which extends the reach of your
brand.
• Those users can click on the image and
be brought to the page on which the
users pinned the image which drives
referral traffic.
• Other users may repin the image
increasing reach further.
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18. CREATE A BRAND PRESENCE
The vast majority of pinning activity is actually a
repin. This means that users are interacting more
often with content already in the Pinterest
environment. To accelerate the rate at which your
brand’s content is being shared, we recommend
that you create a brand presence.
In the case studies, we looked at two approaches —
a product-focused approach and a lifestyle-focused
approach. We believe a hybrid approach would
work best when creating boards.
As we saw with Real Simple, non-competing brands
with a similar customer profiles may be able to
connect to increase both brands’ audiences.
If you already have a Facebook presence, it will be
easy for you to follow all your existing Facebook
fans who are already on Pinterest.
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19. ENGAGE WITH OTHER
USERS
• Like all social networking, the
goal for Pinterest is to engage
with other users who are
interested in your brand.
• You can interact with them by
commenting on their photos and
repinning them to your boards.
• Users receive notifications when
another user comments or repins
their pins telling them which
accounts are interacting with
them. They likely visit and/or
follow those users growing their
Pinterest network.
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20. MEASURE YOUR REACH
1
• Pinpuff.com is a free service that
allows you to see the
“pinfluence” of your activity on
1 Pinterest.
• By comparing your Pinterest
traffic to paid media, brands can
get a sense of the dollar value of
their Pinterest program.
• Pinpuff also recommends easy
1 actions to take to increase your
“Pinfluence” such as driving
more traffic to your profile and
creating strong board names.
• Pinclout.com also measures
influence of individual Pinterest
accounts.
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21. THANK YOU.
To get in touch with IQ, call us at:
678.449.2021
Or visit:
iqagency.com
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