There are people effectively marketing electronics, blogs, books, and TV shows.  You might have a great product but one that doesn’t translate directly into a product photo that is visually unique, emotionally stirring, and doesn’t evoke an aspirational lifestyle.  All is not lost.  You may still attract a large audience on Pinterest if you can use some creativity to present it in a less literal way.  Here is a checklist of a few brainstorming ideas to consider before crossing Pinterest off the list:

• Infographics.  Do you have insights from your customer data or market research that your potential customers might find entertaining or fascinating?  If not, could you pull together such data on a topic relevant to your brand or product category?  Infographics make the information visually appealing and more shareable.
  
• Humor.  Think about the life challenges faced by your customers or the frustrations they deal with when they don’t yet have your product or service.  There’s likely some humor there.  Can you find or create a cartoon, funny quote, or funny photo from this?
  
• Inspirational quotes.  Think about the aspirational goals of your customers.  What is the life that they want?  What are the challenges and obstacles they face along the way to getting there?  Find some images of inspirational quotes relevant to your audience and pin them.
  
• Identity.  Do your customers proudly identify themselves as part of a community?  Are they marathon runners, geeks, social media professionals, music lovers?  A marathon runner would l be proud to pin a “23.2 miles” image to their board that proclaims their affiliation with other runners.
  
• Events.  Do you already put together events around your product that are full of visually exciting activities?  Are people using your products and services at the event?
• Current Events.  Can you tie your brand, product, or service to current events in some way? 
  
• Celebrities.  Well-known faces can get noticed on Pinterest.  Do you have any celebrity endorsements
• Complementary Products.  Are there boards you could create of complementary products that are a good fit with the Pinterest criteria?  For example, maybe you sell travel services
  
• Seasonal Products or Events.    You may already have marketing campaigns where you tie your brand, product, or service to holidays like Valentine’s Day, Christmas, or New Year’s.  Are the images of those seasonal products or events more relevant to the Pinterest audience?
  
• Creations using your product.  If your product isn’t visually interesting by itself, how about when it’s used as part of an experience, in a recipe, or in unexpected ways?  You can capture images or solicit ideas from your customers.
  
• Customization/Personalization ideas.  Can you solicit photos of people customizing and personalizing your product?  Your most passionate customers may have done the work for you of presenting the product in a more visually unique and personal way!  The images are a testimonial to the love your customers have of your product.
  
• Competitions.  You can run competitions for people using your product and services in unique and unusual ways and post winning entries.
• Design ideas and tips for aspirational lifestyle.  Can you attract a community of people in your brand or product category by simply posting images of the lifestyle you represent?  For example, a high-end grocery store that promotes healthy, organic food has posted images of gardening and tips for being more environmentally conscious.

Once you’ve brainstormed what you can promote on Pinterest, you’ll want to apply specific marketing tactics to maximize conversion and commissions.  Refer to the  Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho for more on board organization, link conversion, pin copy, pin selection, and getting followers.

You can also find more Pinterest demographic information and insights into why people use Pinterest on this site.

For example, let’s say your favorite book in the world right now is the Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer.  You go to Amazon.com to look up an image for the book cover and you pin it to one of your boards.  At this point, any user who clicks on your pin image will be linked to the Amazon.com page where they can buy the book.  If you haven’t specifically changed the link address to use affiliate codes, Pinterest will automatically change your link so that it will collect commissions whenever anyone who clicks on your pin buys the book from Amazon.

Although the technical details of how Pinterest actually changes all your links automatically is somewhat unimportant for this discussion, you should assume that if you are linking to a product or service with an affiliate program, Pinterest will probably be able to collect commission on it.  Pinterest is using technology from Skimlinks (skimlinks.com) that has a network of 17,000+ retailers including Amazon, eBay, Target, BestBuy, Zappos, and many more.

