idio Platform

If the murmurings on the interwebs are to be believed, middle-American basket-weavers’ favourite new blogging platform – yes, Pinterest - is driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, Linkedin and Youtube combined!

For those who are unfamiliar with Pinterest, it is a rapidly-growing  social network with a very simple premise: users share (or, ‘pin’) photos that they find online on their own virtual bulletin board. You can follow friends on Pinterest and “repin” things that they have already pinned on your Pinterest boards or browse a live feed of items that are being pinned by strangers when you’re searching for inspiration.

Simples.

It might sound a bit ‘niche’, but the stats cannot be ignored and, unsurprisingly, brands are starting to adopt content marketing strategies to capitalise on the hyper-shareable features of Pinterest.

If you are considering adopting Pinterest as a platform for content marketing, here are some ideas and examples that should get some ideas going:

• Don’t just pin your products, pin your audience’s interests

People don’t like being sold to unless they are in the market to buy. However, they will give a brand its time if it shares content that is engaging or useful.  Whole Foods (below) has created entire boards of gorgeous and novel foods from around the world, for food-lovers to enjoy. If you are a hotel, why not pin pictures of nearby sites, destinations and recommended entertainment and dining venues. A fashion label? Then you could dedicate boards to trends, colours and fabrics, like Kate Spade NYC has done.

• Run a Pinterest competition encouraging people to re-pin branded content

The fashion label, Land’s End, ran a ‘Pin It and Win It’ competition whereby people were asked to pin up to 20 images from the Land’s End site or the Land’s End Pinterest page. Then all you had to do was email a URL of your pinboard to Land’s End to be entered. There were about 200 boards developed for the contest and the viral nature of Pinterest meant that Land’s End products reached thousands of Pinterest users.

• Curate charts and infographics that show relevant and useful statistics for your industry (for more on content curation, go here)

A really good example of this is Mashable’s infographics board which shows how you can group together visual content.

Mashable drive traffic to their content by pinning a compelling photo to a themed board, which drives traffic to the post where the photo originated. They also include a caption (at the bottom of each pic) that piques your interest, motivating you to actually click through the photo to the on-site post.

• Create and order your videos to tell a story

Most major brands have an archive of tv commercials and marketing videos uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo. By curating them on a Pinterest board, brands can create an attractive portal of both old and new footage which can tell the brand story.

Content Marketing and Pinterest: the Bottom Line

Sites like Pinterest reward brands that adopt a content marketing mindset and are committed to producing engaging and plentiful content that creates a community and ultimately attracts and convert them to customers.

If you are interested in learning more about content marketing, or how our platform will enable you to de-risk your content marketing – please do get in touch.

Every week without fail, I guarantee you’ll find brands doing something like this in your social streams:

For those who don't 'do' opera, insert: "iPad2"

For far too long, agencies – who have secured the dubious honour of comandeering client Facebook pages – have used unimaginative weekly competitions (with uninspired prizes), to reach their engagement KPi’s for the month (i.e. get 5,000 more fans).

Free product for the cost of a ‘Like’? – BAM – arbitary engagement stats hit. Simples.

Let’s ignore for the moment that these kinds of competitions are a violation  Facebook’s competition rules. My major problem with these pervasive competitions is that this is the kind of ‘fan’ they create:

FB competitions create opportunistic 'fans' who have no intention of sticking around for 'conversation' and 'engagement'

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Creating content of all shapes and forms with a marketing team can feel a bit stressful, especially with so many different avenues of content a business can take–all of which require a certain skill of writing proficiency and research. Instead of hiring on a marketing professional or putting even more stress on your marketing team, why not hire a journalist?

Marketing firm Eloqua, whose clients include Ellie Mae, Sony, McAfee, and Wisdom Tree, hired a journalist for their content marketing in 2010. Eloqua, despite being a marketing firm for other companies, was lacking in their own content and their blog was suffering from too low of postings and not being properly indexed. To fix this issue, Eloqua hired journalist Jesse Noyes, who previously worked for The Boston Herald.

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In mid-January, founder of Underwired, Felix Velarde, spoke on the future (and importance) of eCRM at Idio’s first Brand Breakfast. Underwired is a leading eCRM strategy firm, helping branded companies such as Virgin, AAR, The Economist Group, and McCain Foods to keep a steady relationship with their customers.

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Felix Velarde is Founder and Managing Director of leading eCRM strategy company, Underwired, and he is also the Course Leader for eCRM at the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing. We caught up with Felix recently after our January Brand Breakfast, at which he was a speaker. Here are the key points:

On eCRM

• Customer engagement is centred on increased understanding of consumers in a way that allows better engagement with them through digital channels.
• Such understanding of people goes beyond behaviour and demographics but the needs, attitudes and motivations of customers.
• Know their motivations, and you know how to create power to build lasting relationships with them.

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