Pinterest Marketing: How to Grow Your Business by Leveraging Pinterest

Startups often have a challenge of drawing internet traffic. Not Pinterest. In the last week, they’ve received 10 million unique visits drawing significant attention to this social media company. Marketers took notice and began adding Pinterest to their brand marketing strategy.  Pinterest can generate significant exposure for your company and help you gain followers and customers.

By now you may be feeling some social media fatigue. After all, with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Foursquare, do we really need a new social media platform? More importantly, with limited time and resources, is it worth devoting precious marketing time to a small startup with an unproven business model? Pinterest breaks the mold by giving users simple, online scrapbooks they can categorize and share with their social network. Pinterest syncs to existing social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter automatically giving you the option to interconnect followers with your brand.

1. Pinterest Connects Directly to Your Website’s Products

Pinterest allows you to upload images of your products and embed links that consumers can click on and drive traffic directly to your website’s product page. Other Pinterest users may stumble upon your images and share them with friends, giving your product the opportunity to go viral in minutes. Keep in mind that Pinterest users will follow the board you create, not necessarily your brand. Make sure to segment your visitors’ interests by designing boards (what Pinterest calls its categories of image)  specific to their interests. One great example is World Market. Instead of acting like a Sears catalog and listing items such as couches or flatware, they separate their products into categories such as holidays, parties, décor, and inspiration.



2. Pinterest Generates Significant Traffic

According to Shareaholic, Pinterest is generating more referral traffic than Google Plus, Youtube, and LinkedIn combined. With over 10 million unique visitors actively searching and browsing for what’s new, you’ll have the opportunity to tap into a large pool of potential customers.



The traffic generated by those users is making a huge impact on companies like Real Simple:

"Pinterest is a huge source from a referral standpoint, even beating out referrals from Facebook in the month of October," said Shannon King, GM of digital for Real Simple magazine. "It speaks to the power of engaged audience members. We view it as an important part of our social media strategy."

3. Optimize Your Website for Pinterest Users

If you want to take advantage of Pinterest’s surge, make sure your website has images that people will want to share. Pinterest gives users a “Pin It”   button your visitors can click to link your products and service images directly to their Pinterest boards for their social network to see. Keep in mind, once your links are sent out, you want to be careful not to delete those links as broken images will turn away potential followers.



4. Pinterest Integrates with Other Social Media Platforms

Pinterest removes the laborious chore of creating your social profile from scratch by directly integrating with your brand’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and websites. 

A. By simply adding Pinterest to your Facebook account, users can automatically “pin” directly from their Facebook account.
B. Add a “Follow Me on Pinterest” button on your website to generate interest from your current customers that may be on the site.
C. Pinterest can automatically update your Twitter account on new “pins” and updates.

By adding these social media back links to your existing online profiles, you’ll be maximizing your exposure online.

5. Pinterest is a Great Platform for Contests, Promotions, or Giveaways

Looking to generate brand engagement with Pinterest and want to stand out in the crowd? Offer a Pinterest contest, Pinterest promotion, or Pinterest discount code to highlight your brand’s willingness to adopt fresh social media platforms. Threadless recently had a contest where they engaged followers to create a board and add 10 “pins” to the board that included at least 5 of their products. To enter, followers then emailed the link for the board they created to the contest email account.  In this way, followers familiarize themselves with the content and products on a webpage through a fun, interactive platform, thereby driving brand engagement and website traffic.

As Pinterest continues to evolve so does its marketing potential for small business and large corporations. Marketers seeking to leverage Pinterest’s visual search and sharing platform will benefit from its current spike in popularity and it innovative platform.