How Pinterest Will Evolve for Business Marketing

Pinterest will be the hottest social media platform for business marketing…in a year from now. 

Despite the hype and the record-breaking growth rates, as it exists today, Pinterest is not ready for business marketers; the demographics are wrong, the categories are too consumer focused, and there are significant copyright and measurement issues to overcome.   

As it stands today, Pinterest is following the “next big social media thing” strategy of getting the audience first, and figuring out the business model later.  That audience for now is mostly women, who are, as Ryan Deshazer, VP of Search and Social at GSW Worldwide described in a recent post, doing “social scrapbooking.”  However, within that audience there are also business decision makers.

As Pinterest’s internal analytics capabilities evolve those business decision makers will become known, and when they do, the marketers will follow.   As a result, Pinterest could quickly become the best social platform available for business-to-business content marketers. 

While other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, are mostly content distributors (sharing), Pinterest’s platform has the potential to offer far more value as a content aggregation and curation tool, as well as a content destination and repository.   Here’s why:

• Scalability and Scanability – the rate of which new content is being added to the “www” is mind-boggling.  According to Hubspot, 70% of bloggers add new content weekly or daily, 500,000 new posts are added everyday alone on WordPress.com   As a result, it’s becoming more difficult to find high quality, relevant content.  The “internet” must evolve in order for audiences to navigate faster through this growing mass of content to find what they are looking for, which opens the door for Infographics and Pinterest.  By making content visual, it also makes it more scanable.  The average person reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, but visually it takes only 1/20th of a second to process an image.  Pinterest platform accelerates the process by aggregating and organize images by category or theme making it easy to search. 
• Valuing Content – business marketers are constantly wrestling with trying to understand the value of their content (relevancy, insight, utilization, etc.) based on how and when it’s consumed by various audience segments.  Lacking a closed loop system to provide feedback, it’s been difficult to know exactly what resonates, with what audience, and why. Curating content naturally within Pinterest provides marketers the opportunity to capture deeper insights into audience consumption habits.   For example, business marketers tend to organization content along the “buying process,” which is typically defined by steps within the sales process.  Marketers may find that business audiences within Pinterest organize and consume content by categories defined as “applications” -- how they intend to use the product, and not how they will buy it.  This insight could help define the real purchase path and key influences along that journey.    
• Audience Insight - lastly, and perhaps most interesting, will Pinterest have the ability to provide “affinity data”?  As Scott Bayer, CTO of Baynote wrote“individual pinning choices are interesting, but there is even greater opportunity to analyze segments of people who express an affinity for a product or category in aggregate.” 

If available, this information could allow marketers to create new segmentation clusters based on common interests, which could help improve messaging and targeting.  “Clustering” could identify brand advocates, key influencers and connectors, local “hot spots” and new ideas for reaching them.   

While we still have some time before Pinterest evolves there are few things to consider now:

1. Integrate “Pin it” button into your website - it will do nothing for conversions, but it may drive some traffic that could provide some insight.
2. Make your content more visual – if content marketing is part of your marketing plans,  experimenting using Infographics (visit Visual.lyfor a starting point).
3. Experiment – whether or not you’re a believer in social media platforms, the fact remains that Twitter and Facebook have impacted how we go to market.  Pinterest also holds the same potential to change the way we create, produce and consume content.  Start to brainstorm on what that change might be and/or what you might like to change given its functionality. 

I realize that there are skeptics out there, I might even be one, but as we’ve learned with other social media platforms, if you don’t think it’s valuable tool, then you’ll be right…it won’t.  Pinterest holds great potential for business marketers, but that “potential” will only realized by those who seek to define it by experimenting…or dare I say, “pin it.”  

10 Things You Need to Know about Selling to Business Owners

Large companies have long recognized the opportunity to address the needs of small business (26 million firms <99 FTE’s).  Over the years, companies like IBM, American Express and Google have spent millions to try to understand the segment and convince business owners that they have the products and services owners need.  

Yet, marketers still struggle to capture of the opportunity in this segment, for a number of reasons.  Despite their best efforts, they often fall back into their “big company” ways.  Speaking the wrong language, misaligning offers, and/or reinforce perception that Fortune 500 companies are too big to serve small businesses.  

Whether you work for a "big company" or an INC 500 firm, here are 10 key points to keep in mind when selling to the Small Business segment.  All Insights below are taken from various research reports produced by the Executive Council on Small Business. 

