Pinterest possesses a huge potential to be one of the best social media platforms this year. With an increased 125% in their overall traffic in 2013, people have started giving Pinterest the upper edge over all other channels, as predicted earlier by Rand Fishkin here. Yet, many people are still unaware of the real value of Pinterest. A major percentage of them argue over the fact that Pinterest can work best for specific audiences related to Fashion, Travel, Food and Home Decor related niches.
By thoroughly analyzing how IT businesses use Pinterest for their promotion, I discovered that many of them were not following the correct pattern which would guarantee full exposure to their respective audiences. Not only did I observe the mistakes they were making, I also came up with some of my own ideas that could help businesses broaden their horizons through the effective use of Pinterest.
Let me share some useful tips with you all that helped me to generate targeted leads along with a solid amount of traffic for a mobile application development company for which I’m currently working for.
Here are the ideas that helped me to devise a successful Pinterest strategy:
1. A Powerful Display Image:
Pinterest is all about attractive and meaningful images. A fact that must always be kept in mind when setting your corporate image. Instead of uploading the complete logo, you can also upload a part of it as I did with my company logo:
Logo for Pinterest
Actual logo
It can be seen that I chopped up the text and selected only the designed part as my brand image. This shows the creative side of your business.
2. Write a powerful description:
Write a description that solely highlights your services and products. If possible, you can add wisely your main generic keywords in this section, as it will be the main source for Pinterest and the visitors to recognize your brands.
3. Location and Verification:
Make sure you set your current location correctly and your website is verified. Also, all your active social media channels must be linked with your account. Perspective clients seek authentic and genuine businesses and they would love to follow you once your whereabouts show authenticity.
These are some of the powerful tricks that worked superbly for me !!
4. Put up your services as Boards:
You read it write! Display your main services in the form of boards as shown above. Here, you’ll need some help from your designers to make highly creative and attractive images highlighting your services. As my company primarily focuses on mobile applications and web design development, I created boards for every kind of services that we offer to our clients. Do the same for your own business and see the outcomes!
5. Pins in the Services boards:
After making the boards, add pins directly from the services pages URL and see that you select the best possible images you have on that page. In case, your page doesn’t contain quality images, assign your designers this task to create the right kind of images for you. Upload those images and add the services page URL like I did here:
Update your boards with more images once your pins start getting visits and impressions (which you can see on pinterest anayltics).
- Separate Board for your Official Blog:
Create a separate board that only contains your official blog posts. Make it a habit of pinning all your blogs in that board on a regular basis. It works well with your marketing strategy and increases your readership.
Pro tip: Do use relevant hash tags in the description section!!!
- Give Due space to your Clients:
Make separate boards for each client with their names as I did here. Describe your client’s project and if possible mention the URL to display your work in the description section. Although it won’t be clickable but you’ll see people liking your stuff as this validates your work. Remember when you create these boards, choose the category to which the client actually belongs to. For instance, one of the projects was related to pregnancy app so I chose the health & Fitness category. This relevancy will give you instant exposure to anyone searching for health related pins.
- Pins from Others:
Pinterest is all about pinning and sharing. The more you pin people, the more they will pin you. For making the most out of this game, create separate boards with titles like “Social Media”, “Technology”, “Marketing”, “Infographic” etc . These kinds of boards carry a dynamite potential and quickly grab the attention of visitors as all the pins in such boards will be from big magazines and publications which people like to follow.
Pro tip: If your official blogs and guest posts fall on these categories always pin them. There is a high chance for you to get them diverted to your blog.
- Follow Big and Reputed Names:
Follow famous and notable blogs related to your niches and pin their stuff in the respective boards. Regular participation on their pins give you the best platforms for your brand. This will also help to solidify your reputation in your particular niche.
- Be a Gentleman:
Social Media is all about sharing and caring. Applying this principle to your Pinterest marketing strategy can be miraculous for your business. All you have to do is to be a gentleman! Keep an eye on your every visitor. That is why your notification board is the most important thing after the analytics. You should individually thank your each pinner and follower, visit their profiles and explore their twitter and facebook accounts. Thank them using your own official social media accounts. By doing this, you’ll hit three birds with one stone!
Here is how:
- 90% people will follow your other social media accounts
- they will follow more of your boards
- they’ll automatically like, pin and tweet your next updates
So what was the resulting outcome?
By implementing these tactics, I generated a pretty solid amount of traffic and conversions. Being a huge content marketing addict, I always give more preference to Twitter for achieving my targets. At the time when I was experimenting these tactics, Pinterest was my first source of Referral and Social Traffic. These are the stats of the first 8 days:
I am sure that these tricks will work for your Pinterest strategy as well. If you have any other tip you’d like to share with us please feel free to comment below.
Umar khan is honorably performing his duties as the Senior Digital Marketing Executive at the US based mobile application company Social Cubix. For him Digital Marketing is a passion and he lives it! Follow him on Twitter and Google+
