Pinterest – Can B2B Marketing Benefit From It?
Pinterest, while initially visited by young middle-class Americans, is quickly expanding its membership. Although numbers haven’t been released by Pinterest, ComScore reported that 13.76 million people worldwide visited the site in January 2012. Not a number to be disregarded and irrelevant!
For Pinterest to work and benefit B2B campaigns, creativity and relevant audience need to be identified. Pinterest, as with other visual social networks, has its popular subjects as products, places and spaces. It has an audience looking for inspiration. B2B brands need to learn how to use these to effectively build a campaign.
Consider these points:
- What content do you have available?
- What can you create, now and in the future?
- How will you control this?
- How is it shared?
- How does it sit with your presently owned spaces, digital/social?
- 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 for ease of sharing of this media can benefit B2B. Profile pages, dedicated brand pages and an app programming interface are all reported to be ‘in the pipeline’.
As an already, very social/sharing platform, B2B can consider adding Pinterest to their marketing mix. Before the global sharing of companies, logo and tone of communication, were the foremost parts of branding, now image and the visual language associated, will need to be designed to be unique to a brand.
Infographics have become a very prominent part of the internet world, and Pinterest is a brilliant place to post them. The members on the platform, primarily re-pin items so a virality is injected into the infographics as they get ‘liked’ and ‘re-pinned’ by people.
Pinterest can be an integral part of your social media marketing, whether you are B2B or B2C. The move towards an open dialogue with people can be seen as a positive move and one from which all can benefit.
The social platform, at the moment seems to be all about, inspiration, whether it’s people sharing items they like and just saying, ‘ wow, isn’t this great?’ to the building of boards that represent events and items they have bought, the media is a pleasant place to be.
It has a certain feel good factor about it when everything that happens depends on people liking your image or video.
After all, the best advocate for your brand is someone who likes you and recommendations and testimonials are an important part of B2B marketing. That images and video can all be shared so easily, makes Pinterest worth a look to see if you can integrate it into your marketing.
Pinterest Pros:
- Additional businesses
- Extra web traffic
- Potential social links
- Beneficial effect for SEO
- Scope for creativity
- People looking for inspiration
- Ease of navigation
- Virality through re-pinning
Pinterest Cons:
- Initially B2C service
- Appeals to a small section of the internet
- Undeveloped platform
- Another social media platform to learn and tend
- Doesn’t add enough value
- Extra design work
