Mastering Pinterest Marketing for Event Planners
Nobody could have predicted that Pinterest would become a social media giant. The premise is simple: you surf the web like normal, and when you see something interesting or useful, you can save it as a pin! The pins accumulate on a pin board and the boards can be made public to share inspiration and information with others.
Many flock to Pinterest to find ideas for the events they’re planning to host. Whether it be a massive corporate event, an intimate wedding, or an over-the-top bar mitzvah, people use Pinterest to start conceptualizing how they want their event to turn out—and that’s where you come in!
Why not add your event planning business to the “world’s catalogue of ideas”? Potential clients browse Pinterest looking for the most stunning images to inspire their own show-stopping events. If you’ve done a styled shoot, and have a well-put-together website, you already have the tools ready for your foray onto Pinterest!
Sharing your boards
Sharing is caring! These days, sharing items of interest across the many social networking platforms available to us is commonplace. Load up your board with pictures, articles, or success stories from your own website or blog and send it out into cyberspace! Treat your Pinterest board like a virtual résumé—the fun and creative cousin of your LinkedIn profile.
The colorful boards will encourage people to linger on your pages. If the content is interesting, they may even save your pin onto their boards and create more portals for pinners to discover your services!
Driving traffic to your website is easier than you think. You don’t have to be the sole person adding pins to Pinterest! Look into creating or converting a personal account into a business account (more information on this below!). You’ll then be able to add the “Save” button feature onto your website or blog so that other people who stumble upon your site can export your stuff onto Pinterest for you.
Engage + Connect
Pinterest is a great platform to engage and connect with old clients and potential new ones. Satisfied clients will often want to post pictures from the event they hosted or save your pins once you post them. This is a great way to share success stories from your portfolio!
Engaging with your followers goes beyond just posting old content. Pinterest can be a handy tool for announcing big changes to your company, giving people a behind-the-scenes look at how you run your business, and even holding contests where voting is tracked by re-pins.
Marketing your brand isn’t just about engaging and connecting with potential clients. You’ll also find Pinterest to be a good hub to connect with others in the event business such as vendors, entertainers, and venues.
If you’re throwing an event, why not share what you’re doing on Pinterest to create some hype around your event and your brand? Tag the vendors, venues, and/or sponsors that you’re working with using the Place Pins feature for extra exposure. Your collaborators might even return the favor!
Group boards are an interesting concept that allow interaction between yourself and whomever else you think would be a good collaborator. You select other people such as previous clients, vendors, or venues to help build an interesting and engaging wall that serves everyone’s interests. If you choose to collaborate with eager clients or other pinners, you can get array of content that can expand the reach of your brand.
Pinterest business account
The business account is free and allows you to have access to a whole slew of cool features that will help you expand your brand on the site.
Promoted Pins
Businesses pay Pinterest to have their pins displayed more often and in more relevant and optimal places when users conduct a search. While you do have to pay for it, promoted pins can reach a wider audience and can propel your business forward.
Analytics
With analytics, you can see which pins and boards are working with your target demographic and which aren’t. You can see who has saved pins from your boards, how many times a pin has been saved, where your pins have been saved, and what platform pinners use to access your pin boards. You can then tailor your content to engage your audience more effectively. In fact, you can see details about the general demographic that visits your profile.
Posting tips!
- Follow your competitors! See what they’re pinning and what people are responding to and apply it to your own boards.
- Use the secret boards to build up enough content that you never have to launch a plain-Jane board with only a couple of pins. Secret boards are private boards where you can stockpile pins or tentatively save pins that may or may not change as you examine the analytics from your most successful boards
- While it’s great to have diverse content, keeping pins similar is an asset. Your followers will see them grouped together on their feed.
- As with Instagram, images that get the most attention are those that have multiple dominant colors and sport a warm undertone –check out the “Most Clicked” data on Pinterest Analysis and see which images and pins get the most love.
- Don’t use all 500 characters available to you in the description box! You want to describe what you’re pinning, but using every single character available to you will lose the interest of your audience. As we’ve learned from Twitter and Vine, being short and sweet can have some robust results.
