Tired of hearing about Pinterest? You don’t have to use it, but you’d be leaving a stone boulder unturned. As business owners and marketers our mission is to establish a company message and disseminate it as efficiently as possible. Whether you run a local hotdog stand, a website, or a multi-national corporation, Pinterest offers some unique opportunities.
Includes:
Pinterest at it’s most basic level of marketing
Pinterest for branding
Pinterest for bloggers
Pinterest for infographics, informative images
Pinterest for “viral” funny or bizarre images (that get you backlinks)
Pinterest for videos untapped way you can gain more Youtube subscribers / views.
Pinterest for ecommerce
Pinterest for brick and mortars
Pinterest for Travel Agencies / vacations
Pinterest for News outlets
How to Create a Board for Best SEO and Target Markets:
How to Create a Pin
Pinterest Marketing Services
1) Pinterest – basic level of marketing:
This is for website owners that don’t have a physical presence, and don’t plan on creating or updating a blog daily. The reality is most websites don’t use a blog, and that’s okay. But you should still exist on Pinterest for the added exposure and SEO benefits since Google, Yahoo and Bing trust the social signals from this Pagerank 8 platform. In the example you see this is how we are currently using the network. Since I plan on creating more quality blog posts and videos we would like to shift to fit into more of these categories, but for now the first one is a good start. Here is the url to the pin: http://pinterest.com/pin/548946642049490924/
As you can see it’s just the image directly from the website. Nothing ground breaking, but helps get us established
2) Pinterest for branding:
Branding is usually met with ROI people screaming it’s not real, but on Pinterest there is a difference between having your logo pinned and repinned and having your entire brand identity present on the platform. Here is an example search for Coca Cola: http://pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=coca+cola . Notice how the brand message immediately confirms that yes, this is Coca Cola. Now, unless you are trying to establish a certain brand identity this might not be the best way to approach pinterest, but the more unique pins you can have up about “Joe’s Famous Sandwiches” or “Insert Your Business here” the better.
3) Pinterest for bloggers:
Blogs can be boring and filled with empty content (let’s hope not all the time). This is where a well placed image comes into play. Your blog post instantly becomes much more “shareable”. It also helps your readership know exactly what they are getting into it; afterall a picture is worth a 1000 words. With a Paint program, or Photoshop and some novice skills you can create and modify existing images on the web to get your point across. Or you can hire a freelancer designer to create an image for each of your blog posts depending on your budget and quality of work. This then blurs the line to the next method. Even webpronews uses non unique images you can see here:
http://www.webpronews.com/growing-veggies-on-mars-a-goal-for-chinese-biodome-2012-12 . I would be shocked if this was exclusive to them, all the way from China…
<<Stock Image (left) compared to a more unique image (right) –>
cartoon images, or something unique of course works best, but if you have a blog you should incorporate images, then pin them.
If all else fails you can throw up random pictures of woman in tight clothing such as shoemoney. He didn’t even bother to try to have it make sense, haha….if he can do that ladies and gentlemen, you can add random images to your blog posts.
4) Pinterest for infographics / information:
Some infographics depict data in such an awful way, while others are simply brilliant. It’s going to either take a lot of time or $$ to create one, but can really help get your point across. Here is an example of someone that had a great social network / Pinterest campaign through their horror infographic http://www.specialcabledeals.com/best-cable-promotions.html
Checking the Pinterest count API we can see over 750 repins. A perfect way to leverage infographics, offers, and relevance to his website (also became a PR 4 which is very respectable)
5) Pinterest for viral images, funny, bizarre, weird:
No one said you can’t pin something if it has already been pinned. 99% of the time you won’t be the one creating these images or photos but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them. Here is an image I found online, pinned as my own (on a random account), edited and added a link back to my website. Warning, I think this is rated PG13 but you might get hot and bothered by this. At the very least you’ll want to crack open some egg nog and get ready for the holiday spirit http://pinterest.com/pin/9148005464894014/
:). You get the idea. If you see something trending on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms (not pinterest itself, that would be a little late), then you can save the image, upload and link to your website. Instant repins and interaction.
6) Pinterest for videos:
Many people think Pinterest is just for images, but it’s a top 50 site on the web that allows video. Youtube is #2. Together you can cover some serious ground. The competition right now on Pinterest is weak for videos but still has a ton of traffic http://pinterest.com/videos/
This is a great opportunity to pin all of your videos whether it be Youtube, vimeo, etc. They seem to get randomly placed within the videos section so it’s a numbers game. Get enough of your videos posted and repinned and you’ll be sure to grab the spotlight on occassion.
