Pinterest for the B2B tech marketeer: Part I: Think about your customers & prospects

This has not been an easy post to write. In the end, I realised I didn’t have enough Pinterest knowledge or experience to write about why it was useful, useless or anything in between.  Never one to be left behind when it comes to social media trends, I joined Pinterest towards the end of 2011 but hadn’t really explored its uses.

So I jumped in and started to try and use the tool in my day job of marketing technology.

Who do you sell to?

Ultimately (and I’ve said this before!) the usefulness of any social media tool as a way of driving traffic to your site is only ever going to be about the relevance of that social media tool’s users to your product. If your customers and prospects are not present on a social media network such as Pinterest, it doesn’t matter how efficient or popular that network is: if they aren’t visiting, they won’t see your efforts.

You’ve probably seen this in the news before: The majority of Pinterest users are women. TechCrunch’s Where the Ladies At? does a pretty thorough job of reporting this, complete with an entertaining comment spat about gender stereotypes that follows the article!

So for me?

Right now, if your customers and prospects are not women, Pinterest is unlikely to be a widely used tool in your digital marketing toolbox directly.

However, I have found what I consider indirect uses for Pinterest and what’s more (why do I feel sheepish in saying this?!) I enjoy using it. Not only is it useful for generating and maintaining digital content (and potentially driving traffic to your blog), but also it’s a great tool for visual brainstorming.

Next?

In my next post, I’ll expand on these indirect uses which for some of you may become very direct, applicable uses indeed. Stay tuned!