Fashion Marketing

In this category of our blog we focus on marketing strategy for fashion industry, presenting practical tips and sharing our experience we’ve gained over the years of work in the fashion industry. As we truly believe we live in the era of photo and photos themselves are the most important factor and the base of the whole marketing strategy around fashion business, we devoted one of the section within this category to photo marketing only. As we are also aware that many of you need some introduction to the world of marketing and advertisements in the second section basics you can find the fundamental information and explanation of fashion marketing which we hope you find very useful.

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Pinterest Group Boards Strategy for Lingerie selling

In the article published at SocialMediaToday.com we described the impact that our Pinterest’s campaign had on Google search results. Thanks to Pinterest we reached the top of Google for the “lingerie wholesale” query. This time we’d like to give more details why the Group Boards strategy which we followed has been so successful.

First months of our Pinterest adventure wasn’t really exciting experience and didn’t happen a lot. Till the 2nd of March when we received an invitation to one of the biggest lingerie group board on Pinterest. And that’s how it started.
We were lucky that someone noticed our photos and invited us to a very popular lingerie group board. Finally, our pins could be displayed to thousands of pinners and the account was getting stronger receiving new followers. Each pin added to the group board was liked and what is more important – they were repined going viral. Pinterest’s search engine started indexing our account. After two months of sharing our photos with other pinners from all the group boards we contributed to, our account reached 1000 followers.

How to get a group board invitation – Board Inviter is the answer

Unfortunately, you are not invited to a new board every day. Pinterest doesn’t facilitate pinners communication in order to exchange invitations. Pinterest gives you just one opportunity to communicate to other users – by leaving a comment under pins. It doesn’t seem to be very professional to me. BoardInviter.com was created – the platform where you can easily exchange group boards invitations with other pinners. To get invitation from other users, you use points which you may gather inviting others to group boards where you belong to. Of course you decide who you invite or not – you may refuse any invitation request you don’t want.

We reached the top of Pinterest for the “lingerie” keyword

lingerie

Thanks to the group board strategy our pin was indexed as the first one for the “lingerie” query (very competitive one). Within three days only it received 350 repins, 50 likes and our account – 60 additional followers attracted by this pin.

Below we present the gallery of our most popular photos on Pinterest.

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Fashion Week Poland – the essence of Pinterest

As usually we visited Polish Fashion Week. It was the 9th edition of this event organized in Lodz – the most fashion industrial city in Poland.

I think I understand now why Pinterest pays so much attention to the Fashion Weeks events. In one place you can find fashion designers, photographers, fashion journalists, bloggers, models and what is most important lots, lots of fashion design and products. You could make thousands of photos and all of them would be repined immediately. Everything what is most important for Pinterest – just its pure essence.

It would be pointless to compare Polish Fashion Week to the biggest events from New York, London, Paris or Milan, as those cities attract the most popular designers in the world. Fashion Week Lodz is for local designers rather. However, Pinterest should take into consideration being present at smaller fashion shows as well. It is a very good opportunity to make it popular (I mean Pinterest) on local markets. Especially if it is a country of 40 million people, where social media are very popular and e-commerce sector is one of the highest developed in Europe.

Unfortunately, the Pinterest awareness among Poles is not yet as high as it could be. I talked to the most influential Polish fashion bloggers and I was a bit surprised. Of course they have heard about Pinterest but they don’t use it yet. It seems to be kind of a mystery to them or they prefer Instagram.

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Exact match and keywords order matter for Pinterest’s search results – part II

According to the last discoveries and the article about the exact match keywords and the order of keywords, I decided to do some test to check my observations.

I added 7 pins with the following descriptions:
4 – “Axami Lingerie Blog” – to see if it is better indexed for the “lingerie blog”
3 – “Axami Blog Lingerie” – to see if it is better indexed for the “blog lingerie”

“Lingerie Blog” results:

As I supposed, the new added pins with exact match keywords “lingerie blog” in their descriptions are displayed much higher than my previous pins. However, I didn’t expect they could be displayed on the very top of the search results. That shows how strong and powerful is the Lingerose’s account.

“Blog Lingerie” results:

We’ve got analogical situation with the query “blog lingerie”, also here my pins conquered the top of search results.

These tests confirm my theory. To display the most relevant results, Pinterest check the exact match and keywords order used in pins descriptions. Of course the strength of an account also matters.

wholesale-kopia

Exact match and keywords order matter for Pinterest’s search results

During my Pinterests SEO’s research today, I’ve checked also the “wholesale” keyword to see if Lingerose’s pins are also indexed for this searched term – and they are. The first pin is indexed at about 20th position and was added 4 weeks earlier.

