Pinterest, while initially visited by young, middle-class Americans, is rapidly expanding its membership. Although Pinterest hasn’t released any numbers, ComScore reported that 13.76 million people worldwide visited the site in January 2012. Not a number to be ignored and irrelevant!
For Pinterest to work and benefit B2B campaigns, you need to identify the creative and the relevant audience. Pinterest, like other visual social networks, has its popular topics like products, places, and spaces. You have an audience looking for inspiration. B2B brands need to learn how to use them to build a campaign effectively.
Consider these points:
- What content do you have available?
- What can you create, now and in the future?
- How are you going to control this?
- How is it shared?
- How do you feel about your current owned, digital/social spaces?
- What are your goals?
- Does it add value, commercially and ROI?
As images and video become more important in marketing, the fact that sites like Pinterest allow easy sharing of this medium can benefit B2B. Profile pages, dedicated brand pages and an application programming interface are reported to be ‘in the pipeline’.
Since it’s already a very social/sharing platform, B2B may want to consider adding Pinterest to their marketing mix. Before the global exchange of companies, the logo and the tone of communication were the most important parts of the brand, now the image and the associated visual language must be designed to be unique to a brand.
Infographics have become a huge part of the online world, and Pinterest is a great place to post them. Elements are mainly re-pinned by members of the platform so that a virality is injected into the infographics as people like and re-pin them.
Pinterest can be an integral part of your social media marketing, be it B2B or B2C. Moving towards an open dialogue with the people can be seen as a positive step from which everyone can benefit.
The social platform, right now, seems to be all about inspiration, whether it’s people sharing items they like and just saying, ‘wow, isn’t that cool?’ From building boards that represent events and items they’ve purchased, the media is a nice place to be.
You have a certain feel-good factor about it when everything that happens depends on people liking your image or video.
After all, your best brand advocate is someone who likes you, and recommendations and testimonials are an important part of B2B marketing. The fact that images and videos are so easily shareable makes it worth taking a look at Pinterest to see if you can integrate it into your marketing.
Advantages of Pinterest:
- additional business
- additional web traffic
- Potential social links
- Beneficial effect for SEO
- scope of creativity
- people looking for inspiration
- ease of navigation
- Virality through re-pinning
Cons of Pinterest:
- Initially B2C service
- Appeals to a small section of the Internet
- undeveloped platform
- Another social media platform for learning and caring
- Doesn’t add enough value
- additional design work
