Another social media channel? Is that really necessary? Well, there are very good reasons to at least consider expanding your content distribution to include Pinterest marketing. A 2018 study found that among nearly 6,000 marketers, only 49 percent described their Facebook marketing as effective. Fifty-two percent even experienced a reduction in organic reach there.
Of course, like 67 percent of the CMOs surveyed, you can increase your budget for Facebook Ads in 2019. This will allow you to at least partially offset the loss of organic reach through paid media. Or you can market your business on Pinterest without spending any money, where you have the opportunity to reach approximately 200 million users from around the world, 83 percent of whom prefer to follow brands rather than celebrities.
In this respect, Pinterest clearly stands out from its competitor Instagram and represents a real alternative for B2B companies. We'll show you how to tweak your settings to become more visually successful with Pinterest marketing.
Fact check: This is important for a Pinterest marketing strategy
As with any other social media platform, you need a strategy for successful Pinterest marketing. This requires a few basics about Pinterest. Below, we explain what you need to know to integrate Pinterest into your B2B marketing.
- What is Pinterest? In short, Pinterest is an image search platform similar to Instagram. The social media network was launched in 2009 and has grown to become the second largest source of traffic after Facebook in recent years. The platform has experienced a particular boost since Facebook changed its algorithm to the detriment of fan pages and in favor of private profiles.
- What are the most important features of Pinterest? For effective B2B marketing, it makes sense to create a business account and a few strategically designed boards. More on this below. You can also generate reach with rich pins, promoted and buyable pins, your own communities, and so-called carousels in addition to repins.
- How does Pinterest work? The most important prerequisites for Pinterest to deliver the desired effect are a good marketing strategy, regular pins, repins, and reposts, relevant keywords, hashtags, and interaction. On average, it takes about 3.5 months for a pin to achieve 50 percent of its total engagement rate. This makes Pinterest more sustainable than other social networks.
What Pinterest is – interesting figures, data, and facts for marketers
After Pinterest initially experienced some teething problems in Europe, 3 million users were registered in Germany alone in 2017. Every month, several hundred million users perform around 2 billion searches on the platform.
Only 20 percent of the more than 14 million pins posted on the platform every day are original. On average, each pin is repinned eleven times. These repins account for 80 percent of all pins and generate a 50 percent higher conversion rate than other platforms.
But it's not just the repin option that makes Pinterest such a powerful referral site. The portal offers lots of other ways to include URLs in pins—for example, in the description. What's more, when you hover over a pin, the linked web address is displayed as a button, which is a nice incentive for interested users to click.
This means that you can place targeted domains in each pin and use the descriptions perfectly for call-to-actions. This allows you to optimize your Pinterest activities with little effort for lead generation. Just like B2B marketing and content distribution, Pinterest thrives on high-quality content that can be uploaded in the form of exciting images, entertaining videos, or interesting podcasts. This commonality forms the basis for successful Pinterest marketing for B2B companies.
You should know (and use) these features for your B2B Pinterest marketing
Posting and repinning pins are the absolute basics of Pinterest usage, which are available to every private profile. However, it is essential for companies to create a business account. This is free and very easy to do by first creating a private account, which is then converted into a business profile. Additional features are then available via this business profile, such as the analytics tool.
What else you need to know to use Pinterest effectively:
- What pinboards, also known as boards, are
- how selected pinboards work,
- what pin descriptions are for and how to write them,
- how you use the repin feature,
- what Rich Pins are and
- Promoted Pins or Pinterest Ads are
- what content and formats you can upload to Pinterest,
- how often you should pin,
- under what conditions images promise particularly high engagement rates,
- how you use the publication planning tool,
- what communities and group boards are and
- what the latest feature, the carousel, can do.
How to get started with Pinterest
Pinterest integration:
For Pinterest marketing in B2B, it makes sense to integrate Pinterest into your blog or website in the form of a code snippet or plugin. If content is shared directly from your blog on the platform, the referral URL is retained. This means that users not only share your content, but also your domain on their Pinterest profile.
Account and board creation:
Create your own account and set up a few boards. More tips on which boards with which content make sense for a B2B company can be found below. Give these pinboards appropriate names and descriptions – feel free to use a useful hashtag or two. Google now indexes Pinterest boards. A detailed description of your pinboards that is relevant in terms of content and keywords is essential for ranking in the SERPs.
