15 ways to use Pinterest with your small business marketing

Building and growing a presence on Pinterest requires you to focus on your target market. What kind of information would your audience find entertaining and valuable? Use Pinterest to showcase your business, your team, and the unique uses of your product. Show off your local community and all the things that make your small business special. Prepare a list of the top 10 things your customers love about your business and find pictures that express each of those special qualities. For more ideas, look at the Pinterest page we’ve created, plus the 15 ideas we share below.

Here are 15 ways you can use Pinterest with your marketing strategies.

1. Highlight a user’s pins of your product(s) on your company website with a note of thanks.
2. Hold a contest for posting creative and different uses of your product on Pinterest.  Follow Pinterest’s Terms and Policies when coming up with your idea.  Involve your team for a great team-building exercise.
3. Use the Pin-It button to drive a link from a pin back to your website.
4. Use the Pinterest board functionality to showcase uses of your product and build your brand’s lifestyle.  Be creative.  For example, myMarketing Café is built around a coffeehouse concept to serve as a stress-reducer for small business owners when they peruse our site.  On our Pinterest page, we’ve posted pins of some of our favorite coffeehouses.
5. Engage with other users who have a commonality with your Pinterest boards and who may follow you back. For example, we might engage with coffeehouses or small businesses.
6. Create boards linked to your other marketing tactics.   Do you have a company blog?  In your blog entries, include creative photography and pin these photos with links to your blog entry into a special board.  What is the main topic of your blog? That should also be in the title of your board to show the connection.
7. Create a “favorite customer” board and thank your customers.  Do you have a following of loyal customers?  Consider taking pictures of them in your storefront, or using your product, or with the owner of the store and create a board of thanks.
8. Showcase your business culture and employees.  As part of your employee recognition, you can take pictures of your fabulous team and pin them to showcase their excitement about working with your company.
9. Showcase your company’s “green” initiatives.  Does your company go out of its way to be green?  Create a green board to show how you do it and help others join in the initiative.
10. Showcase your company’s Corporate Social Responsibility.  Do you support social initiatives locally or nationally? Create a board about the cause or causes your support and include pictures of your involvement or links to engaging stories to help drive awareness.
11. Use Pinterest’s user-generated functionality to allow others to pin to a board.  You can create a board specifically for other users to pin to.  Ideas include a customer pin board where they share favorite uses of your product, or an employee board where they share ideas or post about a favorite customer.
12. Add links in the descriptions of your pins to drive users to your website.
13. Use the Pinterest’s video pinning functionality to bring your company to life.  Videos are great to showcase customer testimonial or to highlight a special event or product.
14. Use videos of past events to promote an upcoming event.  Ever watch the show bloopers?  Build momentum of your upcoming event by creating a montage of bloopers or guests having a great time from past event footage.
15. Use Pinterest videos to create access to a celebrity at your brand or company.  Take footage of a designer working on the next product, share a brief interview about what inspires the designer, share footage of the product in the making (without revealing too much, of course).  This will help build momentum for your upcoming product launch.  Or use this strategy after a launch to endear customers to those who make your product possible.