Casting a wider net
As business owners, our instinct is often to take photographs of all our products and pin them to our boards. While it’s true you should pin popular and unique items you carry, you must also offer something more. Consider creating boards with home décor or bridal themes and pin other people’s items that share something in common with your brand. This allows users who aren’t necessarily searching for jewellery to be introduced to you and will help you cast your net out farther. Just be sure any boards or pins you create unrelated to jewellery are still consistent with your brand or store identity, as well as the message you’re trying to convey.
In a Search Engine Journal article by Eric Sornoso entitled, “Pinterest Goes Native with Advertising for Brands and Businesses,” the writer notes engaging with those you are following, as well as with people following you, is a vital component of Pinterest. “This means ‘liking’ items pinned by others, leaving positive comments, answering every question, greeting new followers, providing helpful commentary, etc. The idea is to be friendly and creative when promoting your brand. Take a look at what your competitors are doing on Pinterest and emulate the positive aspects of their marketing strategy,” Sornoso writes.
Beyond the standard pins described previously is a more in-depth type known as ‘Rich Pins,’ which hold extra information on the pin itself. There are five types of rich pins, including movie, recipe, article, place, and product. This last category is highly beneficial for jewellers, as it can include real-time pricing, availability, and where items can be purchased. With this type of rich pin, pinners are notified when products drop in price, thus allowing them to take advantage of special sales in a convenient and immediate manner. To create a rich pin, you must submit your website to Pinterest for verification and approval. The process of setting up rich pins is rather technical and requires your website contain meta tags, making it an ideal job for your webmaster or site developer. Despite the technical aspect of product pins, the benefits of real-time information can translate into increased sales and a larger client base.
Another useful tool offered to Pinterest’s business users is analytics. This tool allows you to learn more about your customers and what they really want. You will discover what pins and boards from your profile are most popular, what other users like to save from your website, who your Pinterest audience is, including gender, location, and other interests, what devices people use when they’re pinning or re-pinning your images, and how the ‘Pin It’ button on your website leads to referral traffic from Pinterest.
‘Promoted pinning’
It’s an exciting time for Pinterest, and with the company newly offering direct advertising, the time to raise your presence on the social media platform is now. Unlike Facebook and Twitter where advertising is jarring and usually unwanted by its users, Pinterest is the ideal platform for native advertising: a method of online advertising that corresponds to the form and function of the platform on which it’s being used. Pinterest is designed to share images of items you like, making native advertising a seamless addition to the site. The company recently completed its pilot testing of direct advertising with targeted influencers, including The Gap and Lululemon. In January, Pinterest opened ‘promoted pinning’ to the public, positioning itself as a very powerful purchasing platform.
Jeffrey Ross and Patti Moloney are a husband-and-wife duo that has used innovative thinking and technology to develop and expand their line of Dimples charms across Canada. They are also owners of Jeffrey Ross Jewellery, a custom jewellery design studio in Uxbridge, Ont.
