Pinterest Marketing for Business – Red Cow Tips

Stephen McCance June 25, 2014

Pinterest is often seen as only for design based businesses, or those with a visually appealing product or service. Here we have listed a few top tips for using Pinterest for business, even if your particular sector isn’t the most visually appealing.

Marketing your business on Pinterest

There is often a misconception around Pinterest with business social media users thinking that such a visually-based platform doesn’t apply to them. Whether you think your business is suitable to being promoted on Pinterest or not, chances are it probably is. We have summarised a few tips for marketing on Pinterest that you may find interesting (and even surprising).

The first trick of Pinterest is actually not a trick at all….and its something you should really be doing in your marketing efforts anyway, and that is generating original, interesting content that users will like. Now, we know that Pinterest is a predominantly visual platform, but that shouldn’t deter you from using it if your services aren’t necessarily the most design-oriented. Eye-catching text based images also do really well on the platform, so consider using quotes or statistics that people will find useful or share-worthy.

If you are trying to get across quite a lot of information at once, don’t be drawn into using constant infographics. Now, at Red Cow, we’re huge fans of the infographic, but on Pinterest they tend to take up a lot of space on a board, meaning users are less likely to re-pin them. The mobile Pinterest app also doesn’t yet favour infographics and they often take time to load and are generally a bit of a pain. In this case, try combining platforms and making use of something like SlideShare. If you upload a presentation to SlideShare and then pin in to your Pinterest board, it condenses the presentation down into a pin that is much more user-friendly and, thus, likely to get shared and re-pinned. The key to pinning presentations is to edit the pin to make sure it is visually appealing (consider having the first slide as an attention grabbing image) and has a call to action in the description to compel users to click through. Make sure that any time you pin to your board you change the destination URL of the pin to ensure you’re driving traffic to your website, rather than the SlideShare website (or wherever else the image may be).

There’s nothing more annoying that overt promotion and same-old same-old content on any social media channel, and Pinterest is no exception. Try to avoid constant promotional posts about your products or services and make sure the content you’re sending out is interesting and informative to users, rather than trying to sell to them. As your reach grows, so does peoples’ awareness of your business and so sales will follow with time, trying to force it will switch people off from your message and they will become disinterested.

Lastly, the point of social media is to be social, and this is still the case when marketing on Pinterest. As social media is widely considered the ‘new word of mouth’, and there is nothing more valuable than when people endorse you on their social media channels when they are an authority in a particular subject. With this in mind, you may want to consider linking up with some ‘Super Pinners’ that are relevant to your industry on Pinterest. Asking people to be your ‘experts’ will allow you to post to a community page that then also goes out to their followers, vastly increasing your reach.

So there you have it, some top tips for marketing on Pinterest. We hope that these will help to get you started using Pinterest for business, and keep a look our for further posts on this topic. If you still need some help getting started with Pinterest marketing then feel free to get in touch with one of the Red Cow team.