Combining Inbound Marketing and Pinterest for Ad Agency New Business

 

gyro ad agency, pinterest, ad agency new business

Pinterest’s has the potential to offer far more value than Facebook and Twitter because of its ability to aggregate and naturally curate content – Forbes

I had the privilege of presenting at Hubspot’s Inbound 2012 Conference in Boston. A record 2,800 were in attendance from all over the globe. Amazing growth from the several hundred in attendance just 2 years prior. Inbound marketing has created a fundamental shift in how agencies relate to potential clients.

Content marketing for agency new business has become a significant strategy to reach a specific target audience through the creation of appealing content.

Content marketing continues to evolve. Users shifted to visual content in 2012. Improving your agency’s visual content strategy is a key for creating awareness and new business opportunities.

Pinterest has become the major content marketing platform for displaying content visually.

Pinterest is likely to be the hottest social media platform for business marketers—next year, according to Forbes.

It has a proven ability to drive referral traffic, more than Google +, YouTube and LinkedIn. A Pinterest page is more inviting and searchable.  It also improves users’ ability to scan information quickly and changing online viewer habits.

At this years Online Marketing Summit, Danny Maloney, CEO and Co-Founder of PinLeague, shared the following Pinterest stats in his session, “Tapping into Pinterest: The Time is Now!”:

  • PinLeague estimates that Pinterest will have 90% of the top 1500 brands within 12 months.
  • The average order value on Twitter’s $69, Facebook’s $80, Pinterest’s $179.
  • The half-life of a pin is more +1 week compared to 80 min for a Facebook post, and 5-25 min for a tweet.
  • It is not about conversation, it is about quality content. It is a 175 to 1 ratio on repins versus comments.
  • Contributing 20% of social commerce.

Pinterest Continues its Evolution with the Launch of Business Pages

For the first time, Pinterest unveils accounts that are specific to marketers in move to be business friendly. Even more reason for agencies to have a branded presence in this space.

“Pinterest’s goal is to get the thousands of businesses already on the platform to migrate their accounts over to the business type. Pinterest also has an incentive for them to make the switch. We hope to add more tools and features that are geared toward this audience,” according to Pinterest Product Manager, Cat Lee, who was quoted in a recent AdAge article.

According to the latest research, the audience you build through Pinterest will have much stronger connections to your agency than on any other social network. Here are some best practices for building targeted traffic according to PinLeague:

  • Have at least 10 boards with a minimum of 10 pins each.
  • Move the target Pinterest boards to slots 2, 3 and 4 on your profile; these locations are the most visible on your profile.
  • Besides your profile picture, board cover photos are the first images that users associate with your account. They should be high-quality and eye-catching.
  • Make sure that your boards are named properly to suggest what content they contain. Keep the board names short and relevant.
  • Pin content from sites that you know will interest your target audience.
  • Followers of your account don’t want to think being advertised to. They want a relationship with your agency’s brand.  So don’t be overtly promotional.
  • Be especially attentive to anyone interacting with your target Pinterest boards. Reach out to them and start a dialogue, repin or like their pins, etc.
  • Repinning relevant content from your followers is a great way to diversify your boards and has the plus of engaging your fans on the site.
  • Pins should always link to the original site the content came from.
  • Make sure your boards have eye catching cover photos. Cover photos are the key to getting Pinterest users  to visit a board and follow it.
  • Pin new content to your boards regularly to keep traffic coming to them. You can even “recycle” pins by repinning them to the same board again.
  • Pinterest’s search engine is really simple; use common language to describe the pins so they are more likely to be found.
  • With the fans you have on other platforms, drive them to your boards with content not a request to “join you on Pinterest.”
  • Mix owned content and other content that interests your audience.

A good example on how agencies should be using Pinterest: gyro Ideas Shop

“Pinterest holds great potential, but that “potential” will only be realized by those who seek to define or dare I say, “pin it.”  Scott Gillum, president of the Washington, DC office of gyro and head of the agency’s Channel Marketing practice

Additional Pinterest articles and resources that may be of interest:

 

About Michael Gass

Consultant | Trainer | Author | Speaker

Since 2007, he has been pioneering the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.

He is the founder of Fuel Lines Business Development, LLC, a firm which provides business development training and consulting services to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies.

Comments

  1. Great article guys! One small edit: “Pinterest Continues it’s Evolution with the Launch of Business Pages” should be “its” not “it’s” 😉

  2. Michael Gass says

    Thanks Richard and I appreciate the edit as well.

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