Leveraging Pinterest For Local Businesses To Boost Sales

Pinterest, the new social network, is all over the place. Everyone is talking about it and if you’re a small business owner, it can be a great addition to your marketing strategy to promote your business online.

A lot has been said about the need for small businesses to harness the power of social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to their website and creating awareness about their brand to the masses.

Pinterest, the innovative visual scrapbook network is the latest addition to this list of biggies in the social media due to the following reasons:

Exceptionally High User Growth – Pinterest is one of the fastest growing standalone sites right now and boasted of 19 million users in March, 2012.

Great Referral Traffic – The outrageous popularity of the site is now spreading across the Internet communities even more as a recent report by Shareaholic revealed that the referral traffic from Pinterest is more than the referral traffic from Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined.

High Usage – The average time spent by a Pinterest user on the site came out to be 89 minutes in January 2012, which is only second to Facebook, and far surpasses the average user time on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Relationship-centered, Female Demographic – Although a total of 65% users on Pinterest are female, still they account for 84% of both the pageviews and time spent on the site, according to ComScore. Another revelation made by the firm also showed that the age of an average pinner is 32-years and a huge majority of them is either in a relationship or married.

Defined Interests – Users on Pinterest are usually seen to have panache for visual and creative categories, like photography, lifestyle, furniture, clothing, vintage goods, and jewelry. Also, a recent study showed that the shoppers referred from Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy the products than those referred from other social networking sites.

Big names like Neiman-Marcus and Coca Cola has also joined the site to reach out to their audience.

So, what should you be doing to promote your local business on Pinterest?

Here are a few solutions:

Determine if Pinterest is Right to Promote Your Business – The site is ideal for products/services where you can reel people in by showing them visually appealing pictures, like photographers, jewelers, kitchen remodeling, gourmet meals, and others. For a better response, you can add on your past works, product highlights, and customer testimonials. An accountant or a lawyer, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to leverage the power of this site as much.

Be sure that your pins are linked to the right product description/contact pages on your main website for easy sales/profit through referral traffic from Pinterest. Also, if your business caters to women in any way, as the demographics above suggests, you’ll surely feel lucky in finding this site.

Finally, do you think you can dedicate the time and efforts needed to make Pinterest work for you successfully? This would mean producing content and graphics on an almost daily basis along with active engagement with the users.

If all these sounds about right for you, go ahead and start pinning.

Maximizing Your Presence on Pinterest – Apart from a few obvious things, like adding the Pinterest follow and PinIt buttons to the images on your website, adding descriptive keywords for your business as well as its location in the “About” section of your account and others, there are several other things you can do to extend your presence on Pinterest.

Instead of simply promoting your own images, be sure to share other’s content too that you think your followers will enjoy. It’s okay if you don’t sell it. Sharing images with tips and advice can also do you a lot of good as users will begin to identify your brand as a good resource.

Don’t forget to pin videos and images that are featured on your website. Apply descriptive language in every pin and always include the prices with every image, wherever applicable. This may lead a potential customer to your website by clicking on the video or image to make a purchase.

Segregating the boards on your profile with names, like “Sea Food,” “Continental,” “Eveining Snacks,” et al can all make it easy for users to identify with images of their choice. One extremely appealing board is that of promotional offers/ongoing discounts as well, which is easily re-pinned by users.

You may also host a giveaway/contest, encouraging people to create a board in their account for your brand and pin things that they like about your brand. Reward the best board generously and see how you go viral in no time.