When is it Time to Try Something New?

Recently in this blog we have covered an importance of drawing inspiration from others’ solutions and success stories in marketing. We have also mentioned there is a clear line between creative rethinking and downright stealing ideas. Today, we’d like to expand more on when you shouldn’t copy and why it often pays off to do your own thing.

Good ol’ ways don’t always work

Internet is full of all sorts of guides, trainings, and blogs that teach how to reach success in business on examples. And while there’s nothing wrong with this approach in general, it carries certain risks for misinterpretation. The most important factor is the context. Like no two humans are completely identical, the same goes for companies. And sometimes the difference is exactly in the part that made certain strategy work. This is especially true for different marketing strategies, as this is the aspect of business that is the most dependent on specific company’s conditions.

Yet, it’s so common to see business owners copy successful strategies mindlessly, resulting in what we believe everyone is familiar with. Actively managed Facebook business pages that nonetheless get zero customer involvement. Instagram business accounts filled with professional photos, where only bots lurk. Brilliantly composed banner ads that get shown to a completely non-relevant audience. The exact reasons for the failure of a copied marketing strategy may vary, but the result is always the same – loss of money, and sometimes complete business failure.

Marketing is a volatile activity that is highly predisposed to rapid innovations. And to use it effectively businessman must understand both the market he operates in and current marketing trends. If you, like most of us, don’t have time to learn all the details, it’s okay to use ready-made solutions as long as you accept the risks. However, if you are ready to invest more time to do things consciously, you’re on the right track.

Pinterest as an example of unconventional SMM platforms

We decided to review Pinterest for two reasons. First, it’s popular as a social platform just enough that most readers should be familiar with it. Second, it’s not that popular as an SMM platform yet. Again, this example is just an illustration and inspirational idea, and in no way should replace business analytics for you. With that in mind, let’s see what opportunities are hidden there.

Pinterest is a platform that combines some features of Instagram, search engine and notebook. It allows you to find pictures and other media, and save them in your collection. One of the most common appliances for this platform that is especially interesting for SMM is to collect pictures (or pins) of things you want to buy for later. A lot of Pinterest’s marketing features are tied to this practice.

The first one is buyable pins – pictures of merchandise that allow you to make purchases directly. This saves users the need to follow links to web-shop and continue their purchase there. Buyable pins are a great tool to boost impulsive buying.

Another useful tool you should definitely utilize are the so-called rich pins. It is basically a picture with additional information like prices, address, description, etc. This information is dynamically updated once you change it for all users who’d saved your pin. This is especially valuable to avoid a common problem of picture ads – outdated information.

Pinterest Lens is a cool feature that’s still in beta. With it, a user can take a picture of something with the Pinterest app, and automatically get suggestions and ideas related to it. For example, a photo of a bookshelf will bring up some decor inspirations, or a list of books to read. The tool is extremely helpful to connect merchants directly to potential customers that are interested in buying specific products.

Additionally to these features, Pinterest also provides a lot of valuable analytics and integrity with different marketing platforms like Facebook. The nature of Pinterest means that businesses using it will be certain they get organic and relevant customers. Which is definitely not the case with some of the more popular platforms.

A few words about planning

Marketing can be quite a daunting work. It requires some heavy multitasking and flexibility from you. That is why it’s important to use the right tools to organize tasks at hand and simplify the planning process. This is why we suggest using the Roadmap Planner app. It is a top-notch application for optimizing and enhancing your marketing activities, and for convenient management of multiple simultaneous ad campaigns.

Try Roadmap Planner now with a 21-day free trial.