Top 10 Ways To Use Pinterest Marketing For Your Business

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.

 

Article Content:

1. Pinterest at it’s most basic level of marketing
2. Pinterest for branding
3. Pinterest for bloggers
4. Pinterest for infographics, informative images
5. Pinterest for “viral” funny or bizarre images (that get you backlinks)
6. Pinterest for videos untapped way you can gain more Youtube subscribers / views.
7. Pinterest for ecommerce
8. Pinterest for brick and mortars
9. Pinterest for Travel Agencies / vacations
10. Pinterest for News outlets
11. How to Create a Board for Best SEO and Target Markets:
12. How to Create a Pin
13. Pinterest Marketing Services

 

1. Pinterest - The 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 that a lot of websites simply 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 high-ranked platform.

 

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 as 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

compared to a more unique image..
 
If all else fails you can always throw up random pictures of woman in tight clothing.. :-)


 

 

4. Pinterest For Infographics And Informative Images 

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 $$'s 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..  

 

 

5. Pinterest For Viral, Funny And Bizarre Images (That Gets You Backlinks)

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 (on a random account), edited and linking back to a 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, and start getting instant repins and interaction.

 

6. Pinterest For Videos

Many people think Pinterest is just for images, but it’s in the top 30 sites on the web that allows video. Combine this with Youtube videos, and you can cover some serious ground. The competition right now on Pinterest is actually quite 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 occassions.

7. Pinterest For Ecommerce

This is the side of Pinterest that a lot of people have 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 My Business' is a great concept for 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 only seen the fake/ready-made images 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 And Vacations

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 And 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 the NY Times! 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.


 

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 you're 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 here, please leave us a comment. Again, all these Pinterest marketing tips can be done manually or you can choose to use such automated marketing systems like "Pin Pinterest".


To your success,
Jonny Tyson