TrackMaven has put out a white paper documenting 13.8 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands. With the massive amount of options to post content, are organizations providing relevant content to their users. The key to digital marketing is providing relevant (targeted) content to customers to provide great customer experiences. With that in mind, have marketers been using relevant content or is there still a shotgun approach.
TrackMaven documents Pottery Barn on an initiative they had to increase their "engagement" on Pinterest. The mistake they made, which a lot of marketers make when it comes to social media channels, is to increase the amount of content. Increased content = increased impressions = increased engagement, right? Not so fast.
Pottery Barn Engagement and Posts
What is happening in this example is the number of pins are increasing, however the average interactions per pin is decreasing at about the same rate. So in effect, they are working much harder to engage the same amount of customers. I love this chart, because it shows that more is not necessarily better. In the database marketing world, my push is to always increase frequency, whether that be purchases or trips to a casino, etc. But the key metric to look when frequency starts to increase, is does the worth of the customer per transaction decrease and at what rate.
In this case, frequency of pins is increasing, but the engagement is not, so the content is not relevant, there's just more of it. Pottery Barn isn't the only guilty party when it comes to this tactic. As TrackMaven saw, a lot of brands were implementing the same tactics.
The good news is Potter Barn (using TrackMaven software of course) was able to identify this and change tactics. Instead of focusing on content designed to sell certain items, more like an advertisement, Pottery Barn started to pin content that helped their customers make their home better. Of course Pottery Barn goods were front and center in this approach, but they posted less and focused on relevancy to their customer to change the engagement equation. So the new equation is:
More relevant content = increased engagement
Pottery Barn results with new relevant content strategy
Much better content has resulted in the end goal, more engagement through Pinterest.