You may not have heard of Pinterest if you are not an avid fan of arts and crafts. Pinterest is a hub of quirk and interest, an online visual search engine that allows its users to discover, pin (aka collect on a page/profile) and share pictures and videos relating to their interests. They pin these items on “Boards” – different pages they label as subcategories like Fashion, Craft, House Inspo and so on.

Pinterest is a huge hit amongst the public as a personal tool, but what benefits can it provide to your business? Like all social networks, it can be used carefully and cleverly as a marketing tool to do 5 key things.

Grow Your Audience

The more frequently you use the site, the more likely your content is to be pinned. When this happens, your content and services are exposed to new groups of people, with massive global potential.

Grow Brand Awareness

With all these potential people seeing your content, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand values and personality by selecting content that fits. As you are more active and engaging, the audience learn more about you and this helps to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Improve your SEO

Using the correct keywords across Pinterest can help to improve not just Pinterest Search Rankings, but also Google Search Rankings for your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Creating content to pin allows you to include a direct link to your website, product or service! This means that every single piece of content you are sharing can have a direct call-to-action with potentially great results.

Place Ads

Like other platforms, Pinterest even allows you to turn your content into ads and will place them across the network. These appear to a person looking like normal pins – almost. They have a small text indication that the piece of content is an advertisement. They have an easy to use ad manager that allows you to define audience characteristics including Age, Gender, Interests, Location, Language and Device. You can even use business analytics so you can see how your ad is doing.

This is all great! But how do you know if Pinterest is for you? Have a look at what your business is promoting and compare it carefully to the type of content and consumers on Pinterest. If you are a finance business, then it might not be the right move. However, if you are a fashion, beauty, furnishings or even craft brand then Pinterest could be a roaring success for you. All you need then is content that can make you stand out from the crowd.