Chapter 3

Before You Pin

Who Do You Want to Attract?

I’m about to say something some people might consider scandalous. Are you sitting down?

Here’s the big shocker: If you don’t think about strategy before you dive into Pinterest marketing, your pinning efforts are very likely to be a giant waste of time.

The first thing you need to do—even before you create your boards and pins—is to define your Pinterest strategy in order to determine which individuals you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts. And the more you know, the better your chances of being able to truly connect with those people. Defining your Pinterest strategy will also help you keep your focus where it needs to be: on bringing in leads and getting clients. And it will also help you recognize where Pinterest fits into your overall sales and marketing process.

In this chapter, I will help you define your ideal client, discuss how you can shape your content on Pinterest so it’s highly attractive to that client, remind you of the purpose of social media promotion (including Pinterest marketing), and teach you the tools you need to make sure you don’t get shunned from the Pinterest party for bad behavior.

Defining Your Ideal Client

Do you know who your ideal client is?

I’ll bet that you currently have some customers you love to work with, people who energize and invigorate you. Think of one or two of your favorite clients, and consider what it is you enjoy about working with them. Why do you like helping that kind of person?

Author David Meerman Scott introduced the concept of “buyer personas” in his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly (now in it’s third edition). Scott explains how creating a buyer persona (or ideal client) is one of the most important things your company can do before you begin publishing social media campaigns and reaching out via online tools.

Your buyer persona (or ideal client) is simply a descriptive profile of the kind of client you’re trying to reach. Creating these kinds of profiles is a critical first step in defining your online strategy.

In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Scott describes the following exercise, which one particular university conducted to define their buyer personas:

. . . if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic. For example, a college website usually has the goal of keeping alumni happy so that they donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. A college might have two buyer personas for alumni: young alumni (those who graduated within the past 10 or 15 years) and older alumni. Universities also have a goal of recruiting students by driving them into the application process. The effective college site might have a buyer persona for the high school student who is considering college. But since the parents of the prospective student have very different informational needs, the site designers might build another buyer persona for parents. A college also has to keep its existing customers (current students) happy. In sum, that means a well-executed college site might target five distinct buyer personas. . . . By truly understanding the needs and the mindset of the five buyer personas, the college will be able to create appropriate content.

One of the best ways to create detailed, useful buyer persona profiles is to connect directly at the source; that is, to interview people. If you have direct access to some of your favorite clients, ask if you can talk to them on the phone for a few minutes.

You want to know as much as possible about each group of people, so ask as many questions as you can. How old are they? Do they have children? What specific problems do they wake up in the morning thinking about? What words do they use in describing themselves and the issues they are facing? What do they do for fun? What websites and social media tools do they use? What brings them joy?

Use the answers you gather to create a detailed profile on each type of client you are trying to attract to your business. Write the description of the profile down, add a photo, and hang it in a prominent place in your office as a reminder to everyone on your staff. You can even give each profile a nickname that helps you remember their preferences or distinctive traits, like “Sally the Bride-to-Be” or “John the Coach.”

Oreck (@oreck), maker of vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, and other small appliances, focuses on women as their ideal clients. Oreck marketers could potentially create a detailed ideal-client profile called “Suzy Homemaker,” and fill it in with details about where Suzy lives, whether she has kids or pets, and what her hobbies are. The U.S. Army (@usarmy) might have a few different profiles, including the young men and women they are looking to recruit, and members of the general public who are looking to support our troops.

This exercise may seem silly to you, but don’t underestimate its importance. The more you know about the customers you’re trying to reach on Pinterest, the more successful you’ll be in connecting with them via your marketing efforts.

What Does Your Ideal Client Want?

Now that you’ve defined your ideal client and found out as much about him or her as you can, you have a much clearer position from which to start when you set up your Pinterest account.

Your pins and boards will be much more appealing to your target audience if you focus on your ideal client while you’re pinning. Think about these various buyer personas when you’re deciding whether or not to pin an image or video. Ask yourself, “Would my ideal client find this useful, educational, entertaining, or inspiring?” If the answer is yes, pin away! If not, keep looking for something that does fit into one of these categories.

The brand Pretzel Crisps (@PretzelCrisps) does a beautiful job of speaking to their ideal clients with their Pinterest boards. This smart snack company not only uses their pins to supply great ways to use their product (appetizers, dips, etc.), but, they have also loaded up their boards with other images and ideas that their followers and fans love. They even have a board called “Genius,” which is filled with smart and clever ideas for homes and offices. Their content is appealing to the customers they’re trying to reach because Pretzel Crisps knows exactly who they are looking to connect with.

Another example of a company that’s using smart Pinterest strategy is the AARP (@AARP_Official). Although this membership association is new to Pinterest, they’ve already got a good start—they have cleverly-named boards that reach out to their target audience of seniors, like “50+ Technology” and “Movies for Grownups.” Senior members on Pinterest know that this content is just for them, because it’s personalized specifically for the needs and desires of the 50+ crowd. And when customers know that you’ve taken the time to figure out precisely what they want, they’ll keep coming back for more!

Pinterest: One Piece of Your Overall Marketing Strategy

It’s easy to get lost in the circus of social media. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest, we often trick ourselves into believing that we’re being incredibly productive by spending 10 hours a day interacting with people via all these different platforms. To complicate things even further, it seems like a new social media tool arrives on the scene every six months, and the social media gurus start yelling that you must have a presence within this newest site—otherwise, your business is completely sunk.

Sit back, take a deep breath, and let the circus music fade away. I’m going to straighten out some misconceptions for you.

When it comes to online marketing, your goals are simple: Drive traffic back to your website, add people to your mailing list, and turn those visitors into buyers.

Picture your marketing strategy as the wheel of a bicycle. Your content-rich website or blog is the hub of that wheel, and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are the spokes. And while they are very important spokes, they are nonetheless merely spokes. Social media tools should act as distribution and traffic-building mechanisms for your website’s top-quality content. Building relationships and trust on social media is incredibly important, as well. However, if the people with whom you’re building these connections never leave your Pinterest profile or Facebook page, then you are spinning your wheels (and probably wasting a lot of time).

Pinterest is no different than any other social media site. If your Pinterest efforts are not helping you bring people to your business’s door, you need to change the way you are using the site.

We’ll talk later in this book (Chapter 10) about ways to track Pinterest traffic, sign-ups, and conversions, so you know which of your efforts are working (and which are not). But for now, remember this: Your goal is to increase the number of leads your company acquires and the number of sales you close. Period.

We all need to remember that participating in social media circles is a means to an end—not the end itself.

So...