Pinterest for Your Business: A Valuable Marketing Resource
Pinterest is a popular place to collect recipes, decorating ideas, and fashion tips. But if that's all you're using it for—or you're not using it at all—you're missing out on a valuable marketing resource.
Whether you're a Pinterest newbie or you have a dozen boards of your own, check out the "Join as a Business" option, which includes a variety of tutorials. Tools include best practices, brand guidelines, and analytics to help you track your market reach. Learn to build widgets and buttons, enrich your pins, and reach a greater audience by promoting certain pins.
To get started, consider what themes or topics you should use for your boards; these are the platform for your pins. Weddings, adventure travel, wine tours, or other areas of specialization are a good place to begin. Create a board for each of your top-selling destinations, themed tours, and niche market categories. A "Travel Tips" board might also inspire client engagement. Peruse some of the CVBs and DMOs that have established Pinterest accounts, to get a feel for ideas.
Once you've established your boards, start pinning. Along with pinning items already on Pinterest, you could create your own pins. JPG, PNG, and GIF image files, and YouTube, Vimeo, and Ted videos can be pinned. You could also edit existing pins, all covered in "Pinterest Basics" in the Pinterest Help Center.
Creating the perfect pin requires more than using a great image, although that's a good start. Use branding elements on every pin to help the viewer see the each board's theme. For example, use the same border and font on each image you pin. And include your website address in your descriptive text. Although it won't be hyperlinked if it's part of an image, it will keep your information accessible to viewers when your image gets re-pinned by other Pinterest users. Use PhotoShop or PowerPoint tools to add text to your images.
For more tips on using Pinterest to promote your business, click here to read this article in its entirety in the digital edition of Groups Today magazine.
