If you’re looking to reach a new audience or your current audience in new ways, look no further than Pinterest.

Often the dark horse of social media channels, Pinterest is not all weddings, workouts, and hairstyles. Pinterest for business is actually a real use of the network — not only real, but also effective and worthwhile.

Pinterest marketing

Believe it or not, lead generation, website traffic, and brand recognition are all outcomes Pinterest can deliver.

Not convinced? Let’s delve into what exactly Pinterest marketing looks like and what cool new features you should use to enhance your social media strategy as a whole.

What is Pinterest?

Before we begin thinking strategically about using Pinterest, it’s important to know the basics.

Pinterest is a free social networking platform that allows users to share and collect pieces of multimedia (typically images) and save them to a virtual bulletin. Often these bulletins, or boards, are dedicated to a specific topic. These Pinterest boards can be public and available for other users to view, or they can be private so only the owner can see it.

Pinterest is a free social networking platform that allows users to share and collect pieces of multimedia and save them to a virtual bulletin.

According to the CEO Ben Silvermann, Pinterest is meant to be a source of inspiration and encourages users to “go out and do that thing.”

The feed a user sees consists of content the people they follow are pinning or choosing to save. From there, the user can either save that content to their own board or keep scrolling.

This interactive environment is optimal for businesses to engage and interact with consumers and, believe it or not, other businesses.

Why Pinterest?

Pinterest is a great network for businesses to connect with their audience, whether it’s B2C marketing or B2B marketing. It also fulfills all the important objectives of social media marketing: raising brand awareness, community building, driving traffic to your website and enhancing relationships with customers.

Let’s get into how you can effectively harness Pinterest to accomplish those objectives.

1. Showcase thought leadership.

Whether it’s an infographic your company just released on recent industry trends or a blog post that you just published, these pieces of knowledge can be featured on Pinterest. Infographics, of course, already have a visual element so they are easily transformed into pins.

 

Infographics perform great on Pinterest

Content on your company website should also have visuals attached to it that you can use as the featured image of a pin. Even if your product or service is not inherently visual, there are ways to get around that.

For example, if you want to pin an amazing case study, create a graphic showcasing a jaw-dropping statistic or include a photo that symbolizes what happened. You can also create pins based on your email newsletters!

Pro tip: Always include a link in the caption that goes back to your website and the more extensive blog post or case study you’re discussing. This will help drive traffic to your website.

Make sure to add a link to your website

2. Show brand personality.

Pinterest is a fun network, so it’s a prime playground for your brand’s personality to shine. Create a board filled with pins about company culture, whether it be highlighting an employee of the month, creating humorous biographies about the leadership team or revealing what a day on the job looks like.

Quotes on Pinterest are extremely relatable and pinnable

Another way to do this is by creating a quotes board. This may sound strange at first read, but quotes are extremely relatable — and pin-able. Pin quotes that are inspiring to you as a company and will also be inspiring to your audience.

Or pin quotes that are hilarious – whatever best suits your brand! These pins will lead to higher engagement with that particular board and then who knows, people looking at that board may venture to your other boards and become interested in your company that way.

3. Advertise upcoming events.

You can use a board dedicated to events as a way to share photos of how educational and fun your past industry activities were. This should generate excitement for future events you are hosting, which you can promote on this board as well. Include any sales or promotions you’re offering. Hopefully, this will help get those registration numbers up!

Use Pinterest to promote an event

Pro tip: You can also integrate your public relations efforts with this board. For example, if you’re planning a release party to celebrate a new product, you can create a Pin about that here.

4. Create a portfolio board.

This is probably the first thing you thought of when considering Pinterest for your business. It’s the board where you can post beautiful, appealing images of your products. If what you sell doesn’t lend itself to visuals, you can take a photo of the service you offer in action, or your team working together to solve a problem, and include a detailed description in the text.

Create boards on Pinterest

As long as the image itself is engaging and interesting, this board will work in your favor! Check out the features in the next section to learn how to make certain pins even more interactive.

5. Interact with customers.

There are many ways you can interact with and engage your customers. You can create a board for customer testimony by encouraging customers to send in pictures of themselves using your product or service. Another option would be to highlight one customer each month.

One innocent way to interact with potential customers is by following their Pinterest boards and re-pinning or liking their content. Most likely, they’ll be appreciative of your attention. Sharing is caring. This could inspire them to follow you back in the moment and then see your content later on.

Pro tip: Don’t underestimate the power of responding to comments on a pin – or leaving comments on another user’s pin. This is a casual way to interact with customers and to use your brand personality again. Before you know it, you’ll have loyal followers excited to engage with you on Pinterest.

6. Integrate with other social media networks.

One easy way to gain followers on your new Pinterest account is by promoting your pins on your other, more established, networks. For example, chances are, not all your Facebook followers are also following you on Pinterest. By sharing your Pinterest content, it exposes your other network followers to new, visual content they may enjoy.

Cool Pinterest features

Now that you know just how useful Pinterest can really be, let’s go over some awesome features that could enhance your marketing efforts.

1. Pinterest video: Most marketers agree that videos are an extremely effective marketing tool. Cisco projects that global internet traffic from videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021.

Pinterest has allowed video content for a few years now, and just recently released promoted video pins. This makes it easy to include videos on your boards and optimize them — and your Pinterest efforts — for traffic and outreach.

2. Rich pins: These kinds of pins offer an appealing image of the product, its price, and the brand name. This transparency makes customers’ lives easier — they immediately know all the important information about an item should they choose to pursue it.

Example of a rich pin. Source

3. Buyable pins: Ever seen a product that you just needed to have? Buyable pins make it easy for customers to act on that impulse. A white dot on the pinned picture will notate which items are for sale and, in the description, there are direct links to those items. This makes it possible for customers to purchase items directly from a pin!

Don’t forget, even though Pinterest is a visual platform, the text you include with pins is extremely important. Each caption should include a link back to your website and/or a call-to-action encouraging people to continue interacting with your company. You might also want to set up your boards based on the keywords you want to rank for. Pinterest is highly optimized for search on Google and within Pinterest itself.

With every pin, make sure to include a link back to your website and/or a call to action.

Use analytics to see what boards, images, and text is working better than others. That information can help your Pinterest marketing strategy evolve moving forward — and eventually make Pinterest a highly successful aspect of your social media marketing efforts.

About the author: Holly Hunt is a senior content specialist at G2 Crowd, a B2B software, and services review and research platform. An avid reader and writer, Holly graduated from the University of Missouri with a dual major in Journalism and English. In her free time, Holly is eating ice cream and planning her next trip. You can follow her on Twitter at @holly_h_hunt