The next pins keep the positions between 60 and 80.

They are almost the same as the highest indexed pins for for the “lingerie” and “lingerie wholesale” query.

Following this path I checked the “wholesale blog” query. The results were quite obvious for me – only Lingerose’s pins showed up.

But what about “lingerie blog”? This query should be definitely more competitive than the previous one that I checked. I found the first results out of top 200.

The indexed photos were also very similar to the highest indexed pins for all the keywords mentioned in this article before. What could be the possible explanation?

I’ve investigated about 50 first results and almost all of their descriptions contain the exact phrase “lingerie blog”.

All my pins added to the “lingerie wholesale blog” board contain “lingerie wholesale blog”. So, there is an additional word “wholesale”. This might be the reason why Pinterest indexed the pins much lower than the other Lingerose’s pins for all the queries checked today. Definitely the “lingerie blog” keywords is less competitive than “lingerie”. If so, my pins for “lingerie blog” shouldn’t be lower than for “lingerie”, but they are.

Before I go further I want to mention about one exception among the first 50 results for the “lingerie blog” query. I’ve found a pin with the following description: “lingerie green”. Where is the missing “blog” word?

As you can see it’s on the image. So, the image recognition system not only can recognize shapes and other things, but it can read as well. What is more important, Pinterest’s search engine may use writings from images as one of the factors which build a list of search results.

Ok let’s get back to my results, if it all is true and Pinterest likes so much exact match keywords, what about the order of keywords, does it matter?

Let’s see

I’m typing in “blog lingerie” and I see completely different results than those for “lingerie blog”.

There are lots of my pins indexed and they keep higher positions. I checked first ten results and the pins descriptions contain:

blog! Lingerie

blog: Lingerie

blog lingerie

Blog. Lingerie

so, Pinterest search engine sees almost the exact queries to our searched one.

After the top ten results my pins start showing up. How would I explain this situation if pins from Lingerose’s account contain “lingerie wholesale blog”. The order is different and there is additional word “wholesale” between our two keywords. I think there are not many results related to the query, the order of words in “blog lingerie” is not natural. So Piterest has displayed the most relevant results first, then selected my pins as they come from very strong account and contain both keywords.

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Limited albums – future advertising and engagement program for Pinterest

CEO of Pinterest – Ben Silbermann announced today: “we’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businessem”.

So I decided to share with you one of my ideas for advertising on Pinterest which I came up with . 

Below, I’m presetting with details:Limited albums” as the future advertising and engagement Pinterest’s program.
Of course, it is just my theory. However, this program could be used for online marketing purposes to gather new users and to keep pinners engaged. It might also be used as a part of Pinterest’s future advertising program. It definitely requires creation of some special app.

This idea reminds me my childhood and one of the collecting passions I had. When I was about 10 years old it was very popular to collect special stickers from chewing gums. You received a paper album that showed you what photos (stickers) you need to find in chewing gums. Below I present a sample of Chabel – chewing gum album:

I know that kids (including myself) spent a fortune to grab all stickers and to win a prize.

So, what doest it have to do with Pinterest and how could it be used?

Ok, we have another collecting idea and a quantity limited album. We can organize a competition with prizes as well. To explain it better, I use an example of the very popular fashion brand – Louis Vuitton.

Louis Vuitton wants to advertise his new collection on Pinterest. Pinterest offers organizing a contest with prizes and provides a special app – the limited album of 30 pins of products from the new Louis’ collection. For each Pinterest’s user who will gather all of the 30 pins, Louis Vuitton provides prizes – for example some products from the new collection. Louis also pays to Pinterest for the advertising possibility.

The special app might be downloaded from Louis’ Pinterest account. An user visits the account and clicks the board “Join the contest”. The limited board is automatically installed/created onto the user account. It might look like the Chabel’s album presented above. If empty (no photo repined yet) there are two color photos, just to indicate what pins the user should be looking for. That’s how the game starts.

Now, there are a few important questions. First of all, how the photos should be tagged or signed. When the user repins the photo that matches to the limited album, our app needs to recognize it and stick it automatically to the right place. It may use image recognition system that I’m sure Pinterest has or kind of special tagging. Anyway I leave this question unanswered at this moment.

Another questions are, if one participant may repin photos to his limited board from the other participant’s limited board? If the limited album and the photos added should be visible?

