Using-Pinterest-for-marketing

Smart Ways to Use Pinterest for Marketing

Using-Pinterest-for-marketing

Pinterest offers a range of activities you can initiate to market your company to a new audience like in any other social network. The goal is to gain brand recognition, drive traffic to your website and be successful at converting the new visits into leads.

Marketers need to find creative ways to promote their brand on the network and truly jive with its vision and user base. In other words, businesses should use the social network to showcase the lifestyle their brand promotes. Let’s examine some of the great ideas for using Pinterest as part of your social media marketing.

Invest in Good Visual Content

Being a visual social network, Pinterest let’s you create a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content.

We cannot deny the power of online visual content for marketing and the emotions images elicit in readers. Instagram is one platform that has contributed to this movement and enabled real businesses to leverage photos as an inbound marketing mechanism.

What and where can you get some of these visual content to pin on your Pinterest pinboard:

Visual content you already have

You can make a board to showcase your company’s culture and pin them. Have executive headshots? Create an “executive management” board and include a bio for each person. This is also one way to showcase your business’ personality.

Strong visuals from blog articles

You should be using clear, beautiful images in your blog articles and pin them. Choose the visuals that best highlights your written content.

Infographics & Data Charts

Infographics are pretty popular and they are doing very well on Pinterest. If you have any industry data that you can visualize, do so before someone beats you to it.

You can also pin simple data charts that you can build in excel. Make sure to have a clear headline in the image so people know what they are looking at.

Create a User-Generated Pin board

Involve fans and customers in your marketing by enabling them to contribute their own pins to your pinboards. Pick out a few of your top evangelists or customers, and create a board dedicated to their pins.

You can ask customers to pin images that showcase the lifestyle they enjoy because of your brand. This is a great way to leverage customer testimonials in a unique and visual way.

Add the Pin-It Button to Your Website

Adding a “Pin It” button to your site will make it easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images. Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a new audience.

Gather insight into buyer personas

Use Pinterest as a tool for understanding the interests and needs of your ideal customers. View pinboards of your customers to aid in your understanding of who your customers are and what they’re interested in.

If you have an integrated marketing software that tracks which people got to your website through Pinterest and follows them through the buying cycle, you can spot trends in their behavior and find ways to nurture such leads more successfully. From here, you can email your brand new leads and push them down the sales funnel with a custom message.

Standout as an industry thought leader

Become the go-to Pinterest account for pins about a certain subject or topic relating to your industry. For example, because Digital Organics is a Digital Marketing company, we could create a pinboard that features awesome visual examples of great online marketing. Or if you’re a paper company, you could create a pinboard that features really awesome origami paper creations from around the web.

Minted is a great, real-life example of a paper company that leverages this tactic by creating themed pinboards that show unique ways to use paper, mixed in with other related lifestyle photos.

Host a contest

Several brands had started launching contests using Pinterest. Before jumping in, consult Pinterest’s Terms of Use to make sure the contest you’re holding doesnít infringe with its guidelines.

Hold a contest that asks users to create a pinboard on their own account to demonstrate what they love about your brand, products, or services. Ask them to send you a link to their pinboard so you can evaluate entrants, and the coolest board wins a prize! Even better – you can also re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner.

Use Hashtags

Just like Twitter and Google+, Pinterest supports the usage of hashtags. You can use hashtags to tag pins and make content more search-friendly. Promoting a new campaign of some sort? See how Club Monaco (pinterest.com/clubmonaco) leverages its Pinterest account for this very purpose, using the #cultureclub hashtag and pinboard to promote a section of its website called Culture Club.

Add links in the descriptions of your pins

Don’t forget to include links in your pins back to your website and landing pages to drive traffic to your website whenever possible. Keep track of referral traffic and leads generated from Pinterest. Such insights will inform you about how useful this platform is in comparison to your other efforts.

If you are uploading a photo instead of pinning something live on your website, select a link that makes sense and include that in the pin description. The combined impact from each pin’s clicks and re-pins will give you a big advantage.

Create a Video Gallery

Create a pinboard of some of the interesting videos your business produces interspersed with relevant images. Pinterest’s homepage has a separate tab for videos, so you will get even more exposure by being featured in that category. Just don’t forget to include a call-to-action within the video itself.

Feature Offline Events

You can also create a pinboard that features the best photos and video footage of the annual event you host to help you generate buzz and promote the next ones.

Other ways would be commenting on other people’s pins to get dialogue started. Most people do not actively do this, yet, but it will be a huge growth area, much like blog and social media commenting. People like it when you repin their pins. They get credit on the pin on your Pinterest board, and that brings more people to their Pinterest boards, increasing their followers. You can also pin from all over the internet. Variety is the Pinterest spice, so be sure to mix it up.