Near the middle of 2011, Jason Miles, co-founder of doll clothing e-retailer Liberty Jane Clothing, noticed that a significant chunk of its traffic was from shoppers clicking directly from Pinterest.
Pinterest, the social network where consumers can ‘pin’ and share favorite products and images from around the web, was then barely a year old, having launched in March 2010.
“We didn’t know anything about Pinterest,” he says. But after watching the number of consumers coming from Pinterest steadily grow, Miles developed a marketing strategy for LibertyJanePatterns.com around the platform. Now more than 9.5% of visitors arrive at the site directly from Pinterest, making the social network second only to Google.com (11.4%) as a driver of traffic to the site, according to web analytics vendor Alexa Internet Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc.
“Pinterest is a big deal for us,” Miles says. “It’s a substantial driver of traffic to our site and that traffic is producing results.”
Miles will speak June 6 at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2013 during a presentation entitled “Pinterest a year later—what all marketers need to know.”
In his IRCE session, Miles will discuss the four-step process he took to create a devoted Pinterest following and give examples of how he develops image-focused content that Pinterest users are likely to share on the social network. He will also offer advice on how retailers can revamp their sites to make them more Pinterest-friendly.
“We’re in a niche that is perfect for Pinterest,” he says. Pinterest’s user base skews female, with women making up 70% of its unique web visitors and 84% of the unique users of its mobile app, according to The Nielsen Co. But, he adds, there are a number of tweaks any site can make to encourage shoppers to pin a retailer’s images on the social network.
Internet Retailer editors asked Miles to speak because of his experience using Pinterest to help drive sales at Liberty Jane Clothing. Miles is also vice president of advancement at Northwest University in Seattle, where he oversees marketing, development and human resources. He also is a co-author of “Pinterest Power,” an Amazon best-seller in the small business marketing category, and author of the upcoming “Instagram Power.”
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