Select a category and, optionally, a cover image for each board. On your profile page, you can then personalize the order of your boards if you think it makes sense. This is easy to do using drag and drop. I recommend pinning at least your most important board or your most active board to the top of your profile so that it is the first thing visitors to your profile see. You can highlight up to five of your boards in this way using the showcase feature.
>Pin-Description:
Describe each pin individually and assign it a direct link to the corresponding content on your blog or website. Use hashtags and include the URL again here. Include a call to action. Pinterest gives you 500 characters. However, since it is primarily a mobile medium, you should say the most important things in the first 100 characters. This is because smartphone apps no longer display more than that.
Rich Pins und Buyable Pins:
Two options that don't necessarily make sense in B2B. Rich Pins allow longer descriptions and the display of product prices, for example. And Buyable Pins enable items and products to be purchased directly from the app. However, both tools are designed more for B2C profiles that want to reach customers and buyers directly via Pinterest marketing.
Promoted Pins:
They are the equivalent of ads on Google and Facebook. You can use them to increase the reach of selected pins. This can also be useful in B2B marketing, especially at the beginning of your Pinterest marketing efforts.
Perfect pin formats:
Although Pinterest started out as a pure image network, it is now also possible to pin videos and sound files from selected platforms. These options are particularly interesting in B2B, for example to promote image clips and podcast episodes in addition to classic blog articles.
Pin frequency:
If you already use Pinterest, be sure to rely on your analytics results for your pin frequency. Otherwise, start with about 10 to 20 pins per day. Don't panic: you don't have to upload 20 of your own pins. Use the 20:80 ratio I mentioned above. For every pin you create yourself, always repin four from other sources.
Plan pins:
This feature comes in handy when publishing content. Similar to Facebook, Pinterest also allows you to schedule pins in advance and automate their publication. This makes it easier to maintain your profile. Simply select "publish later" and set the date and time when you have uploaded an image to pin.
Image design:
A few tricks in image design increase the chance of repins. Primarily create vertical images with an aspect ratio of 2:3 or 4:5 and a minimum width of 600 pixels. An analysis has shown that images with several dominant colors, especially red and orange tones, are repinned particularly often. In addition, images are more likely to be repinned if no faces are shown and the surface texture is smooth. Perfect conditions for B2B use, then.
Communities, group boards, and carousels:
Pin to group boards and create your own group boards to which you can invite other users. This allows you to increase your reach, even if you don't have a large number of followers. Carousels allow you to upload up to five images for a URL and add a separate description to each one, which reduces the need for long pin descriptions. Pinterest communities are less about self-promotion and more like a discussion forum similar to Facebook groups. They are a great way to connect with customers and colleagues, create FAQs, and promote webinars, for example.
Tips for your Pinterest marketing that you can implement immediately
Need some ideas for creating a successful B2B profile and getting started with Pinterest marketing for your business? How about these?
- Create a board with infographics about your business.
- Create a board where you promote your products or services.
- Create separate pinboards for your blog, video channel, and podcasts.
- Publish screenshots of your newsletters and link the pins to your subscription link.
- Create pinboards for case studies, white papers, webinars, SlideShares, and eBooks.
- Introduce your employees on their own board.
- Create a behind-the-scenes pinboard where you can pin impressions from everyday life at the company.
- Create a board for events you are participating in.
- Share your customers, colleagues, partners, or employees of the month on your own pinboard.
Add Pinterest to your content marketing strategy
It may not seem like it at first glance, but Pinterest can also be a powerful generator of reach, traffic, and leads in B2B. All you need is a little imagination when designing your pinboard and a willingness to present your company transparently and authentically on the platform.
Pinterest marketing can definitely be worthwhile in B2B. However, it should be accompanied by an appropriate tactic and, of course, only be part of a comprehensive distribution strategy. In any case , Pinterest is certainly more interesting for B2B businesses than Instagram, for example, where the focus is more on self-promotion than on sustainable social media management.
You can learn how to design, implement, and automate such a strategy for seeding your content on social media in the 6-week Content Marketing Academy. Register right here with just one click:
