Pinterest Marketing Brainstorming

“Pinterest, an online scrapbooking service, disclosed on March 16, 2015  that it raised about $367 million in a new round of financing from new and existing investors. It valued the company at $11 billion, putting the start-up in roughly the same range as the Silicon Valley darling Dropbox and the data analysis company Palantir Technologies.”   Michael J. De La Merced, New York Times

Why are investors flooding Pinterest with gobs of capital? What does any of this have to do with your  business? What do investors and the 70 million daily users know that you don’t about Pinterest? Well for starters it has more traffic than Linkedin, YouTube and Google + combined. The average time spent per user is right around 72 minutes. That’s a long time per visit which translates into a higher visibility rate for you.

When deciding to write this post about Pinterest I wondered if you would even care. I wondered if you still think that Pinterest is a site filled with glorious and whimsical images of weddings and babies and food porn. Or if you thought that only women are on Pinterest – or that your product or service does not belong on Pinterest. I mean in all honesty the SitaraSocial Marketing Pinterest account has laid dormant for quite a while now. I have been telling myself that it is ok to not have an active Pinterest. Meanwhile, I have pored hours into cultivating and engaging an audience on other social networks as if I can afford to virtually ignore a very real audience, that could impact my business in a very real way. You too?  Well this post is an expansion of sorts on a previous post about using Pinterest as part of your marketing strategy. Pinterest can increase brand awareness which lends itself to increase website traffic, which lends itself to greater lead generation, which can lead to  an increase in sales.

Assuming you know who your target customer is, there are a few questions you need to answer for yourself. How can I help my customer? What topics should I choose for him?  In fact, sharing on Pinterest is a lot like sharing on any other social network. You should share things that are relevant to your audience –  informative things, fun things, including but not limited to your owned content.

What do I need to know about using Pinterest to increase brand awareness?

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Boards:

Pinterest Boards are categorized virtual cork boards that allow you to add content by pinning. Your Pin Board titles should be relevant to your industry or niche, it should be keyword rich, and it should be attention grabbing. Be sure to infuse your personality into the descriptions for each board. You can have secret boards. If you are curating a specific board and you want it to be private until a certain time, you can do just that. There are also Group boards, which are boards that can have multiple pinners sharing related content within the same or shared board.

Optimizing Titles, Descriptions, and Pins:

Give pinners a reason to click and re-pin. Share enticing, creative and targeted descriptions and add a dash of personality. Pin with purpose but have fun with it. Share quality pins that link to quality content—> click rate will increase—> your pins become more relevant—> better search results rank on Pinterest for your brand.

Rich Pins:

Rich Pins are pins that include extra information right on the pin itself. There are six types of rich pins: app, movie, recipe, article, product, and place. Get started with Rich Pins to add more value to the content that you share on Pinterest.

Pinterest Marketing Tips

• Know your Target Audience

• Share quality content

• Share your Pinterest Page across all of your other social media accounts

• Add widgets to your website and blog that make it easy for people to share your content on Pinterest

• Follow Pinterest users that are in your industry and share and re-pin their pins

• Be sure to check your Pinterest analytics to analyze what is resonating with your audience and what is not, and use that info to tailor the content that you share with your audience.

This is just scratching the surface of all the ways to integrate Pinterest into your marketing strategy, but its great info to get off and running with purpose. Everything that you need to know in order to set up and start pinning on Pinterest.

Visit SitaraSocial Marketing Pinterest and be sure to follow it to continuously be inspired with creative ideas for social media marketing strategies, cool home office work spaces, and great lunch recipes for us hungry time starved entrepreneurs.  I’d love to know your thoughts on Pinterest. What advice do you have for Pinners?