Anyone can use Pinterest, but being successful at Pinterest marketing requires a combination of internet marketing, design, and copywriting skills. It doesn’t hurt to have a basic understanding of copyright law and how it applies to the images you pin.
Skills needed to be effective at Pinterest marketing
Art / Taste / Style / Eye
You need to be able to recognize a good image when you see one. Some of the time, you will need to create the image yourself, or tweak / crop / adjust existing art to serve the marketing purpose you want to achieve. If you are cluefree when it comes to style, your boards will look like a personal account and will be less likely to attract repins.
Curiosity and Imagination
Pinterest is the opposite of linear. At the end of a class, one of my students said, “I don’t see how anyone can use this to find “homes for sale in Raleigh!” He had a point. You can’t search the same way you can on Google. At the same time, users aren’t looking for the same answers they would look for on Google.
An effective Pinterest marketer needs to be able to think about a business in sideways terms; imagining how people might come to an account and being curious about how people think of their interaction with any particular business or service provider.
I think about a Pinterest account as a spiderweb, stretching into all the spaces that someone might think of just before they think about my business. I need a better analogy.
You will also need a powerful dose of creativity if you are working with service businesses, or any business that’s not in the traditionally “pretty” trades (almost any retail business, and especially brides and puppies). Infographics, quotations, books, tech… There’s plenty of content that can be turned into Pinterest marketing pin, if you’re able to look at your material in a creative light. If not, you might be more successful on Twitter.
Copyrights
It’s not hard to know enough about copyright law to keep your Pinterest marketing activity safe and legal. IP lawyers will pay closer attention to a business account than they will to a personal pinboard.
SEO
SEO skills matter both within Pinterest, in terms of finding pins, boards, and pinners, and from outside, where boards have been appearing in enviable SERP positions. Pinterest supports the use of hash tags in pin captions. SEO skills can be applied to board titles to improve SERP results.
At this time, Pinterest links are all nofollow.
Google Analytics recently adjusted their privacy settings on Pinterest traffic.
Internet Marketing
People who understand how traffic, lead generation, and conversion work on the internet will be better able to benefit from using Pinterest as a marketing vehicle.
Copywriting
Pin descriptions offer a 500-character opportunity to practice traditional copywriting skills, with feature-function-benefit possibilities, fascinations, calls to action, and reasons to act now. Kinda like the perfect tweet, with three times the space. Because most pins are viewed alone, rather than surrounded by similar pins on a board, writing a non-obvious yet persuasive description may be the most important function of a Pinterest marketer. Give people a reason to click through to your website.
Follow Us!