Pinteresting Enough For 100 Million

Pinterest hit a milestone recently, with an official announcement that it has reached 100 million users, far exceeding the estimates of some analysts’ calculations earlier this year, such as in a report by eMarketer that calculated Pinterest would hit 47 million users in the U.S, by 2015, and 59 million U.S. users by 2019.  But as the New York Times reported, “Pinterest has faced scrutiny over whether the size of its user base and business growth can justify its huge valuation.” Over the past five years, the company has grown to a valuation of about $11 billion dollars.

According to Tribune’s report, co-founder Evan Sharp expressed to AFP that most of the users are not just visiting Pinterest once a month and “They’re actually discovering something so interesting that they’re saving it or are clicking through to the website.”

“It’s 100 million active users, more than 70 per cent of whom are actively engaged,”

This was quoted from a telephone interview they conducted. The disclosure from Pinterest is the first time since its launch in March 2010 that it has discussed the number of users. Sharp said that the majority of Pinterest users are women but noted the gender gap “is closing a little bit every month.”

However, Pinterest’s numbers are lower than Instagram, which claims some 300 million users. It is only in the past year or so that Pinterest has made moves into monetizing its growth. Slowly it has offered itself to advertisers, allowing big brands to buy promoted pins. And, while ads may seem more intrusive on Instagram, interrupting photos of fuzzy cats and weekend warrior selfies, Pinterest relies on its users to save items that they theoretically want to buy. The question, as with most tech companies, startup small businesses and even web marketing or  social media marketing companies of this age, is how they will meet their valuation. But what the numbers do suggest is that Pinterest is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Optimize Visual Content For Social Marketing

You can work all you want to increase the visibility of your content, but if the content itself isn't good enough, any audience that finds it won’t stick around. To truly increase engagement, you need to create quality content that resonates with your audience. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

How can you optimize your social content to increase engagement for your web marketing? In its simplest form, content optimization is dependent upon three main things, which would be what to post, when to post it, and how to keep it fresh. This is a little different on each platform, so remember, you don’t need to figure everything out on your own. You can take advantage of social media analytics to measure and keep track of the impact and reach of your strategic social SEO and presence, which will tell you what content is working and what isn’t.

We no longer just think about Twitter for words, Instagram for photos and Tumblr for GIFs. We're in a new world of social media marketing where optimized content is a smart combination of words and visuals tweaked for each channel. Whether you’re a social media pro or just getting started, there are a few best practices to follow for what content to post to get the best response from your audience.

These days, visual content like photos and videos have power, but other visual content formats are also popular, like GIFs and increasingly, cinemagraph, which is similar to a GIF with only one section of the image animated. Arresting images and funny GIFs perform well, but don’t feel like you have to post only cute or humorous content to be successful. Some of social media’s most popular brands aren’t what you might initially expect. GE, IBM and NPR all stay true to their brand voice while creating rich, often visual content.

Be sure to post high-quality photo and video content, no matter your industry. Remember that every social media platform has different best practices for image specifications and regulations, so do your research so that your posts are approved and optimized for the platform they appear on.

Personalization Generates Leads

Today’s prospects independently research products and services before making a purchase, which creates numerous interaction touch points. Now, organizations are starting to realize the importance of personalizing those touch-points and providing an engaging, valuable experience for each visitor. But realizing the importance is different than actually implementing a personalized experience. You need to build a successful branding or personalization strategy.

Personalization can be obtained by finding out who your key audiences are, and what the defining characteristics are of your target audiences. And you also need determine which content assets are most valuable to your ideal persona, such as blog posts or case studies and which channel you are focusing on.

If you’re looking to generate new leads or nurture existing leads and further educate them, start by choosing only two or three use cases that make the most sense or will have the most impact on your business. If you’re B2B, you can consider employing account based web marketing to target specific companies, industries, or even personas that are what is considered, of higher-value.

After you’ve selected a few use cases to focus on, go one step further by detailing the specifics. For instance, for some companies this may entail listing account names or regions that are most valuable to your business. For others, you can zoom in on a particular behavior or specific product interest.

But before starting to run any campaigns, determine what you’re going to measure and how, so establish analytics. This can help you understand how each key audience interacts with you. Set up your measurements to determine baseline metrics for the different verticals and audiences and start testing personalization campaign or brand marketing results to measure uplift. And track performance by checking how many visitors from each specific segment visit your website, how they behave on-site, and what type of content they prefer.

Personalization is an excellent way to push prospects down the funnel, but once they turn into leads, it’s a marketer’s responsibility to turn them over to sales. Use the same segmentation capabilities to provide your sales teams with real time sales intelligence about their target customers.

Drive Customer Satisfaction With CRM's

To drive customer satisfaction, organizations deploying CRM solutions must think about the customer relationship in an integrated and comprehensive way. In today’s multichannel world, this is particularly important. Customer interactions take place everywhere. From sales, support, service, finance and on the web. Beyond traditional sales and support management, companies need to be able to see real time, cross channel views of all interactions to deliver superior customer service, whether the interaction occurred on the web just seconds ago or in person with a sales rep yesterday. This enables every customer interaction to be based on a holistic view of a customer’s history.

Self-service has also become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. Many organizations are deploying customer self-service portals to meet their customers’ expectations around the ease of doing digital marketing business with the company on the web. Customer portals enable customers to view outstanding quotes or orders, or even request returns, improving service while reducing the cost to serve. 

On the call center side, the support team can benefit from cross departmental customer visibility, with a detailed order history allowing the support team to check service level subscriptions. This also gives the team an opportunity to deliver customized up sell and cross sell offers that both anticipate customer needs and drive revenue.

For organizations whose business model requires delivering ongoing service for their customers, project management is a critical but often forgotten component of CRM. This includes the tactical aspects of creating jobs and linking them to specific customers, as well as tracking estimated end dates, percentage of work completed, actual end dates and the income and expenses associated with each project. Project management is particularly important for businesses whose models are predicated on customer renewals or subscription revenue.

The final area of customer satisfaction is billing. Billing errors can create significant customer attrition, and in many cases, billing errors may stem from manual processes in the original sale, project management issues or simply duplicate or out of date customer data.