Introduction

Despite quietly growing an audience of middle-American moms and crafters for several years prior, Pinterest first exploded onto the national scene in late 2011. That’s when marketers and site owners first started noticing impressive amounts of traffic streaming into their sites from this little-known social channel. Before long, site owners were clamoring for a better understanding of “this thing called Pinterest” and the media was buzzing about social media’s newest darling. As press mentions grew, more users streamed into the site and traffic referrals continued to climb.

With more than 25 million active users, Pinterest has fast become a major player in the world of social media, ranking as the third most popular social network behind Facebook and Twitter. In a world where 91 percent of adults use social media “regularly” and 15 percent of online visits were to social media sites (according to Experian’s 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report), those figures are worth paying attention to.

Pinterest made its mark on the Internet by allowing web users to create image-based archives of web content organized by topics and themes. Pinterest basically took the concept of web-based bookmarks, made it visual, and allowed people to share their streams with other members of the service. These days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a 25–40-year-old American woman who hasn’t heard of the service, and interest from men and other countries is growing steadily.

For websites and brands targeting the female demographic, Pinterest is fast becoming an essential component of a solid social media strategy. Even male-focused brands and the business-to-business market have begun to embrace and explore the service, opening the doors to an entirely new way of reaching consumers on the Web.

Learning how to get your brand proper exposure on Pinterest is becoming an essential skill for anyone tasked with overseeing online marketing.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is designed for anyone involved in social media marketing or online marketing. Such people probably fall into three basic groups:

• Website owners and bloggers who are looking for ways to leverage Pinterest to drive new and qualified traffic to their websites. These people are probably already familiar with the traffic potential of Pinterest but are looking to better understand how to channel that traffic more specifically and how to use Pinterest to boost awareness of their sites and blogs.
• Brand managers and content managers who are looking to better understand the role Pinterest plays in the everyday lives of their target audience and who want to learn to better target that audience through the curation of brand-supporting pinboards and content. These people will benefit most from understanding how Pinterest can help boost or solidify their brand identities and how Pinterest can provide valuable consumer insight on their target audiences.
• Social media marketers and strategists who want to stay on top of the ever-changing world of social media to make sure their clients are maximizing exposure channels. These people will be looking to understand the best tactics for approaching Pinterest as a direct marketing channel. They’ll be looking at what types of images perform best, what types of content or interactive contests have the most potential, and how best to integrate Pinterest into existing social media plans for their clients.

The great news is that Pinterest has a low learning curve. Most companies can be up and running on Pinterest in an afternoon and can easily have a starter-level strategy in place for testing in a matter of days. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the best ways to build a brand presence on Pinterest as well as how to leverage it for both traffic development and consumer insight. It features numerous case studies, examples, and ideas that you can immediately put to work for your website or your clients’ websites.

A huge benefit to getting involved with Pinterest marketing right now is the wide open landscape this new channel presents. As of this writing, Pinterest’s Terms of Service were extremely open and had very few limitations on how the service can be leveraged by websites, brands, and marketers. As a result, marketing blogs and discussion forums are chock-full of stories, examples, and ideas of how best to get rolling with your own Pinterest campaigns. Taking advantage of the resources listed in Appendix A of this book will help you keep up-to-date on the latest ideas being kicked around the Web. The newness of this medium also provides inventive social media strategists with an excellent chance to carve out new business niches for themselves and gives brand managers the chance to score impressive wins with creative new tactics.

With Pinterest Marketing: An Hour A Day, my goal is to provide not only a step-by-step guide to help you get started with your Pinterest marketing plan, but also to get you thinking about the many ways that Pinterest can be used to improve your website, your content efforts, and even your company as a whole. I hope you will be inspired to create amazing content and to take advantage of the trails created within Pinterest to find and reach out to your brand’s biggest evangelists on Pinterest and across the Web.

There are several ways you can use this book. The most straightforward is to start at the beginning and follow each chapter as a step-by-step guide to building, leveraging, measuring, and refining your Pinterest strategy. Alternately, if you’ve already been using Pinterest and have a solid grasp of the basics, you can skip around from chapter to chapter to absorb the ideas and suggestions for making your Pinterest presence even stronger. However you choose to approach the book, pay special attention to Chapters 8 and 14, which focus heavily on measuring and refining your approach to Pinterest over time. It is with this knowledge that you will be able to create and improve upon your own ideas to make Pinterest a powerful part of your ongoing social media marketing efforts.

What You Will Learn

Pinterest is about more than pretty graphics and do-it-yourself content. It’s a place where people go to collect, organize, and share the content that matters to them. It’s a source of inspiration and a haven for ideas. This book will help you look past any preconceived notions you may have of Pinterest and will allow you to see it for what it is: an amazingly effective resource that gives companies valuable insight into what matters most to their target audience.

I’ll teach you the fundamentals of building a Pinterest presence, but I’ll also help you understand how to structure it in a way that allows you to reach a wide and varied audience while still keeping them highly engaged.

I’ll also detail the best practices used to attract attention in the extremely competitive world of gathering repins and will help you learn how to increase the potential that your content will be consumed, shared, and archived for future interactions. I’ll show which types of contests and which methods of engagement will be the best fit for your style of company and will offer tips and ideas for making even the least sexy brands fare well on this image-based website.

Finally, you’ll explore the best ways to measure and refine your efforts over time, focusing in on common problems with Pinterest campaigns and how to combat them. You’ll even take a look at the future of Pinterest to explore how this growing channel could impact not only the way people consume content online, but even how search engines value content in the future. Overall, I’ll help you view Pinterest as more than just another social media channel so you can grasp the full impact it can have on the way your company does business on the Web.

What You Need

The only thing you really need to get rolling with Pinterest is an Internet connection and a Pinterest account. That said, if you are looking to properly leverage Pinterest as a marketing channel, it’s a good idea to have a working knowledge of a solid analytics program (like Google Analytics), access to some image-editing software, and the ability to create or outsource strong content development.

What Is Covered in This Book

Pinterest Marketing: An Hour A Day is organized to provide you with a step by step approach to building a sustainable Pinterest marketing plan.