Pinterest should be one of the top contenders as a marketing avenue for your business.
According to Salesforce, which has access to Pinterest’s user data, Pinterest accounts for approximately 23% of social media-inspired sales. Assuming your target market fits Pinterest’s demographic (70% female, average age of 40), here are 17 ways to use the service to promote your business in 2017 (and beyond).
- Use High Quality Photography and Images – It is of top importance to make sure you have the best product photography and images that you can find for all your pins. Pinterest is very image-oriented, and high quality photography and images improve the likelihood a user will engage with your pin by re-pinning it, liking it or commenting on it. Similar to anything in the realm of social media, content lives or dies based on the level of user engagement. Varying your images by size, shape, and text can also create more interest from potential Pinners.
- Highlight Your Products – If you are a retailer, then you should regularly feature pins on the products that you sell. If you are a manufacturer, make sure all of your product lines get featured in your boards. If you are a manufacturer that offers a limited amount of products, find different ways to pin your products, spacing out your pins over time. For example, you can show your product being used in different environments or for different uses.
- Highlight Your Services – If you are a service-oriented business, posting pins about your service or services is a logical choice. Before and after photos work well here. For example, if you are a house painter, showing before and after photos of a recent home you painted can help give homeowners ideas of how you can makeover their own homes. Adding text to your images can also help users understand more about the service you are offering.
- Highlight Your Customers – Always ask permission first, but most people enjoy recognition, either for themselves, or something they are proud of. Pins featuring your customers interacting with your products or services brings a human element to your business. It also helps those customers featured develop a deeper bond with your brand. Potential customers are always drawn to brands that have fans, so don’t be afraid to show them off.
- Highlight Your Employees – Like featuring your customers, this is another great way to put add a personal touch to your business. Potential customers are more likely to do business or buy from another person rather than a faceless corporation. Feature your employees for what they do for your business, as well as showing who they are outside of work. When potential customers can relate to your staff, they will warm up to what you offer.
- Share Case Studies – Create a board for sharing your case studies. Case studies are essentially short stories about the different projects you’ve completed. These give customers more insight to what you can do for them.
- Use Rich Pins – Rich Pins are special pins that include extra information right on the Pin itself. There are six types of Rich Pins: app, movie, recipe, article, product and place. Article pins allow you to add a headline, author, story and link. Product pins allow you to add pricing, availability and where to buy. Recipe pins allow you to add ingredients, cooking times and information on serving. Movie pins allow you to add ratings, cast and reviews. Finally, place pins allow you to add an address, phone number and a map. All of this information helps to make your pins more valuable to users.
- Expand Your Reach with Promoted Pins – Similar to Google’s Adwords programs, Pinterest has their Promoted Pins service that allows marketers to get more visibility by paying to promote their pins. Paying for Promoted Pins will get them seen by more people, which can help improve your awareness, engagement, and traffic.
- Be a Curator of Industry Related Content – Re-pinning other pins that are relevant to your customers, as well as creating pins with useful information from other sources, can help establish you as an expert in your field. Followers will look to you for the latest news happening in your industry. Then when you post original pins, you’ll have a built-in audience that sees you as a credible source.
- Collaborate With Others – Create a board that you can invite others to collaborate on. Collaborators can be anyone from employees to customers and/or the public at large. A group board that you moderate can become a micro-community where you develop relationships, share information, and help each other grow.
- Promote Your Pins in Email Newsletters – If you are doing email marketing, such as a weekly newsletter, create content for the newsletter by sharing screen shots of your boards with links. This helps to further engage your email newsletter subscribers by giving them something else to check out and gets more visibility to your Pinterest account.
- Re-purpose Existing Content / Cross-Promote – While generating Pinterest content does take time and resources, you can also utilize already-created content that’s available on your other channels. For example, re-purpose an old Facebook post or Tweet to create a new pin for your Pinterest.
- Create a Blog Board – Do you write a lot of great blog articles? If so, create a blog board that highlights all your best and/or newest articles. Link back to your blog to help generate inbound traffic.
- Pin Actively – This should go without saying, but any social media platform requires consistent activity. A dormant account is a dead account. Keep your followers interested by spreading out content over a period of time. However, much like Twitter, pins will disappear on someone’s feed over a short period of time. Therefore, rather than blasting out a hundred pins at once, dedicate five minutes every hour, or at least once a day, to pinning one or two pins, and engaging in activity with other Pinners. Keeping this steady stream of content flow will prevent your pins from getting lost in the online clutter.
- Use Pin Alerts to Compete – If your competition is using Pinterest, adjust your settings to get Pinterest alerts to keep up with their activity. You probably share many of the same followers, so knowing about special sales and offerings helps you to know what you are up against, and how to combat it.
- Share Behind-the-Scenes Information – Help users feel like they have VIP access to your company by sharing pins that show behind-the-scenes information about what you do. Pins showing a product getting built can generate interest, as can “sneak-peek” photos of an early product prototype. Maybe you have company or community events that you participate in that you can feature information about. Brainstorming with staff should yield plenty of ideas to choose from. Just make sure whoever is in charge of posting the pins is not over-sharing, or sharing too much at once. We recommend a two step approval process to ensure that two people are needed to sign off on any behind-the-scenes postings.
- Like and Follow Your Customer’s Content – It’s social media, so be social and connect with your customers (and potential customers). This engagement includes “loving,” re-pinning, commenting, or sharing other people’s pins onto your Pinterest or other social media platforms. The more you engage with others, the more likely they’ll be to engage with you.
Pinterest is a great marketing tool for businesses of different sizes and industries. If you’re new to Pinterest, or need some help optimizing your account, our social media marketing experts at NetSource Technologies can help. Contact us today by calling 1-800-709-3240 or click here.