I considered all pros and cons and I’d leave the decision to users. We could use the same system as exists in Pinterest now – normal boards and private boards. I guess that most users will choose secret board’s option, while bloggers or fashion portals go for normal board’s option. That way they might get a lot of new followers and their accounts visitors.

The last important question is, how the special photos should be distributed for the contest’s purposes? Of course, all of the photos should be added via Pinterest. We should divide those 30 photos into smaller parts (for example 10, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1) not to add all of them at one time. This will definitely let us keep users engaged on Pinterest. The frequency depends on the contest’s duration. The photos should be added to many places, some of them the users may not be aware of yet. We need to make pinners search a lot and interact with each other before they find the right pins. For the contest’s purposes we might use the accounts of Luois, Pinterest or the others (for example a fashion portal could distribute one photo on its Pinterest account and could pay for this). The photos also could be added randomly to search results in “everything” or “fashion” category – if possible.

That’s how I see it could look like. I’m sure that this kind of marketing would engage a lot of users and let gather new ones. Of course, there are many other things that should be discussed.

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How fast Pinterest indexes your account name

On the 3rd of September we changed the name of the Lingerose’s account.

The name of the account was changed from “Lingerose Lingerie Network” to “Lingerose Lingerie Wholesale”:

Let’s see when Pinterest will index Lingerose’s new account name. So far there is only one account indexed:

Pinterest indexed the new named account 3 days after on the 6th of September.

Of course it doesn’t mean that all accounts names would be indexed the same time. It depends on how strong your account is and how active pinner you are. The stronger and more active account is the more often is visited by Pinterest crawlers.

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Pinterest help center and community team – opinion

Yesterday, I watched an interview with Ben Silbermann at D: All Things Digital.

My first impression – he is a very nice and precise guy, who knows exactly what he is doing. Comparing to Mark Zuckerberg, he seems to me more focused on details and quality. This is nothing against the founder of Facebook because I haven’t met both of them personally, it is just my opinion.

I think their personalities might reflect their “children” as well. Pinterest – a great modern design and functionality. Pinterest was also being prepared for a long time to meet users expectations, before it went worldwide.

Using Pinterest a lot, I must admit that it works really well. Of course, as in case of all the other social media platforms with millions of users, also on Pinterest some errors or problems might occur sometimes. And this is one of the situations I would like to describe today. I want to show how quickly Pinterest’s response we can receive and how good our cooperation with their Help Center can be.

As we may notice, Pinterest recently fights a lot against porn content and SPAM, canceling inappropriate pins, boards or even the whole accounts.

In our campaign for Lingerose.com we add a lot of photos presenting lingerie – sometimes very sexy. Some photos might even show some naked parts of female body. Of course, it has nothing to do with any kind of porn content. These photos just present sexy lingerie products. Anyway, any Pinterest’s user may report your pin if he decides that it is inappropriate for him and Pinterest’s crew is obligated to review this reported pin.

Unfortunately, on the 16th of July we received an email from Pinterest saying that because of inappropriate photos our “Axami” board was removed. We were also asked to remove all the other photos that go against Pinterest’s policy. In case if we didn’t do that our account might have been suspended.

In fact, in our Axami’s board there were some sexy photos but not related to porn content for sure. The other reason why it was “Axami” board removed, was that it was simply the first board in Lingerose’s account.

We decided to act immediately, submitting a request and sending the following email to Pinterest’s help center:

“Hello,

We’ve just received an email from you that our board “Axami Lingerie Wholesale” was removed because it included pins that go against your policies. You are also asking to remove all pins that go against your policies.

I’m writing this email to inform that we’ve just started process of removing all pins that might go against your policies. I want to ask to give us about 2-3 working days, because we have a lot of pins and boards and we need to go through all of them to check.

I just want to explain that we are lingerie wholesale distributor and our aim is just to present products that we offer. We sell sexy lingerie as well but these pins have nothing to do with porn content from a buyer and seller point of view. Of course I understand your company policy and the fact that other Pinterest users might consider these pins as kind of pornographic materials.

When we finish the whole process of removing pins that might go against your policy – I want you to ask for any help if you find any pins in our boards that you still consider against your policy.

We’ve been building this account for almost 5 months, adding and pinning day by day. It has been a very hard job. We’ll do our best to cooperate with you and follow your further instructions.”

