Pinterest for Business – a valuable marketing tool

Pinterest has often been underrated in its power to be used as a tool for companies hoping to expand their digital marketing. With an audience of over 70 million users, and as the fastest growing social media platform in the world, there is huge potential for businesses to capitalise on the opportunity to visually advertise their products.

Who does it benefit?

Businesses who focus on highly visual advertising, such as interior designers, clothing companies, restaurants and many others can benefit in particular from the ability to create a Pinterest site. With 72% of Pinterest’s audience being women, it can be an exceedingly valuable tool for targeting a specific demographic and allows you to interact with your customers in ways that other social media platforms can’t – it can act as an impressive visual showcase of your products driving traffic to your own website and increasing sales. If your business is highly visual, then there is a lot of potential to advertise through this form of social media, with 60% of major brands having their own Pinterest accounts. Smaller businesses should also be encouraged to take up this approach in their marketing strategy as it provides a ready-made audience and Pinterest itself provides educational materials specifically for businesses to learn how to market themselves through the business site.

Marketing your brand through visual images can be an overwhelmingly positive method of advertising products, and is often very effective. In January 2012, Pinterest drove greater traffic to websites than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube combined, showing the potential power it can have as part of a marketing campaign.

There are a number of new Pinterest apps and tools which businesses can use to make the most out of their accounts:

1)      WiseStamp:

A beneficial tool for businesses that enables them to show their most recent pins in their emails. Very useful for Pinterest for businesses as it can be added to existing newsletters, encouraging existing customers to become a follower of the company’s Pinterest pinboards.

2)      Pinterest’s open board:

A great way to interact with your customers and make them feel involved in your brand. If your company offers an open board allowing customers to pin photos of themselves, family members and friends enjoying and using your products, it will create a positive image and entice others into trying your products.

3)      Pinterest Contests:

A good way to advertise your brand on Pinterest is to run competitions offering prizes to those who repin your images or post to your open boards. This will help to increase the audience of your brand creating new followers and driving and increasing amount of traffic to your site. It also helps to connect with your existing follower base.

4)      Rich pins:

Rich pins makes it much easier for people to act when they find something that they like on Pinterest – which can only benefit your brand as it makes it easy for Pinterest users to buy your products. Rich pins include automatically updated details like prices, availability, movie reviews and ingredients.

5)      Pinpuff:

Download the Pinterest app Pinpuff to find out exactly how much of an impression you are making on the Pinterest community. This app will measure a user’s reach and influence and assigns a monetary value to each user, giving you a clearer idea of how profitable your boards might be.

6)      Pinstamatic:

Pinstamatic is an interesting Pinterest app that helps you to create more creative and original boards to draw in customers, and helps you to stand out from other customers marketing on Pinterest. For instance, it allows you to add quotations and sticky notes to your board and allows you to share music, location maps and more. This allows you to add to the visual content on your Pinterest page with text, audio, locations and websites, enhancing the utility of your Pinterest page and attracting users for greater periods of time.

What do you think?

Do you think Pinterest is a valuable marketing tool for businesses?