PINNING ON PINTEREST TO GENERATE MORE LEADS

In the marketing industry, Pinterest is grossly underestimated. Pinterest is not just another fad that is being used to just pin recipes & interior design , it is a gamer changer. Pinterest is in a market leader and is in a league on its own.
While Pinterest may not be suitable for every marketer in every industry, it does offer a huge opportunity for most. Over 70 million users utilize Pinterest’s platform and that number grows worldwide each day. In addition, Pinterest users spend the most money compared to other users of popular social networks — nearly double the amount of money spent from Facebook users and triple the amount from Twitter users. This means that Pinterest has a wellspring of potential leads and potential customers just waiting to be tapped into. Let us teach you how to engage and convert those who will probably spend a decent amount with you.

Back To The Basics On Pinterest

First off, thinking about generating leads … and actually generating leads on Pinterest are two very different things.
There’s really only two ways to generate leads right now, making Pinterest a fairly simple social media network to deal with. So we’ll walk you through both types of lead generation and how you can optimize pins to make the most of those lead generation opportunities.
Keep in mind that most people go to Pinterest during the beginning stages of the planning process. When people want to plan a wedding, outfit or vacation, they use Pinterest like a visual search engine to give them ideas.

Types of Leads You Can Generate on Pinterest

On Pinterest, there are two types of leads you can generate: direct and indirect. It all boils down to where Pinterest is on the conversion path. Here’s the difference between the two:
Direct Leads: Direct leads are generated through content on Pinterest that links directly back to a landing page on your website. On that landing page, visitors can share their personal information (a name, email address, phone number, etc) in exchange for an offer — whether that be an ebook, coupon, infographic, or any other piece of content.
Indirect Leads: Indirect leads are generated by using Pinterest on the path to conversion — but it’s not the final destination before someone gets to a landing page. For example, if you shared a blog post that had a call-to-action to a landing page at the bottom of the post, your initial pin is helping direct visitors to that landing page.
Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest really only has a one effective place where you can generate direct or indirect leads: through pins.

Yes, you can technically include links to lead generation material in boards and even in your profile, but those are considerably less effective than through pins; for two main reasons: 1) Links in Board and Profile descriptions don’t automatically hyperlink (thus decreasing the possibility of someone clicking on them dramatically), and 2)Most people are spending time pinning and repinning, so they probably aren’t taking the time to check out your page or board description for extra, juicy, non-visual content. Spend your time wisely and focus on where you produce the most results.
Spend time creating and optimizing pins to get clicks, repins, and likes to help maximize the ROI of Pinterest and help drive your lead generation growth. Let’s break down each part of the pinning process so you can squeeze the juice out of all of your Pinterest lead generation opportunities.

How to Optimize Your Pins for Lead Generation

1) Create a board that your Pinterest audience can — and will want to — discover.

Pinterest is known for having an audience obsessed with food, fashion, and DIY goodies — which makes marketers think that we all have to produce those three things to be successful. And while we all don’t have businesses built around those three things, there is a huge opportunity on Pinterest to tap into the lastest obsession.

Show Them Your Ways

Show people how they can make something or give them the tools to do it — despite what industry you’re in — and Pinterest users will gravitate towards your content. They like visual content that is helpful and engaging. Feature board topics that bolster helpful content that will also generate leads. We have done this very thing by making a Pinterest board purely for templates that users can download and print — but there are lots of other ways you can make that same idea work for your company and Pinterest boards.

Once you pick a board topic idea, be sure that it is search engine friendly (both on Pinterest and otherwise). Tightly align your board names with how your users speak and think with something clever, with industry speak. Besides that, if you want a more in-depth Pinterest SEO guide, check out this blog post.

2) Create images that Pinterest users naturally notice.

Now that you’ve got your board idea, you’ve got to fill it with pins. Whether you decide to create an image yourself or use a royalty-free stock image, there’s actually some science to choosing pins that people notice, and click on. Here are a few data-backed pin composition tips.

Don’t use UTM parameters or shortened links in your pin URL.

Adding a link to your landing page or other piece of content is crucial to generating leads, but unfortunately, Pinterest strips UTM parameters after the campaign source parameter. Pinterest warns users that all shortened links could lead to spam, so your best bet is just putting in a simple URL in the URL box and trying to measure success in other ways.

Keep It Simple Sweetie

Next up is your pin’s description. Keep the copy short and sweet — usually between 100 and 200 characters works best — while also making room for a shortened URL. This is the place where you want to include a shortened, trackable URL in your pin, as Pinterest doesn’t restrict these links like it does with the actual pin URL. Providing a link in the description gives your followers even more opportunities to click, and maybe even become a lead.

Add a hashtag, if relevant.

Let people discover your pins more easily by including a relevant hashtag or two. Don’t go overboard though — Salesforce has found that on Twitter, tweets with one or two hashtags receive 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags. Obviously, Twitter isn’t Pinterest, but it is a good practice to take cross-platform.

Rinse, repeat.

And you’re done with making pins — so keep following steps two through eight until you have a robust board.

Spread your pins far and wide.

To get the most out of your pins, you gotta get outside of Pinterest. Just like you would with any other content platform, you’ve got to promote your boards and pins to really make the most of them. There are lots of things you can try here — from sharing links to individual pins on other social networks to embedding your lead generation boards on your website or blog , the world is your oyster. You might even So go on, get creative — the more eyeballs you can get on your pins, the more leads you can generate.

Keep track of your success with a few different tools.

Obviously, when you’re trying to generate leads on Pinterest, your main metric will be leads. But, there’s lots that happens before people become leads, so if you’re finding your lead generation number staying stagnant or decreasing, check for holes in the proverbial Pinterest bucket by looking deeper into referrals and clicks.
Unfortunately, because of the way that Pinterest strips URLs, it’s not quite as easy to get a definitive number of success through referral traffic, but here are a few metrics you should keep an eye on to get a general understanding on how your Pinterest lead generation strategy is working:

General Pinterest Referral Traffic:

You can find this metric in your marketing analytics software. (HubSpot customers, you’ll find this under the Sources report.) While this also loops in traffic from pins outside of your board, it’s a good idea of how well the Pinterest audience enjoys your content. If you’re finding lots of referrals from Pinterest but few clicks on your board, you might want to switch up what you’re pinning.

Pinterest Analytics Clicks:

If you have a verified business account , you can access these metrics directly in Pinterest’s dashboard. It’s not clear whether clicks are just for the URL clicks or for the whole pin (which includes clicks on the description), so you will have to do some data slicing and dicing. Regardless, this a great metric to have in your back pocket.

Shorted URL Clicks:

You can see this metric by putting the shortened URL in your browser followed immediately by a + sign. If you want to isolate clicks purely on the link in one description, this is a great metric.

UTM Parameters:

You can see this metric if you dive deeper into your marketing analytics software than the general referral traffic (usually placed under “campaigns”). This metric can help track how well your Pinterest descriptions are doing at sending you traffic. This way, you can figure out if including a shortened URL even makes a difference — or adds clutter to your description. Gotta test these things out for yourself, even if they are general best practices.

And once you have all of this data, use it to help you iterate on your strategy. Pretty soon, you’ll have leads flowing in — the proof you need to keep up with this hot social network.