Posted: January 11th, 2012 | Filed under: just tips, marketing, social media | |
The latest talk-of-the-town social networking site is Pinterest (latest stats is 31 million visitors per month). Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. It is very visual and simple to use. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. Social discovery just got a lot funner.
People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes. More importantly, I’m hearing from bloggers that Pinterest is driving more traffic to their blogs than Twitter and Facebook.
Here are three tips on getting started with Pinterest for your business:
1. Organization is key. After you create your Pinterest account, you can start creating your own board(s). Divide your boards into topics that are relevant to your brand, rather than just pinning your products onto a board. Curate pins that tell the story of your brand. Equally important is to categorize your board (e.g. Design, Women’s apparel etc) so users can discover it. Some of the brands that are doing great job on these two fronts are Kate Spade New York and West Elm. There are brands that are even leveraging Pinterest for contests, such as Lands’ End Canvas Holiday Pin It To Win It Contest.
2. Making the sale. When you are pinning your own products, you can specify the product URL so it takes the users straight to your site. Also, use the $ sign in description to list the product price. When you do that, Pinterest will automatically put that pin into the Gifts category, which will further promote your pin/product.
3. Connecting your site. You can add your site, Twitter and Facebook account to your Pinterest profile. Back at your own site, you can either add the Pinterest follow button so users can follow your Pinterest account, or add the “Pin it” Button(s) next to your product(s) to allow your cusomters to “Pin” your products onto Pinterest. To get the buttons for your site, head to Pinterest’s goodies section.
Have fun pinning!
Posted: October 20th, 2011 | Filed under: marketing, mobile, social media, technology, trends | |
Trends help us figure out what’s ahead. Looking at the Internet Trends by Mary Meeker of KPCB, we can get a sense of what to expect in 2012.
A couple of highlights are:
Web and Social:
- 81% of Users of Top Global Internet Properties are Outside of USA
- Social networkers exceed internet users and 70% of them use Facebook
- eCommerce continues to gain share from offline, with mobile commerce also accelerating (leading the charge are eBay, Paypal, Amazon, Target, and Square)
- Local commerce rejuvenated by mobile
- Time spent on Social Networking Sites surpassed portals in June 2011 in USA (this is Significant!)
Mobile:
- Smartphones surpassed Featured Phone shipments in W. Europe and USA, rest of world to follow
- Mobile Usage and Mobile Search growing rapidly, leading to Mobile Advertising ramping quickly in all geographies
- Global Mobile Apps and Mobile Advertising spending is at $12B in 2011
Around the bend:
- The Next Big Thing will be online audio, sound is going to be bigger than video
- Mega-trend of 21st Century will be the empowerment of people via connected mobile devices
See the full presentation below for all the insightful forecasts on what’s ahead!
KPCB Internet Trends (2011)
Posted: October 5th, 2009 | Filed under: fail, just tips, marketing | Tags: email campaigns, emails, fail, opt-in lists |
Economy is shaky, people are spending less, businesses are turning up a notch on their marketing efforts to drive sales. Makes sense. Some of the brands I purchased from before (most noticeably Victoria’s Secret and Endless – I’m looking at you) thought a daily email with different deals is one way of driving sales. Send me enough deals and surely I will take the bait eventually, right? Wrong.
The daily email deals are annoying after one week, then feels like spam after a few weeks, then it becomes unbearable – I went and unsubscribed from the brands. Now I won’t be notified of future deals, which is opportunities lost for these brands.
Just because email is free doesn’t mean you should contact your opt-in subscribers list every day (unless your business model IS about daily deals like Groupon). Bombarding your list constantly with emails will come off as spammy, downgrade your brand experience for your customers and could cost you your businesses.
Posted: September 11th, 2009 | Filed under: marketing | Tags: cupcakes, marketing, secret sauce |
Do you want people to notice your business? talk about your product? spread the word on your service?
Make your product/service remarkable, and you will succeed. It’s really that simple. Hard to do, but worth all the effort.
For example, I am not the biggest fan on cupcakes (crazy, I know!), but one look at Hello Naomi’s Super Mario cupcakes and I couldn’t help myself but went straight to her site to see what other amazing-looking cupcakes she also makes. It was almost instinctual. No sales pitch, no one ask me to click on a link, no advertisement brought me there. I was sold on the product because it was remarkable. And I’ll think of Naomi’s cupcakes if I ever need to buy some.
All the marketing campaigns, PR, SEO, online tools can’t help you if your product/service sucks. You can even have a visually-boring website if your product is amazing, people will still use it and keep coming back, look at Craigslist.
Make it remarkable, and you’ve done the hardest part.
