10 Ways to Leverage Pinterest for B2B Marketing
At a recent B2B networking, the conversation steered naturally to current trends in the B2B marketing world. I heard the usual chants of “our Facebook marketing is really picking up and our fan count went up x times in the first quarter of 2012”; “we answered x no. of questions on LinkedIn this month”; “I made x new connections this week”; and so on. Of course, I waited to hear some words of wisdom like maybe, “our lead to sale conversion ratio went up x times this quarter”; or “marketing contributed x percentage to our bottom line last month with some very good quality leads”; “sales have picked up now that our marketing and sales teams are working together to qualify and nurture leads”—of course, my waiting was futile.
What caught my attention was one B2B organization’s senior manager remarking that “we really are striving to become Pinteresting to our customers”. He turned to me right after that and asked, “how do you think a B2B company like ours can integrate Pinterest into our demand generation strategy?” I replied that I don’t know yet but will certainly look into what insights are available in the marketplace. But I also thought to myself that it is rather early to be anxious about this just yet. Pinterest is yet another social media tool; the new kid on the block, hence attractive; but I would not find myself on pins and needles wondering how to be Pinteresting! A content sharing site and virtual pin board must be exciting for the B2C marketer who has so much visual material to share with prospects and customers. For the B2B marketer—I would wait and watch what happens. I don’t see B2B companies spending big bucks on billboards or TV commercials, so why would they invest time and effort in a similar web-based medium?
Leveraging Pinterest for B2B Marketing
I promised to look into what seem to be the best ways to leverage Pinterest for marketing, so I’ve gathered a few top tips listed below. In my opinion, most of these apply to B2C marketers and I have my serious doubts about how (or if) they will work in the B2B space. But here is the list anyway:
- Pin Infographics pertaining to your industry that will offer your target audience useful insights presented in a visual format—monitor who is downloading and sharing them.
- Try creating a visual-rich company newsletter or channel marketing newsletter and share it on Pinterest—see if it goes viral.
- Is your senior management / executive board a team of well-recognized personalities? Post their pictures and profiles on Pinterest—it may help to give your brand a human face.
- Tabulated data, charts and graphics from your company’s blog can be interesting visual content to share and will help drive traffic to your blog too.
- Have an e-book or whitepaper that you are trying to get prospects to download from your email marketing campaign? Design a good cover page for the digital book or paper and share it on Pinterest.
- Did you conduct a recent webinar? The slide deck or presentation could be valuable visual content for your Pinterest page.
- It’s okay to like, comment on and / or share other people’s pins on your pin board. You may benefit from some reciprocal sharing.
- Have an attractive visual on your website? Link to it from Pinterest and monitor your site analytics to see if it helps to get you any increased traffic.
- Do you have a great video of a focus group in action, a customer meet in progress, an industry association’s panel discussion where your top executive was a speaker, a trade show seminar you presented at? Pin it!
- Add your Pinterest “follow me” button on your website, blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile and email signature. Not sure the increased followers will mean anything, but like I said, this is a list based on what I am seeing and hearing about Pinterest.
At best, the tips above are tactics that may work for B2C. The challenge is to ascertain at what stage Pinterest fits within the overall B2B marketing strategy, if at all it does. Very early days in my opinion; so let’s not get carried away by the initial overwhelming interest in Pinterest.
What are your thoughts about Pinterest and B2B marketing? Have you done any experimentation yet with this social media platform? I would be interested to know your early observations.
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