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Does your business have a clear Pinterest strategy?
Have you been struggling to figure out how Pinterest could help market your business?
Pinterest represents a massive opportunity for both consumer-focused and business-to-business companies.
In this article, I'll show you three ways to build a successful Pinterest presence for your business.
#1: Increase Your Brand Authority
Do you want to establish authority in your field? This is a common goal for many businesses on Pinterest.
Middle Sister Wines positions itself on Pinterest as an authority in the wine industry by creating several Pinterest boards that provide useful and educational information to their followers while promoting their products in fun ways.
You don't have to create all the content that you pin on Pinterest. To help position yourself as an authority in your field, share from a carefully vetted combination of sources to ensure your boards contain the most accurate and useful information available.
Middle Sister's Wine Tips and Tricks board contains videos from their YouTube account, alongside resources from other industry experts. The board addresses topics such as how to pair wine with food and what type of glass should be used to serve different kinds of wine.
Follow Middle Sister Wines' lead and pin relevant and helpful resources. Your followers will come to think of your account as the go-to place for reliable information about your subject. And as you increase your authority, you'll continue to build trust, which could lead to increased customer loyalty and referrals from brand advocates.
#2: Expand Your Reach
Do you want to expand your reach and grow the size of your audience? Consider leveraging the community on Pinterest.
Use Group Boards and collaborate with popular pinners who have a large following to expose your brand and content to more people.
While Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) has a strong standing in traditional media, the average BHG Pinterest board had fewer than 200,000 followers.
One of BHG's latest Pinners of the Month is Jennifer Chong. Jennifer pins content from BHG's website to the Pinterest-owned board which exposes all of Jennifer's 2 million followers to BHG's content and to the BHG Pinterest account. As Jennifer's audience follows the board, BHG's follower numbers grow.
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Using group boards, BHG has grown its overall follower numbers to over 379,000.
Use This Approach Thoughtfully
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Your followers will see what your contributors pin, and what they pin will reflect on your business, so trust between parties is important.
The collaborative partnership should benefit both parties. In the example above, Jennifer received recognition and exposure from a renowned magazine and Better Homes and Gardens increased exposure and following of their Pinterest account.
A poorly conceived partnership built around content that isn't relevant to your existing audience could lead to a loss of followers. Collaborate with someone outside of your niche and your followers will be confused. The collaboration must make sense.
With careful thought this is a great way to get in front of a wider audience.
#3: Drive Traffic to Your Site
Are you interested in getting more traffic to your site? Then consider using Pinterest. Beth Hayden, author of Pinfluence, revealed that Pinterest drives more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined.
In order to take advantage of this, Pinterest users first have to be attracted to your pins and repin them to their boards.
The most successful pins on Pinterest have some traits in common. They combine great images with content to solve a problem, inspire, offer something desirable or appeal to interest in a hobby or activity.
This doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. For example, take this image from Gwen Wilson at Simply Healthy Family sharing a quick and easy way to shred chicken.
This image is great at communicating the message of the pin and it wasn't taken in a professional studio.
I pinned this image to my account 5 months ago and in that time it has been repinned from my account 35 times. What's more, the blog post associated with this image has been shared on Pinterest over 191,000 times.
Gwen isn't a celebrity. She currently has just over 1,100 followers on Pinterest. Clearly, a huge following isn't necessary to drive traffic from Pinterest to your website.
Share attractive content on Pinterest to drive traffic to your site.
Bonus
Do you want to know how your Pinterest marketing is working for you? Measure the reach of your content on Pinterest with these useful tools.
The Pinterest Pin Count tool will show you the number of times a page or blog post from your site has been pinned and repinned within Pinterest.
Pinterest's free web analytics tool will help you determine which of your pins drive the most click-throughs to your site.
Use the metrics and information from each of these tools to help you replicate content that receives a high percentage of pins and drives high traffic.
Over to You
Regardless of the goals you pursue and the strategies you implement on Pinterest, there's one overall principle that should guide your social media marketing: the content you deliver should benefit your current and potential customers.
Pinterest lets brands deliver that content in an easily shareable format that leads to increased visibility and higher traffic numbers.
What do you think? What goals are you pursuing on Pinterest? Have you developed your Pinterest strategy? Do you have more than one? Let's talk about them in the comments below.
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