In Pinterest for the B2B tech marketeer: Part I: Think about your customers & prospects, I noted that as a technical marketing person Pinterest may not necessarily appeal to your prospects, you may, as a social media enthusiast, find it a useful creative tool for reasons such as these:
- Creating your own supporting visuals in the form of infographics, videos, slideshare cover slides charts or basically any image that “tell the story themselves” for blogs.
- Creating and/or building up new concepts and fields
- Creating mood boards
- Promoting events
Your images & videos on Pinterest
Pinterest has been a great reminder to me that some of the best, most easily digested blogs posts are the highly visual ones, particularly the ones that contain images that illustrate the point of the post.
Creating your own infographics is a great way to make your blog posts invaluable, and “pinning” the visuals that live in your posts to a board in Pinterest means that (depending on your privacy settings) they’re instantly searchable by Pinterest’s entire user base and can be repinned (and easily tweeted or shared on Facebook).
When someone repins your visual, it shows up on one of their boards in Pinterest complete with credit to you as the original pinner, and a link to the blog post where the image lives. In this way, pinning your blog post images is a great way of sharing them and driving traffic to your site.
If you don’t have a blog or site and are simply looking to promote yourself as a freelancer or category expert, you may wish to pin some of your slideshare or youtube content.
Creating and/or building up new concepts and fields
Pinterest may be a useful way of collecting and sharing visuals to promote a new visual concepts or fields within your industry. Your company may develop enterprise software that isn’t of interest to most of the current user base of Pinterest, but what about using the tool to build up a visual boards to illustrate new skills, building blocks or methods that can be shown visually to others in your field?
This may prove to be especially useful for anyone who creates visual elements for a living, such as graphic or user experience designers. A user experience designer may be able to pin and capture examples of storyboarding and narrative journey maps. These may then be repinned by other users experience designers which could help to promote the concepts within this relatively new field.
Creating mood boards
If you don’t already use mood boarding as a way to brainstorm, you should try it.
Picture this: it’s time to rebrand. You decide to let agencies pitch to redesign your website and all your supporting literature, as well as any tradeshow materials. You explain to each agency what your company does, but they all come with design examples that don’t quite catch the essence of the day to day feel of your company and the feeling you want to communicate via your branding.
I used to communicate this extra level of specific tone by creating mood boards in Prezi. I’d painstakingly crawl the web looking both for specific images and inspiration. Flicker was a good source and still is.
But I’ve found Pinterest to really stand out of the crowd when it comes to this. Because there are so many creative people uploading their images and also because I often get real surprises when I type in quite straightforward terms, I find the tool to really excel as a source for mood boarding.
Event roundups
For industry events where the sponsors and attendees are not part of the Pinterest user base, I don’t think the tool will be of much use. But as a marketing person, 50 per cent of the events I attend are marketing (and not industry specific) focused. Attendees take photos and are often happy to share their slideshare presentations.
This is where Pinterest can be a great sharing and marketing tool. Visuals relevant to the event can be placed in blog posts and then pinned and shared, and then repinned and shared (remember, you can also tweet your pins and repins). As an event organiser, this could be an invaluable way to share visuals surrounding the event, especially if the event takes place over a few days. If, for example, your event visuals began to appear in Pinterest searches for “social media” you may find you get lots of repins that link back to a blog post about the event – and ultimately greater turnout for your next event.
Conclusion
I think it’s pretty obvious here that I am trying to be pretty open minded when it comes to Pinterest simply because I like it as a somewhat indirect marketing tool as I’ve enjoyed the way it helps me creatively when it comes to thinking about social media marketing.
In part III of this series, I will (at last!) discuss at length the reasons that Pinterest does not occupy a place in my digital marketing toolbox for my hands-on, day to day tech marketing.
Techmarketingtalk 