1. Don’t call them Small Business Owners – despite the fact that 60% of small businesses, as defined by the U.S Census Bureau 2008, have less than 5 employees, don’t call them a small business. 
2. There are 2 different types of business owners – one type of owner is focused on growing their business, the other surprisingly, is not. Know the difference when targeting this segment. “Satisfaction owners” represent 46% of all small business owners.  Also known as “lifestyle owners” they are older (>46) and more likely to have higher revenue businesses.  They are "in it" because they love what they do and enjoy the work-life balance ownership present. “Growth” owners (36%) are more likely to be in retail, and more likely to have owned or own more than one business (serial entrepreneurs). 
3. They are in the Service Business – for the most part small businesses are focused on providing services.  60% of small business are; professional services or other services.  
4. Speak THEIR language  – As you might have already picked up, this will be a reoccurring theme in the post.  3X as many business owners find a sales person more trustworthy if he/she discusses savings in dollarsrather than percentages.  To be credible give them specific details, contact information and testimonials for other business owners.
5. Small things are a BIG Deal – according to the research, a major purchase decision starts at $500.   Cash flow is the lifeblood of small business don’t under estimate your need to prove value or ROI on what you would consider small transactions.   If you’re talking about cost savings, express it in monthly terms rather than annual.   2X as many owners expressed seeing savings monthly rather than yearly.
6. Resources and Time are Tight - owners now make a purchase decision in less than a week for complex and simple products.  43% said that it now takes them less time to make a decision than it did 5 years ago.   They search online, visit your website, and then call to confirm what they’ve learned.   SEO is critical if you’re going to play in this segment, as you will see below. 
7. They Love to Search - Business owners purchase patterns have changed, instead of contracting it’s now expanding.   Rather than narrowing their list of vendors, 60% of owners now report expanding their consideration set through research.
8. And it’s Local – business owners search for a product or services by name, not a brand, and they include their local area (e.g. “internet providers in St Louis”).  They don’t include “small business.”  
9. Search is Important, but Social Isn’t – as you saw in the previous examples Search is critical for being considered, but interesting enough, Social Media is not.   The reason - small business owners view social media as a channel to speak about their businesses, rather than hear what suppliers have to say.
10. If You’re Not Relevant…You’re Not Relevant.  In today’s marketplace to resonate with audience content must be personalized.   A recent Forrester report showed that most sales forces are very capable of discussing their products and solution, and even the industry issues, but when it came down understanding the buyer’s role or situation they failed.  

Business owners in healthcare, construction and manufacturing want information specific to their industries.  Owners of professional services or retail want information specific to them. 

Satisfaction owners are looking for products and services that save them time savings and strengthen their relationship with customers.   With Growth Oriented owners talk ROI, and time to payback.

Summary – it’s OK to categorize your services or products as small business solutions, but don’t call the buyers small business owners.  Recognize that there are two different types business owners focused on two different goals - lifestyle vs. growth.  Both groups are interested in hearing your value proposition in terms of real dollars on a monthly basis, not over course of the year.

Business owners are heavy users of search for researching vendors, and they use social media to promote their business, but not for buying from vendors.   To be relevant your content must speak to their industry or similar size businesses. 

If you talk to them like you know them, show them you are committed to building a lasting relationship this dynamic market can power your organizations growth.      

Click Here for a Social Media ROI

Everybody knows – or thinks they know intuitively – that social elements add value to marketing. But just how, exactly?

Like anything in business, it comes down to return on investment. Social media is not a strategy and it’s not an end in itself. Unless your business objective (and I’d check with your shareholders on this) is only about gaining page views and follows, marketers need to understand how social adds value to everything else in your toolkit.

So how do you find the “sweetspot” for developing an ROI for social media?  Well, start by viewing the tools at their most basic level, as vehicles for sharing; photo’s, thoughts, content, etc.  Consider them “levers” for improving the performance of known activities that have produced a ROI. 

Years ago, we assessed the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns for a client.  Because the firm was in the hi-tech industry they had a heavily reliance on content marketing for their campaigns.  They spent months designing and building them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in execution only to see diminishing results. 

The audit revealed that their campaign effectiveness (related to lead production) lasted roughly 36 hours after launch (see below).  Meaning that the majority of the leads were being created within the first three days of launch, regardless of how long they left the campaign in the market (this is not uncommon). 

Today, social media has the potential to create a long tail effect, extending the life of expensive campaigns, ultimately improving ROI, and along the way creating and deepening the relationship with the audience. 

I’ll use myself as an example: A blog post of mine titled, The End of Blogs (and Websites) as We Know Them recently ran on Forbes CMO Network (see below).  It received no special promotion; in fact, you could say the deck was stacked against it.  Posted on a Friday, the slowest traffic day of the workweek, at midnight (EST) when most of the blog readers at home or are in bed.  By prime blog viewing time (10 am) it had almost dipped below the fold.

But on the following Monday it took off, almost doubling the views of Friday, and continued to build momentum ending the week as the 3^rd most popular post of the day.  The following week it was the most popular post on Wednesday.  So what happened? 

Social took over. Without a significant additional investment in promoting it, social sharing accelerated and extended the life of the post, even as it fell off the first, second and third page of the site.  Readers engaged and went from passive viewers to active promoters.

Readers were tweeting their own thoughts and comments about their insights, not just retweeting the post title.  They placed it into Linkedin groups and added their comments on the impact of the technology (the topic of the post) to their particular area of interest or role.  They were actively engaging in sharing their “discover” with others. 

That is the power and the value of social media for content marketing.  

The post no longer needed to be pushed because it was being endorsed, and in some ways validated by readers -- the most trusted source of information.  

The potential of social media is intriguing, but to determine its true value, companies will need to experiment.  Using social media to support your content marketing efforts is a prudent choice, but keep this in mind: It will only be effective if the audience/community finds value in the content and part of that value is defined by those who pass it along. 

This post appears today on the Forbes CMO Network.