5 Creative Ideas to Promote Your Brand Using Pinterest

I love Pinterest. Sure, it helps me get inspired to make a fantastic recipe, plan my kids’ birthday party or get my craft on. It’s also where I turn for the latest information on blogging and social media. More importantly though, Pinterest is a great way to build your brand online and drive more traffic to your website. I think it is a key component for ANY business to beef up their web presence so they can get found.

Pinterest at its core is about discovering, capturing, and sharing things that interest you. It’s also a great forum to visually tell your brand story.

So, Pin It, Promote It, Profit!

To help you Brand Strong, here are 5 Creative Ideas to Promote Your Brand on Pinterest.

1. Promote Your Speaking Capabilities. If you are a thought leader in your industry and want to secure more speaking engagements, create a Speaking Board with video snippets of your latest speaking events. This helps showcase your different topics as well as your presentation style, and it will clearly say that you want to be booked for more speaking engagements. However, although you can pin video on Pinterest you don’t want people watching the video there. You want to drive traffic to your site so take a still shot of the video and pin that but make your audience click over to your site to watch the video. Once they are on your site they can click around to learn more. You can pin some of your slides too, like Chris Brogan has, to give a sample of your content.

2. Share Your Customer Testimonials. There is nothing more powerful than having other people say great things about your company. Pinterest provides you with a unique opportunity to put a face to those testimonials which gives them a big credibility boost. Pin video of your customers saying how great you are, like HP does in the example above. Next time you are with a customer at their office or at a trade show, ask if they would give you a testimonial. Then, just pull out your Smartphone, ask them a question, and film the answer. It’s easy for customers to give you the testimonial because they don’t have to write anything. Instant credibility and brand validation! If you don’t want to go the video route, turn their testimonial into a graphic and pin it, like in the examples above.

3. Showcase Your Products or Services in Use. Show people how to use your product, show them interacting with your employees, or show them enjoying the results of your product. This is powerful storytelling. Silverback Lab does a nice job of illustrating their design process and showcasing the adventures you can have on their bicycles.

If you sell a service, you know how hard it is to sell something intangible, right? With a service your customer can’t touch, feel, smell, or kick the tires on what they are about to purchase. They need to take a leap of faith that you will deliver what you promise. (If you sell a service and you haven’t read Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible – do it now!) Pinning photos of people in the process of experiencing your service, like people standing around a horse as it is being examined, helps build trust like these pins for Wisconsin Equine Clinic.

4. Share Your Process. How do you make your products? What goes in to delivering your service? Peel back the curtains and show your customers how much time and care goes into the process of delivering on your brand promise, like Westchester Automated Gates does here. As another example, one of my clients, Moxie Jean, sells designer and stylish gently used kids clothes online. They put a lot of care into sorting the clothes they receive to make sure they only resell the best quality clothing. Since Moms don’t get a chance to check the clothes out before purchasing online, Moxie Jean needed a way to demonstrate the quality and care that goes into their selection. They need to build brand trust. So, we created some Pins to visually tell that story.

5. Customer Generated Content. Let your customers engage more with your brand by allowing them to create content for your boards. Invite them to upload photos of them using your product or service. Ask them to pin their favorite products from your web site. Highlight a VIP customer one week and ask them to curate a board around a particular industry topic. For example, UGallery.com asks artists, bloggers, writers, and designersto weigh in on their UGallery faves on their Be Art Guest Board. Constant Contact, the email software service, has a board Customer Holiday Tips where they ask their customers to share some of their Holiday small business tips.

Asking guests or customers to pin or curate boards on your Pinterest account shows that you honor your customers and they in turn will share their involvement with everyone they know. Greater exposure for your brand.

How do you use Pinterest to help build your brand or which of these ideas are your going to implement today?

Want to learn more? Follow my Tips to Promote Your Business with Pinterest Board