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How Engaging Pinterest Content Can Triple Your Website Referral Traffic

Authors: Jessica Gioglio Jessica Gioglio
Posted Under: Social Media
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Part whimsical pinboarding site and part lead generation wonder, Pinterest has solidified itself as a major player among today’s social media channels. While there are many reasons for this, a standout is its ability to personalize curated boards around topics of interest. From recipes to workouts, interior design, fashion and more, there seems to be an endless trove of content opportunities on Pinterest for companies to showcase their offerings.

The question is, with so much content on Pinterest, how are leading companies standing out? A good example comes from a company you might not expect – Walgreens. With tons of product offerings across a variety of everyday and targeted needs, the company has found a clever way to use Pinterest to reach its customers, while tripling its website referral traffic.

So, what are Walgreens’ top tips for Pinterest success? Read on!

Focus on Pins That Add Value

One of Walgreens’ top performing types of pins are tutorial pins. A tutorial pin is designed exactly how it sounds, with a step-by-step guide for how to make or do something. The key with these types of pins is to understand what will add the most value to your audience and use visuals to clearly explain each step.

An example from Walgreens featured a product sold in store – Reddi Wip – in a unique way by showcasing how to make frozen whipped cream shapes for holiday entertaining.

Walgreens1

Curate a Mix of Brand, Influencer, and Partnership Content

A favorite content strategy tip of mine is, “The magic is in the mix.” This tip rings especially true on Pinterest, where success often means creating a variety of boards that appeal to different customer interests. In order to do this at scale, you’re seeing top companies like Walgreens invest time in content curation and co-creation. By identifying how influencer generated and partnership content can fill content gaps, companies can then pin valuable content throughout the day.

An example of how Walgreens curates its Pinterest content can be found on its Hair Care board. On the board, you’ll find a mix of product, hairstyle inspiration, hair tutorial tips from both the brand, influencers, and partners.

Hair Care Pins

Track and Analyze the Most-Pinned Items From Your Website

While this tip seems obvious, don’t discount the power of adding the Pin It button to your website. 62% of companies have the Pin It button on product pages of their websites. With this data captured in Pinterest Analytics, companies can then compare the top pinned content from their website with their own top performing Pinterest content to ensure alignment, or even identify a trending product or service as it becomes popular.

By doing this, Walgreens realized, “Pinterest users Pin for themselves; it’s a very personal profile. Understanding what products they are adding to their boards is a helpful merchandising and marketing tool. More importantly, being able to see what consumers are Pinning, searching for and trends they’re creating helps us provide useful content and information back to our customers for the things that matter most to them,“ said Shanti DeLand, Manager of Social, Mobile & Content Marketing, Walgreens.

Embrace New Media and Promoted Pins to Drive Results Around Priority Initiatives

The whimsical nature of Pinterest offers a lot of opportunity for creative visuals to captivate consumer attention. Pinterest supports a variety of visual mediums, from images to videos, infographics and even GIFs (although GIFs do not autoplay). As a result, mixing up your visual mediums is just as important as mixing up the types of content you create.

In addition, Pinterest is also now offering Cinematic Pins, the company’s eye-catching alternative to video ads. Similar to the GIF format, these video ads are real-time and motion sensitive. For example, Cinematic pins move at the speed the user scrolls, stop when the user stops, and play backwards if they scroll up. Walgreens was a partner at launch for Cinematic Pins with an ad promoting lip gloss featuring a model in oversized sunglasses blowing kisses as the user scrolls by.

For more information on Cinematic Pins, plus other Pinterest ad formats, check out this useful blog post from Sprinklr.

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