7) Pinterest for ecommerce:
This is what mostly everyone has been talking about. Sites like amazon and ecommerce sites can post images and descriptions of their products. If you create the pin you can simply plug in the description and you have a ready made pin. Most of pinterest frontpage seems to focus heavily on female interests, dresses, purses, beautiful young women out on the town, food, etc, but there are males as well. It’s such a large demographic that if you sell something online you really can’t afford to miss out on easy sales and links back to your product pages. If you sell 5000 products you should have 5000 pins at the minimum.
8) Pinterest for brick and mortar (restaurants, doctors, lawyers, etc):
Google places is a great concept along with Yelp and other local business sites. Here the experience is 1000% more rewarding and informative when you can actually see photos of the restaurant or business. Have you ever looked up restaurants in your area and you only see the fake / ready made image as their logo and that’s it? Well, you hate it and so do your potential customers. If you own a brick and mortar business you should take a 360 degree photo spread of the outside of your business, staff, inside, and some videos. All of this should then be posted on Pinterest. Do you want to go to the friendly doctor that shows you his work area, or the one with the creepy large pixels of a broken stock smiley face?
This is easily one of the most under utilized tactics next to video. If you have a physical address where you conduct business upload everything on Pinterest and the other networks. It will create trust, familiarty and sales.
9) Pinterest for Travel agencies / Vacations and get aways:
The grass is always greener on the other side. Seeing images of far off distances, exotic destinations and vacation locations make us want to be there, which makes us call up a travel agency, which makes us purchase the tickets…then next thing you know, you’re on the beach sipping margaritas all because of a visual image or video found on Pinterest.
10) Pinterest for News / Gossip / Industry leaders:
If you are an industry leader you have to stay abreast of the latest happenings in your niche. Just because you aren’t TMZ doesn’t mean you can’t report on the news, give you own advice and angle on the situation. This is true whether you are selling health products, services, internet marketing, etc. By going to Google News you can see a wide range of news topics. Many of them already exist on Facebook and Twitter, but have a considerable void in Pinterest. To put things in perspective, Pinterest is exponentially more powerful than NYtimes which has an Alexa rating of 108 compared to 38. Stories are visual experiences as well, and the sky is the limit with affiliate marketing promoting other news outlets, or of course your own or your clients.
Thoughts:
Those are currently the best ways to utilize Pinterest. As business owners our job is to create a brandable, systematic message and then disseminate it as efficiently as possible. I would avoid wasting time on Pinterest following others, liking their pins, etc. It’s fine to do from time to time when bored, or to get a better feel of the platform and its users, but you bring value to the network by posting your content, regardless of what category you fall in above. Let’s also not forget that for every $ spent marketing on Pinterest is a vote for multiple traffic sources on the internet. It’s not just a “good” thing to be on Pinterest, but to grow with it makes us all stronger and less likely to be limited to one source of traffic.
If you are struggling with Pinterest or using it in a way not talked about please leave us a comment. We also run the largest network of hundreds of thousands of real Pinterest users around the world that can help pin, repin, like, and comment on your images / videos. Again, all this can be done manually or you can use our system PinterestBacklinks and/or BookmarkingBeast (which incorporates all of the popular platforms but doesn’t focus on one).
P.S. notice the image for this blog. It has a beautiful woman (check), a crowd of people indicating marketing (check), a random arrow (check), and novice like editing to bring it all together (check). See, anyone can create an image for their blog. I know you want to share this on Pinterest, so stop fighting the urge and hit that Pin button!
Thank you for a great informative video. Let’s say you want 300 backlinks from Pinterest in addition to the products you already have pinned. Is it ok to upload a page/pages of photos (300)? How do you go about it and have it look natural?
Thank you,
Michelle
hi Michelle,
Thanks for the kind words. That’s a good question. I think the most scalable way to get backlinks to that specific product page would be repins. This way you wouldn’t have to upload an additional 300 images to get 300 backlinks. Each time it’s repinned, it appears on that members page so it counts as a backlink.
If of course you don’t have the ability to get repins you can always get more pins, in which case that strategy sounds like a good idea, although time consuming. A mixture of original pins and repins is probably your best bet.
Pinterest is making noise since last year and now I am excited with their business accounts.