Effective Pinterest Strategy: the Whole Foods Success Story

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What makes for an effective Pinterest strategy? How to take advantage of this visual discovery engine to increase sales? Read about Whole Foods Market success.

Effective Pinterest strategy Whole Foods Market

Many see Pinterest as a community online to share images. Others, the visionaries, take advantage of all that this tool gives them and they grow with her. They understand that, in reality, it is a visual search engine and the first true platform for social commerce.

One of these visionaries is Whole Foods Market. The large supermarket chain is present in all of the social platforms, but none of them brought them the results that they achieved via Pinterest. Whole Foods launched its Pinterest boards in July 2011. By December 2013, Whole Foods had 155,000 followers and, only a few months later, in May 2014, this number had increased to 190,000 followers.

What makes for an effective Pinterest strategy?

We know that the number of followers does not necessarily move the needle when you aim to increase sales. Whole Foods Market ultra effective Pinterest strategy consists in presenting its products in a very attractive way to groups with different interests. Fully understanding who these groups are and the reason they are on Pinterest. For example, the “Go, go gadgets” board talks to a consumer interested in the latest on food-related artifacts or gadgetry and Whole Foods shares with them products like different ingenious and novel kitchen tools and how-to infographics on how to evaluate the quality of a blender. When these visitors click-through and arrive to the pages of Whole Foods site they discover additional ideas, recipes, products for which they already have a predilection for. This traffic coverts itself very easily into sales.

Here’s a great example of this effective Pinterest Strategy. A single image from this brand was shared 68,000 times generating therefore 44,000 visits to their website.

In a very short time, Pinterest ended up being the channel that contributes the most to the generation of sales for Whole Foods Market. More than Facebook, more than Twitter. In fact, Pinterest surpassed Twitter in referred traffic to the Whole Foods’ website. Their success was so big that they were invited to share content on one of Julia Child’s boards, therefore Increasing exposure for their products to the hordes of fans of Julia.

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine with great advantages for business

Of course, increasing traffic to a company’s website is only one of the benefits of Pinterest and only one of its ways to help increase sales. But maybe you are concerned about the increased level of effort of adding a new platform to your strategy. There’s great news regarding this point when you venture into the Pinterest world as 70% of the activity of promotion is executed by the community itself. The very opposite of what happens with the majority of social media channels and platforms.

Hispanic consumers tend to buy the products they share on social media twice as much as non-Hispanics and that Hispanic millennials are more likely to use Pinterest and Twitter

As of April 2013 Pinterest had 30 million visitors from across the globe. In March 2014 it surpasses the 70 million users mark and hosts more than 750 million boards with 30 billion pins. Besides the sizable audience, comScore reported an average of permanence on Pinterest of 12,1 minutes per visitor and food is one of the categories most shared on Pinterest, we can clearly see that Whole Foods decisions made for an effective Pinterest strategy and a very profitable one.

Now add the fact that Hispanic consumers tend to buy the products they share on social media twice as much as non-Hispanics and that Hispanic millennials are more likely to use Pinterest and Twitter (source: Mindshare and Unilever research)