In another email sent an hour later we also asked which other pins should be deleted:

“We are now deleting all the pins that might go against your policy.
However, it is difficult to decide sometimes if any of those pins go against your policy or not. Below I’m presenting some of our pins and have a question if they should be deleted or not:”

We already had contacted with Pinterest’s help center before, so I knew it would take 1-3 days for them to respond. And they didn’t let me down again. On the 18th of July I received following email, but what was more important “Axami” board was back.

“Hi Jack,

Unfortunately, I can’t comment on individual pins, but taking a look at your account I’d say that you shouldn’t have problems with your pins being removed. We’ll use this as an example to improve our reviewing process in the future, and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

We took a look at your board and decided to restore it. We just ask that you keep our content policies in mind while you pin. To sum them up:

We don’t allow things that are inappropriate for the general public – like sexually explicit or pornographic pins – anywhere on Pinterest, including secret boards. We do allow works of art and educational content, like you might see in a museum or classroom.

Thanks for your understanding,

Tobi

Pinterest – Community Team”

So, why I have presented this correspondence between me and Pinterest: I wanted to show that also the Pinterest help center is a high quality team that you may rely on. There are real human beings not robots that want to help you resolve your problems.

Recently, I’ve seen some people complaining on Pinterest’s Facebook profile about canceling pins, board or accounts. Unfortunately, they never do any steps to resolve a problem or they do it a wrong way, sending messages which don’t explain anything. Sometimes they are even offensive or aggressive. And sometimes they are just not right, they add really inappropriate or porn content and then they are very surprised that it was deleted.

So, my advice is: before you start yelling how bad support Pinterest provides, make sure that you are really right and you don’t do anything that goes against Pinterest policy. If so, check their help center. If you can’t find the answer, submit a request and explain very precisely and nicely what has happened. Then allow them 1-3 day for getting back to you. Remember that according to what Ben Silbermann said, in May 2013 there were only 130 employees. I mean – only, because there are about 50.000.000 of us – users. So be patient!

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Do hashtags really matter?

Do hashtags really matter on Pinterest? Should businesses use them?

I see that many bloggers and companies involved in Pinterest encourage to use hashtags giving a lot of tips on how to do it properly. Of course, I don’t mind, but I’m just curious what is the real purpose or what are advantages of doing that. I want to answer this question from the point of view of a company that wants to conduct Pinterest campaign to advertise its products or services. First, we need to understand how hashtags work on Pinterest. Very simple – Pinterest just uses them as a search query. So if you click on hashtag in a pin description – for example #fashion – it will lead you to search results for the query – fashion. Nothing more.

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As you may see pins may include in their description: – our key word with hashtag – #fashion – pin number 1 – just key word with no hashtag – fashion – pin number 2 – no key word – pin number 3 What does it mean? Analyzing results for many other, more or less popular keywords, we’ll notice that for the search engine of Pinterest hashtags don’t matter. Pinterest treats a keyword with hashtag the same way as this keyword with no hashtag. From PSEO point of view Pinterest just ignores it. Hashtag doesn’t count as a factor that may have an impact on search results. So who has advantages of using hashtags? For me, the main beneficiary is Pinterest itself. First of all, hashtag is clickable and if hashtag attracts some pinner attention enough to click it, he will get more results related to the hashtag. For Pinterest that means more pins viewed, more pins probably clicked and higher average time that user spent on the site. Of course, a user is also very happy, because he may see more pins related to his intention/interest and what is very important – he will see first-top of search results with probably best pins according to Pinterest search engine. Ok, so we already have two beneficiaries, but hold on – what about us? What are the consequences for our business? Our main aim was to conduct Pinterest campaign to attract potential customers. Suddenly, a pinner that was watching our photo clicked on the hashtag and was moved to search results list. What happens next? Here we’ve got two following possibilities: 1. We are lucky and the list of search results display only or almost only our pins. So the pinner may choose other photos that come from our account. This is hypothetical situation and in reality – especially for broader and popular queries – it is almost impossible. We would need to have extremely strong Pinterest account in order to achieve that. However, for more precise queries it would be more possible. For one of our former customers, for “lingerie wholesale” query, in the first 400 results displayed, there were only 2 pins that didn’t belong to the customer. However, we still didn’t use hashtags. Why? Let’s imagine situation when we stop our campaign and search results are changed – there are more pins of our competitors. And this is what I want to describe as the second possibility. 2. We are unlucky and search results display few of our pins among the others or it is even worse – there are only our competitors’ pins. So what is the point to give your potential customer a chance to see your competitors offer? It is madness to include hashtag consciously if we know that we can lose our customer. It’s like creating a link on your advertisement – “click here to see my competitors”. Ok, maybe your pin is so incredible that after they see other results they definitely come back to you with conviction that your product or service is the only choice they can make. Lucky you but to be serious and honest – I doubt it because it’s very risky business. By putting hashtag you give another clickable place but don’t forget that the only clickable places on and around your pin should be those that lead to your website or to your Pinterest account. With hashtag it is not possible, however, there is still one exception that I need to mention. It is hashtag with your brand name. This is the only exception which usage I may understand. Anyway, I still wouldn’t do that. For me, bolded hashtags, especially those with your brand name, look a little spammy and may discourage your potential customer. But it is just the matter of sense of taste.

