Finding a Pin in a Haystack: Getting Your Brand Discovered on Pinterest

Ravi Kolhe | 12/18/2013 | |
Pinterest has quickly emerged as one of the web’s most valuable content-marketing tools. Its visual nature and layout makes it easy for people to discover and share new content.

From the perspective of businesses, Pinterest presents itself as a showroom for displaying products and advertising space for content marketing campaigns. This content-oriented platform serves as an avenue for companies to generate brand awareness and to cultivatean online community.

Third-Party Endorsements

Pinterest gives brands a unique opportunity to encourage third-party endorsement through the “pin” and “repin” buttons. Just as you would hear one of your friends discussing a new product and become interested, seeing that another user pinned an item evokes an equivocal level of interest.

If a piece of content is repined multiple times, its exposure multiplies exponentially. With the value of pins and repins established, the challenge for marketers becomes creating content worth sharing.

Pinterest Content

Pinterest’s platform offers companies a medium for communicating their brand’s personality while also sharing products. You can think of each Pinboard as a facet of your brand identity. This means it is in your best interest to create boards to represent your brand’s products, style and voice.

Make sure your images are high quality photos with aesthetically appealing overlaid text or a comment explaining why the pin is important to a pinner. Check out Havahart’s Pinterest page for great examples of what your Pinterest board should look like.

NBA

One example of an organization that has managed to bring the diverse facets of its brand to Pinterest is the National Basketball Association. The NBA’s Pinterest features pins for everything and anything NBA, including product, a board for NBA championship images and a board for famous NBA quotes. Also, there is a board for NBA’s “NBA Cares” program, which is the organization’s initiative for social responsibility.

When you view this Pinterest page you instantly know what the NBA is and what it stands for. Across a fairly small number of Pinboards, this organization was able to tell its story and convey its brand while interacting with their fans

Peugeot

While utilizing pinboards in a traditional fashion is a great start, Pinterest’s platform leaves ample room for creativity in your branding. One example of the creative freedom that Pinterest affords content marketers is Peugeot’s Panama Puzzle campaign. By capitalizing on Pinterest’s grid layout, this French car company developed an ingenious contest as a part of its digital marketing efforts.

In this contest, each individual pin on Peugeot’s page servedas a section of a larger, incomplete image that represented a puzzle. With the missing piece located on the Peugeot Facebook page, users could track down the missing image, pin it and claim their reward. This puzzle concept led Pinterest users on a wild goose chase through Peugeot’s digital assets with ample content exposure along the way.

Prior to this campaign, Peugeot was a French car company with limited brand awareness. Following the contest, Peugeot had announced its brand with a fun, creative connotation.In terms of thinking outside of the box on Pinterest, this campaign is just about as good as it gets and left creative directors wishing they’d thought of it first.

Community Development

Once you’ve developed your own strategy for spreading the word about your brand on Pinterest, the work doesn’t stop. Having achieved some level of brand identity, a company needs to seize the opportunity to engage with its Pinterest following. This means responding to comments, repinning relevant content from other users and interacting with pinners through contest or other sentimental activities. These are the activities that continue to drive traffic to your own boards and encourage third-party endorsements.

While the key to sparking brand recognition on Pinterest is content, it is community management that keeps the flame burning. If Peugeot were to simply let the hype from their campaign dwindle, it would have been ineffective in the long run. Rather than allowing this to happen, the company kept the conversation going with its users and came up with other creative campaigns.

Developing a brand on Pinterest means creating a content-marketing plan that communicates key components. By leveraging Pinterest’s format and content sharing tools, you can develop a strategy for spreading your brand’s unique identity.

If you enjoy this post, do us a favor: Share it!

No comments:

Subscribe to Get Free Tech Tips And Quality Tutorials Straight in Your Inbox.


We Hate Spam! Really, It's terrible and we never do it.