3 Clever Ways Your Pinterest Page Can Generate Leads for Your Business

By James Scherer

Do you love Pinterest but aren’t sure you’re using it as well as you could for your business? Feel like you’re missing something?

You just might be.

Pinterest is so much more than pretty pictures of pretty things. It’s an increasingly popular, increasingly successful platform for marketing, with some sources citing a single Pin worth 78 cents in real-world sales.

But not everyone succeeds on the platform. Pinterest has far and away the most gender-targeted audience of the top 6 social platforms. We’re talking about a social site with an 80 percent female user base. For those businesses that know how to connect on it, though, it’s becoming the most exciting platform with the most exciting opportunities to generate brand awareness, show off products, and engage with consumers.

However, there’s more to Pinterest than just putting up a well-posed image of vintage leg warmers. If you're looking for exciting -- and unexpected ways -- to use Pinterest for your business, read on.

1. Pin-to-Win Contests

Pinterest is an awesome platform for contests, as the platform is, at its heart, a socially competitive one.

Think about it. Only on Pinterest do all users (not just businesses) actively court the public to support their opinions. Someone pins an image they’ve found of their favorite wedding dress, and their primary goal is to have someone else appreciate the image they’ve found and pin it themselves. In other words, Pinners pin for the repin. (Did that make sense?)

Pinterest is the only platform on which success for the individual comes from dissemination. This environment also is perfect for a lead generation contest, as 70 percent of Pinterest users use the platform to get inspiration on what to buy (compared to 17 percent on Facebook). This creates an environment where people actively want the things they see.

Tip #1: Ensure your Pinterest images are in portrait mode and roughly 600 pixels by 900. Compress them to below 100 KB  -- there are hundreds of image compressing tools online -- if possible.

Step-by-step:

• On your website (or on Facebook or Twitter with a 3rd party app), create a visually appealing landing page devoted to your contest.
• Create a contest in which users pin images of your products or their favorite related images onto their own boards.
• Decide on a prize closely related to your business. (This ensures leads are genuinely interested in your products, instead of simply a cash prize or random iPad.)
• "Email-gate" entry to the contest by requiring that entrants provide their email address before they can enter-to-win (lead generation!).
• On the entry form, ask entrants to enter the URL of the Pinterest board they’re submitting.
• You can either choose the winner of your pin-to-win contest yourself or (with a 3rd party app) open the contest to voting. Voting encourages entrants to share and promote their pinned images (and therefore your brand) across their own social networks.

Tip #2: Remember to include an Alt Tag for your images -- this helps with search. Include in the tag a few keywords relevant to the product or your business. This is important not only for search within Pinterest, but whenever someone pins your image they pin the Alt Tag as well. Pretty cool, huh?

2. Send Pinners to a Lead-Generation Page

Driving Pinners off Pinterest and onto your website is the goal of many businesses on Pinterest. Many businesses focus on making a sale by sending Pinterest traffic to a landing page where they can buy the awesome thing they’ve just seen.

But what if you don’t sell beautiful products that encourage an immediate sell? Well, that’s where a lead-generation landing page comes in. Marketing your products can be about either the immediate sell (based on a discount, an awesome salesperson, or an immediate need) or it can be about a nurturing sales funnel, of which Pinterest can be an integral and powerful part.

Tip #3: The shelf life of a Pin is much longer than any other social endorsement -- with half of all site visits occurring at least 3 and a half months after the initial Pin -- so don’t necessarily get rid of popular Pins after the initial engagement spike has lapsed.

Step-by-step:

• Create an email-gated landing page on your website devoted to your business’s resources (case studies, ebooks, white papers, etc.).
• Create a Pinterest board devoted to that content.
• Use appealing, catchy, or intriguing parts of your content (i.e., a statistic from a case study, an interesting question asked in the ebook) and use these tidbits to encourage a click-through from your Pinterest board.
• Remember to Alt Tag your images with search-friendly keywords relative to the content itself.

Tip #4: Get specific with your boards titles, and keep them above the fold. For example, instead of a "Fashion Highlights" board, go with four different seasonal fashion boards; instead of a "Social Media Marketing Advice" board, break it up by platform.

3. Pinterest Exclusive Coupons

Creating coupons that are exclusive to Pinterest encourages people to follow you there instead of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If your customer demographics align with Pinterest more closely than they do with other platforms, generating exclusive engagement may have a huge influence on your social media marketing ROI.

So, if the niche fits, I definitely recommend you focus time and energy on developing fans who engage exclusively on Pinterest. Now, while you can’t ‘Follow-gate’ a coupon code like you can ‘Like-gate’ a Facebook contest (yet!), you can stimulate engagement exclusively on Pinterest by providing the link to the coupon only through that site.

Step-by-step:

• Create an email-gated and optimized landing page on your website, blocking people from accessing the coupon code.
• Create an eye-catching Pin that links to the landing page and the time-limited coupon code.
• Promote the Pin on your other social platforms with a post or tweet saying something like, “Do you like discounted stuff? Head over to Pinterest to get access to 50% off your first purchase with AcmeShades. Offer expires on Friday at midnight so get moving!”
• Remember to include in these posts eye-catching images such as your products, the Pinterest logo, or something related to the sale itself (like the discount percentage or dollar value).

Ensuring the coupon is available only from Pinterest means that users must have a Pinterest account in order to see the link. Not only does this generate leads for your business, it also increases the chance of generating Followers.

Or…

• Integrate a discount code option into your website’s "shopping cart" page.
• Provide discount codes in the description for your products on Pinterest. Only Pinterest users will see and get access to this code.

Forty-two percent of Facebook users become fans of a brand's page in order to get access to coupons or discounts. There haven't been any studies published on this same subject for Pinterest users, but it is entirely likely that the results would be the same. If you are periodically offering concrete value to your Pinterest followers, they’ll stay more engaged, encourage their own social circles to engage, and remain loyal customers for a longer time.

Tip #5: If you haven’t applied for rich-pin integration, definitely give it a look-see. Brands with rich pin integration have a 82 percent higher repin to pin ratio than normal Pins. Giving your audience more information (price, availability, etc.) is also a great way to drive them off-platform.

Lead generation is just the start of your sales funnel, but it’s always exciting to find a new way to get people moving towards a sale. Have you considered Pinterest for lead generation before? Have you ever run a pin-to-win contest? How did it go? Start the conversation below.