Marketing on the pin board
Pinterest is no longer the underdog after coming in third behind Facebook and Twitter in Experian Hitwise’s ranking of top ten social networks. The site is now visited by more than 1 million visitors daily who keep on pinning their favourite photos and images that depict fashion, recipes, crafts, children, pets, etc.
Pinterest is not only useful for B2C usage, but also quite effective in business promotion. This visual-based social network drives a lot of referral traffic and is great value for marketers.
How Pinterest Works
Pinterest a huge virtual pinboard (noticeboard) that allows people to look at and share interesting things, pin them and leave comments. The USP of Pinterest are its cool and captivating pictures. Its a mixture of social network and social bookmarking.
How To Get Pinned
Pinterest doesn’t sell your products or services, you have to sell them using Pinterest on their technology and their social platform. The real value of Pinterest is in pictures and shares. Thus, your images link back to you so they have to be pleasing to the eye and, where possible, remarkable. Techniques include:
- Create unique boards
Create boards, organise them in a unique way so they stand out in a crowd of common names. - Use quality images
Pinterest is a picture-based website, so the quality of your images is vital. Remember, the quality of the photos, images or artworks is part of your marketing strategy. - Make your images shareable
Don’t make your images exclusive by watermarking them, as people won’t pin them. It’s better to not also put any marketing pitches in there, like the price of your services or products on pictures or your company logo. On Pinterest, let your products sell themselves by their appearance. - Link to mobile with QR codes
The Pinterest community loves cool images so a great QR code that is worthy of being pinned around, will spread across the network. - Detailed descriptions
To help your images get noticed, it helps to write detailed descriptions. With the right keywords people will find your images quickly, ensuring more traffic to your pages and website. - Reward your pinners
If you can afford it, run competitions for pinners who get the more shares, likes and tweets of your message. - Interact with your Pinterest friends
You can get great longevity from a single original pin. When you just start pinning, don’t begin your Pinterest existence with commercial messages, get involved with emotional, fun and eye-catching pins. Repinning viral content you’ll draw the attention and people will start following and liking you.
Pinterest ROI Maximising Techniques
There are many ways to use Pinterest for positive-ROI benefit. If you want to get started with it, here are a few tips:
- Be selective: Don’t pin every product in your store, every image from your blog, etc. Only pin the best ones.
- Use teasers: Don’t give everything away in one image or description. Create pins that relate to your products or service and guide visitors to your website for more.
- Add ‘Pin It’ buttons: Just as you integrate social networks and sharing buttons on your website, be sure to add buttons that make it easy for other people to pin your images.
- Use lots of images: Make images core to your marketing so there is more content for people to pin. Remember that videos can also be pinned.
- Pin often, Pin a variety: The more you pin, the more people are likely to see one they like and re-pin. Unlike other social networks, images on your boards have greater longevity.
Repin, like, follow and comment other pins/pinners that are relevant to your industry or business and be part of the community. Be personable. - Pin interests: Most people on Pinterest don’t want to “see marketing“. Make boards on topics that interest you and pin and interact on those boards too.
- Pin vertically: By vertically, use images that are taller than they are wide. Because of Pinterest’s column layout, it will attract more eyeballs.
- Pin mashups: Combine different formats of content into a vertical image showing each on in a different block.
- Feature customers: Make your customers feel special and they’ll keep coming back. Make it a social network!
- Secret Boards: Offer membership to a secret board where only VIP members are invited to view and contribute to it. You can even use it as a collaboration area for your employees.
Why not contact Jack Marketing Solutions™ today to find out how we can maximise your Pinterest for business?
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