If you’re anything like me, you started the year never having heard of Pinterest. Then you woke up one day and it was everywhere, as consumers and brands glommed onto the visual social platform that gives users a way to display, share and comment on pretty pictures that make them happy, touch their emotions or add a chuckle to the day.
Luckily for restaurants and retailers, users also pin products and brands they plan to buy, including a favorite pair of jeans or a favorite vegetarian meal. Who are they? Nearly 5 million visitors in March were women, and moms are 61% more likely than other demographic groups to spend time on the website, ClickZ reported.
The site is young, but its popularity has grown so quickly that there are plenty of experts offering tips on how to market on Pinterest, including a Restaurant Hospitality article by TVI Marketing Manager Eugene Farber.
Because Pinterest is such a visual platform, the right photos and images are essential to any marketing effort. For restaurants, that means food pictures, but it also means snapshots of special events involving the restaurant or your chef; pictures of the restaurant space and action shots of your servers; media coverage of the restaurant; and photos of the inspiration behind your dishes, Farber writes.
Populate Digital ran a useful graphic on the same topic, with 64 tips covering issues including how to create a profile and boards, copyright concerns and what to research to ensure you’re on the right track with your Pinterest marketing.
As with any social-marketing effort, the work truly begins once you’ve created your profile and started to populate it. One of the easy first steps is linking your Pinterest account to Facebook and Twitter, to expand the reach of your pins into the social universe and boost the likelihood that prospective patrons will get to know your brand. “It is important to remember that this is a social network, and it only work if you are being social,” TVI’s Farber writes.
If you want more step-by-step advice on how to create a winning presence on Pinterest, Northwest University Marketing Vice President Jason Miles created the blog Marketing on Pinterest and offers a free, 33-page guide that starts with a glossary of terms for users and includes plenty of examples for creating eye-catching photos that will get noticed and tell a story about your brand.
How is your restaurant marketing on Pinterest, and how’s it going? Tell us in the comments.