5 Effective Pinterest Tips For Small Business Marketing August 3, 2012 by Sarah Bauer BA English Literature

The virtual pin board social platform called Pinterest has enjoyed an explosion of popularity this past year, creating cost effective marketing opportunities for small businesses. You just need to be sure your target audience is waiting for you there.

Wedding planning, crafting, cooking, and fashion reign Pinterest usage in North America. According to AppData and Facebook research, 97 percent of Pinterest users on the western side of the pond are women. The data suggests that if your small business products or services can appeal to Internet-consuming women, your small business should be leveraging the marketing opportunities on Pinterest.

However, men currently dominate the Pinterest scene in the United Kingdom (56 percent); topics like SEO marketing, web analytics, and venture capital rule the roost. As a social platform, Pinterest is flexible. While a Pinterest prospect for your steel manufacturing company might not be realistic today, who says it won’t be in six months’ time?

Whether Pinterest seems like a viable marketing solution for your small business or not, having some core knowledge about what the platform can do for corporations could come in handy as the Internet community continues to expand and adapt at a rapid-fire rate.

Here are five tips for small business marketing success with Pinterest:

1. Use title pages for e-books, white papers, and guides.

You can offer users your original documents in a visually attractive way, by using title pages as pins. SocialMediaExaminer.com contributor Mitt Ray suggests gating the content so people can access it only after they have signed up for email alerts or monthly newsletters. It’s a great way to distribute e-books, white papers, and product guides and collect a prospective client list at the same time.

1. Integrate Pinterest interaction with your other social media platforms.

Pinterest contests and conversations should expand to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presences. Advertise your Pinterest account on Facebook, or invite users to give feedback on new pins via Twitter. You want to cultivate a thorough and authentic brand persona online. Pinterest can enrich your business “voice.”

1. Only pin the worthy. Pinterest caters to the neat and tidy, with its masonry-style layout and minimalistic typography. Play within this boundary of elegance when you decide what images to pin on your profile. Stay away from tacky, promotional graphics. You want quality images that you believe could make an impact.
2. Invest in infographics. Put company data into a graphically dynamic format, and watch the image spread across the Net. Infographics are a popular way to share information online, and provide businesses with a visual entryway into the Pinterest platform. As a content source, infographics can be shared across platforms, and quickly delegate industry authority to your business.   Contact Chris today to discover how your company data could transform into sensational infographics.
3. Step outside your product range.

Pinterest users are often savvy to marketing trickery, and will filter your profile out if it doesn’t provide anything beyond bland and blatant advertising.

So you have your product range showcased visually on Pinterest-great! Now add new boards with products outside of what you offer, to give users a diverse and genuine resource to draw inspiration from.

That’s the name of the game with Pinterest: engage first, sell later.

Reference

Ray, Mitt. “7 Pinterest Tips for B2B Companies.” 20 June 2012. Socialmediaexaminer.com: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/b2b-pinterest-tips/

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