Reaching your audience through pinterest

Pinterest is a platform for sharing visual content. So, to expand awareness and reach of your brand, the quality of your visual content is the key to success on Pinterest.

Pinterest is for creative marketers! By making sure your content is imaginative, eye-catching, interesting and useful, you will be able to reach out to expand your audience and keep them interested.

In this article, there are some basics of managing integration with other channels and SEO that we will cover at the foundation of expanding reach.

A few headline statistics about Pinterest:

• 70 million users from the US
• 80 million users outside of the US
• 81% of Pinterest users are actually Females
• 40% of New Signups are Men; 60% New Signups are Women.
• Median age of a Pinterest user is 40, however majority of active pinners are below 40
• There are over 75 billion ideas on Pinterest
• 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest
• Food & Drink & Technology are the most popular categories for men
• Every day nearly 2M people Pin product rich Pins

Download Premium Resource – Smarter Pinterest Marketing Guide

Managing Marketing on Pinterest to build awareness and drive sales.

Access the Smarter Pinterest marketing guide

How should you integrate Pinterest with your website?

Make the most out of your Pinterest presence by linking it all up; this will help your followers find you on other platforms. To best way to integrate your social presence on any platforms is by:

• Integrating social network icons featured on every page of site (run-of-site)
• Adding social network icons featured above the fold (the top part-of-the page)
• Explaining the benefits of following the brand on Pinterest (e.g. type of content or promotions)
• Developing additional visuals to explain benefits
• Creating a social hub5 linking through to different social networks
• Adding social sharing buttons and widgets i.e. the Pin It button and board widget
• Ensuring Rich Pin content is added to board content and products (locations, articles, product info, recipes, apps etc)

The visual prominence of these ‘signposts’ will vary according to your objectives. This example of a ‘Fat Footer’ from the Debenhams home page shows that although it may be ideal to feature social sharing buttons above the fold, it is more natural to group them with footer information and other marketing messages like promotion, delivery, and returns, may be more relevant above the fold.

You should add a Pin It button next to shareable images on your website such as infographics that include the option to have a count of times the image has been pinned.

Adding these buttons will encourage your visitors to pin your images and will act as a reminder tool. You can even add your own comment. The re-pinner can, of course, choose to delete this and add their own comments.

You could create a specific pinboard for your web content that could include Pins of images or data. Don’t ignore inherently non-visual content such as press releases! Pull out a key statistic and use a stock image to create a striking visual as Pinterest can drive additional traffic to newsworthy stories.

Rich Pins

From a content point of view, Pinterest offers the ‘Rich Pins’ feature that allows you to add further information to your Pins to drive greater integration with your website. Rich Pins now falls into six categories:

• Article Pins: includes a headline, author, and story description, helping pinners find and save stories that matter to them.
• Product Pins: adds real-time prices, stock availability, visible links to product pages and purchase locaters.
• Recipe Pins: providing ingredients, cooking times and information on serving.
• Movie Pins: offering ratings, reviews and cast details.
• Place Pins: to include a map, address, and phone number.
• App Pins: to share and download apps directly from the platform (currently US iOS only).

To add rich Pins to your Pinterest profiles, depending on the most relevant type of Pins, you’ll need to add meta tags to your website to apply them to your pinned content.

How should you integrate Pinterest with other channels?

It is important to make sure your web presence is fully integrated and other social media platforms can also be used as feeders to Pinterest.

We recommend you consider your integration options for Pinterest in these four areas:

• Website and blog (covered above)
• Other social networks
• Email marketing
• Offline integration

Other social networks

Cross-promotion of different social networks can help increase followers, provided that exclusive content is available on the social network that you are recommending and make sure it’s not overdone. When developing a cross-promotion strategy for different social media channels, it’s very easy to overlap your content and bombard the consumers with similar information, over and over again.

So, each social media channel should serve a unique purpose and give the followers a fresh insight into your company. For example, you can share a new infographic on Pinterest that is hosted on your site and then share this Pin address with followers or fans on Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Cross-promotion is natural when you first launch your Pinterest, but make sure your Pinboards are sufficiently populated to offer value and continued reason to follow. You can support the launch through a blog post like this one, but it’s also worth linking directly from the social network to Pinterest.

Download Premium Resource – Smarter Pinterest Marketing Guide

Managing Marketing on Pinterest to build awareness and drive sales.

Access the Smarter Pinterest marketing guide