Can Pinterest Make Your Small Business Bigger?
Pinterest's head of online sales and operations has four tips for leveraging the platform to push your brand’s products.
Pinterest's head of online sales and operations has four tips for leveraging the platform to push your brand’s products.
Brands like Whole Foods, Nordstrom, and LL Bean are well-known for their powerful presence on Pinterest. But those brands are well-known in general. Can the image-focused platform have an impact on smaller companies?
Small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) make up the bulk of Pinterest’s business accounts. Of the companies using the platform, 80 percent have less than 10 employees. Take, for example, Heather Cleveland, a Bay Area interior designer whose eponymous design firm has just one employee besides herself.
Cleveland initially used Pinterest for fun and started bringing it into her professional life as a way to gauge her clients’ tastes. She likes the platform because Pinterest, like her industry, is completely visual, and design terms like “modern” and “contemporary” are completely subjective.
If people had a crystal-clear vision of the way they wanted their homes to look, they wouldn’t have sought out her services in the first place, Cleveland notes. “[Having clients make Pinterest boards] enabled me, in the beginning, to zero in on their aesthetic without going two or three rounds doing detective work,” she says. “Customers appreciate that because it allows them the flexibility to spend more money on furniture and less on me figuring out what they like.”
Household names like Nordstrom use Pinterest mostly as a branding tool. While Cleveland does that as well – sharing her blog posts on the site increases her visibility and authority within the design world – she also uses the site to grow, frequently generating new business through her boards, which more than 5,700 people follow.
Pinterest can help a SMB expand in a different way than, say, Facebook or Twitter can. Though companies of all categories use the platform, Pinterest does tend to have a creative bent, which makes using it feel a bit more intimate.
“Pinterest is a very personalized, individual experience,” explains Joel Meek, head of partner online sales and operations at Pinterest. “When you pin things to your board, it’s a tool you’re using to plan for an event that’s important to your life.”
To grow your business on Pinterest, Meek says there are four things to keep in mind:
Looking at DODOcase’s social analytics across the board, McGinness finds that while Pinterest doesn’t bring as much traffic as some of the other sites, the platform does generate a disproportionate amount of revenue, second only to Facebook. In Tiwari’s opinion, the visual nature of Pinterest lends itself to more purchases.
“You go on Pinterest to look for some kind of inspiration; I think we’re capturing [the consumer] further down the funnel,” he says. “When you’re on Pinterest, you’re much more engaged and looking at women’s fashion, you’re much more likely to convert than someone looking at their news feed on Facebook or browsing Twitter.”
He adds that when Jeweliq was launched two years ago, the company pinned its entire inventory. The first 15 sales came directly from Pinterest.