Branding

This is the third installment in an on-going series focusing on Pinterest.

Have you done your homework from last week? If so, you’ve identified areas on your site that you can make more Pinterest “friendly.”

So let’s get into some tactics that you can use to build your brand and market your business:

First rule of marketing on Pinterest: Easy on the self-promotion

Pinterest is all about curating and sharing. Pinterest’s stated goal is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” So that means that while you aren’t expressly forbidden from engaging in marketing activities promoting your brand, you shouldn’t be obnoxiously obvious about it.

Build your content

Just as with Facebook, Twitter, and even your blog, if you’re going to use Pinterest, you need to be committed to updating your content. One or two pins every now and than won’t cut it. Like we’ve said about Facebook and Twitter, if you’re going to be on Pinterest you need to be on Pinterest. You need to be adding fresh content frequently. Don’t worry too much, because once you get going with Pinterest, you’ll soon discover that pinning things is fun! Aim for daily updates to your Pinterest boards. Go get the “Pin It” button for your web browser’s tool bar to make the task super-easy.

Organize your content

Your pins on Pinterest are organized into boards. They can be anything you want and we suggest making the topic of each board as specific as possible. Instead of having a board called “Cool stuff” make it more specific: “Cool cooking gadgets,” “cool bakeware.” A board with a topic that is too broad will appear scattered and will require the viewer to do a lot of the work of looking for particular things of interest. Be kind to your viewers and sort things out for them.

Promote your presence on Pinterest

Once you get going with adding content to Pinterest, start promoting your presence there on your Facebook page, Twitter, your website, your newsletter, your blog. Every avenue of communication with your audience! By the way, when using the “Pin It” button in your browser to pin something, Pinterest will ask if you want to Tweet your new pin so there’s the Twitter angle taken care of right there!

Again, just like other social media outlets, by engaging other users on Pinterest, you can begin to promote your business. Comment on other’s pins (if they’re relevant to your brand in some way), re-pin content from others, and follow other users (who may in turn follow you).

One note about following on Pinterest: You can follow users or boards (and vice versa). This lets users be a little more particular about what they follow. A user might not be interested in all of your boards so they can follow just the board that interests them.

Marketing your business

In a sense, marketing on Pinterest is almost a pure marketing exercise in that you can’t simply throw up everything you do or make or sell, but you have to focus more on the benefits and advantages of what you do.

For example, if you sell spatulas (“All spatulas, all the time!”) you can’t just post photos of your awesome spatulas and call it good because you’ll be breaking the number one rule: No obnoxious self-promotion. You can certainly post images of your fabulous wares, but think about related things: Pin recipes of pancakes. Pin photos of fabulous kitchens that you can cook and flip the pancakes that you made from the recipe you pinned with the FlipMaster2000 that you sell. (“Oh, that looks like a great pancake recipe. I’ll have to try it this weekend. Oh, I’ll need a new spatula– off to Spatula City I go!”) Take a look at Whole Foods Pinterest page.  Keeping in mind that they’re a grocery store chain, see what they’ve pinned and how they’ve organized their content. Notice that they’re not full of images of products that they sell but just about everything they pin relates directly to something that can be found in their stores.

Create a board of photos that relate to your office culture to let folks know just how cool you are. Nothing too crazy, though. You can also post photos of your staff on service calls, making product, or helping customers. You get the idea. Because customers are buying more than just a product or service, they’re buying into the organization behind it.

Create a a board (or boards) that focus on your areas of expertise. Don’t worry that your pins might be sending people AWAY from you, you’ll be establishing yourself as a resource that can be relied upon. Building authenticity and a sense of trust is only a good thing.

Finally (for now), If you don’t already, start adding relevant imagery to your blog posts: compelling photos or illustrations; Infographics (everyone loves infographics!); charts and graphs are also great– just make sure to include an informative caption. Since a blog post itself can’t be pinned, you’ll need some good visual content that can be pinned that will link back to your site.

See? It’s pretty easy and may even help you think differently about your business and discover new ways to market yourself!

Now get out there and start pinning all the things!

This is the second installment in an on-going series on Pinterest

Okay, hopefully you’ve all done your homework and spent some time exploring how Pinterest works. Hopefully we haven’t lost you completely to Pinterest! (PIN ALL THE THINGS!)

So now the question on most business peoples’ minds is “How do I put Pinterest to work for my company?” Some might say that B2C efforts on Pinterest such as selling physical products are easier than trying to promote intangibles such as services or B2B, but we disagree.

As we mentioned before, Pinterest is all about sharing. Users travel the web and pin whatever strikes their fancy: photos and images of things that are relevant to their lives. Their boards represent lists of things they like, things they want to do, something they’d like to buy, or even just a shortcut to a site they want to revisit. All these pins serve as recommendations. For instance, if Alice likes certain things that overlap with Bob’s interests, he’ll realize that they have some shared tastes and be more likely to investigate the other, non-overlapping interests of Alice’s and maybe discover some new things. Pinterest helps facilitate this by showing users pins based on their stated preferences and lifestyle choices. Anything that Bob repins will show up for all his followers. (This is similar to “re-tweeting” posts on Twitter.)

Images are the key thing on Pinterest. Users can’t pin text or web pages, they can only pin photos and other graphics. (Obviously the photos link back to the original pages with the interesting text-based content. This is an important concept with Pinterest.)

So you need to make sure that you have high-quality, good-looking photos and images to accompany content on your main business website. Every product should have a decent photo; the better looking the photo, the better it will look pinned. Think “glamour” shots.

It’s no different if you’re in a service industry. Include appropriate, original imagery on your services page. Get a decent camera and take a few, clear, sharp, well-lit photos of your staff in action if need be. Be creative! If you have a blog (and you should) then include original photos, charts, graphs, etc. with your posts. When visitors pin these images, they’ll be linking back to the blog post (or a page on your site). Make that image memorable!

Additionally, make it easy for visitors to your site to pin your content. If you’re displaying Facebook or Twitter buttons on your site, include the “follow me” Pinterest button too, and have it link to your collection of boards. Use the “Pin It” button on each product page and services description page (most services pages are boring, text-only affairs that could benefit from some graphics anyway). Include it on your blog. The “Pin It” button makes it easy for visitors to immediately pin something they find interesting or worth marking to come back to. Once your content is pinned, it can easily be repinned by other Pinterest users.

Okay, so there’s a brief look at your Pinterest “infrastructure.” Your homework for this week is to take a good look at your site and identify areas where you can make it more “Pinterest friendly.” Try implementing the “follow me” button and the “pin it” button. Next time we’ll dig a little deeper into pinning activity and what it means from a marketing perspective.