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More control of your group board

Recently, we have received following email from Pinterest Team:

We’re adding a little something to give you more control over the pins and people on your group boards. Now, if you decide to remove someone from a board (we get it – creative differences!), you can also block them to make it like they were never a part of it.

 Blocking removes all of the pins the person added, people they invited, and any pins those people pinned.

We hope you never need to use this tool. But if you do, we hope it makes it easier to keep your group boards the party-plotting, trip-dreaming, potluck-planning spaces you want them to be.

Happy (group) pinning!

– The Pinterest Team


I’m really happy about their decision and new functionality they have introduced. Creating and managing group board so far was sometimes risky. You or your contributor could invite pinners that you wouldn’t really invite if you knew who they are. Invited pinners could add SPAM or porn photos not related to your group board. They could also invite new Pinterest account just in case if you get rid of them and start the whole process again.

As we may see Pinterest really takes care about security and proper content. Good job and keep working Pinterest!

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Why we shouldn’t compare Pinterest and Google search results yet?

Why we shouldn’t compare Pinterest and Google search results yet?

I decided to write this article because I’ve recently seen many opinions that Pinterest search results are better than Google search results. They seem to be just cleaner and more efficient. And I can even agree with that in this field – Pinterest might do better job than Google has been doing for many years. But this is not the purpose of this article. I definitely don’t want to go deeper – into the features of search results of both of them. What I want to do is to answer more important question before we do any comparison – if we should do it at all? And in my opinion the answer is very simple: no, we shouldn’t do that. Or not yet – it is just too early.

What does it mean?
To answer this question we need to consider very important facts. The main one is that Google is a search engine itself and Pinterest is a visual social network site. This is what makes the huge and significant difference between them and search results they display. Google indexes almost all sites available on the Internet. This is the aim of Google robots to collect sites from the web. Sooner or later newly created site will be indexed, of course if it is not blocked to be indexed. So we may say that Google does it automatically. Pinterest doesn’t do that. Like other social media sites also Pinterest is created by people, not robots. It is us – people that add interesting photos to Pinterest. And definitely we, as human beings, are not so
persistent and stubborn as robots are. As sites owners we may create Pinterest accounts or as pinners we may add some interesting photo that we’ve found on the Internet. But it is not enough and at this moment there are definitely much less sites present at Pinterest than collected by Google. That means that Pinterest results are not completed yet.

Let me give an example of one of campaigns we’re conducting. That’s a campaign for lingerie wholesale site. As a user of Pinterest I’m typing in “lingerie wholesale” query and receive following results. As you may see at photo below the article in the first 400 results I have found only 2 pins that don’t belong to our wholesaler. So potential customer watching these results might think that there is only one lingerie wholesaler around the world.

There might be 2 explanations for that. Not all lingerie wholesalers are present at Pinterest yet or they don’t know how to conduct Pinterst’s campaign properly.
To change this situation, awareness and need of Pinterest campaign among sites and businesses owners should be equal to awareness of being presented in Google search results. This might be a difficult task. Even if one day all of us know that this is a must to be at Pinterest, we’ll find another problem. Someone has to create an account or add our photos and this is definitely not Googlebot.
To see that awareness of Pinterest is not as high as many pinners believe, we need to visit e-commerce, blogs or other sites out of the US. You will be surprised how many serious bloggers and businesses don’t use „pin it” button yet. We can’t expect that someone’s gonna download any photo available on those sites and upload it onto Pinterest. This is the job of “pin it” button.

The last thing I want to mention is just the age of both – Google and Pinterest. Pinterest is much younger. Even if we theoretically assume that all sites have Pinterest accounts and include “pin it” button that Internet users click as crazy, we need to wait a little longer for Pinterest to collect all photos that probably Google has already indexed. It is just the matter of time. So, as I said at the beginning, it is too early yet for this comparison.

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