In my opinion, this is actually a very fair business model for Pinterest.  Many people (unlike you!) are not aware of the potential to use Pinterest to make money.  Instead, they love pinning things they like and drawing inspiration from the pins of others.  So, they don’t really notice or mind that Pinterest is making a small amount of money on all of their pins.  Of course, it’s also good for the merchants (Amazon.com in our example).  They get additional traffic and sales from Pinterest and they are happy to pay the commissions for each sale as they make more by selling the product.

However, if you understand the model, you can pocket those commissions instead of Pinterest.  In order to do this, you need to first sign up as an affiliate of the merchant who is selling the product or service you want to promote.  This might seem like a lot of work if you are promoting a large, diverse number of products from many different retailers.  However, you can start by just choosing the merchants you pin from the most.  You will also be able simplify things by joining a large affiliate network like Commission Junction (www.cj.com) or Linkshare (linkshare.com) or the affiliate program of a  large retailer like Amazon.com (affiliate-program.amazon.com) that offers a large number of products.

After signing up for the affiliate program, you will get an affiliate link that you can use when linking any pins to the merchant’s site.  Here’s how to do this on Pinterest:

• Pin your image as usual using the “Add +” button on Pinterest or the “Pin It” Browser button.
• If using the “Add +” button, specify the affiliate link when creating the pin.
• If using the “Pin It” Browser button, you need to IMMEDIATELY click the Edit button on your pin and change the link to your affiliate link.  The reason this needs to be done right away is that people will almost instantly start repinning .  Only repins that happen after you change the link to your affiliate link will allow you to generate commissions.

For more specific marketing tactics to maximize conversion and commissions, refer to the  Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  The book covers board organization, link conversion, pin copy, pin selection, and getting followers.

• Mostly Female (80% female, 20% male).
• Age 25 to 54 (80% of total with 27% age 25-34, 29% age 35-44, 24% age 45-54)
• Did not complete college (only 25% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher)
• Annual household income of $25K-75K (69% of total with 35% $25K-$49K, 34% $50K-$75K)

Source: Doubleclick Ad Planner by Google, December 2011

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  Additional demographics and information on why particular groups are attracted to Pinterest are included in the book/eBook.

If you are a Community Manager, Marketing Manager, or other Social Media expert, there are a few tools that are essential to managing your boards and community on Pinterest.  These tools will make it easier for you to pin and repin as well as making it easier for others to pin content on your website and blogs.

Source URL. One of the most useful competitive research tools is a URL rather than something you need to download.  You can go to the URL pinterest.com/source/domain to get a visual list of all the pins that originated from the specified domain name.  So, if you want to see what people pinned from etsy.com, you enter the URL pinterest.com/source/etsy.com in your browser.  For each piece of content, you will also be able to gauge popularity from how many repins it got.

Search result from pinterest.com/source/designworklife.com

“Pin It” Browser Button.   To make it easier to pin images you find on the web, you can add a “Pin It” button to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar.  Once installed, you can just press the “Pin It” button whenever you see something on a web page that you want to pin.  You will be able to select the image you want on the page and it will automatically provide the appropriate link back to the source page.

Installation is an easy drag-and-drop process.  Just go to pinterest.com/about/goodies in your preferred browser for instructions.

“Pin It” button.  If you want to encourage more visitors to your blog or website to pin content to Pinterest, you can easily add a “Pin It” button to your web pages.  To do this, you will need to grab a snippet of HTML code from Pinterest at pinterest.com/about/goodies.

Follow button.  If you want to get more followers, you can add a Follow button on your website or blogs so that you can follow you with just a click.  You can get the HTML code for this button from Pinterest at pinterest.com/about/goodies.

Pinterest Mobile App.  The Pinterest iPhone app allows you to browse, pin, repin, and take photos for pins on the go.  You can install it from the iTunes Store by searching for “pinterest.”

RSS Feed.  Each Pinterest account also has a RSS feed associated with it at the URL pinterest.com/username/feed.rss.  For example, if your username is “leoncho”, your feed URL is pinterest.com/leoncho/feed.rss.  Other people can use existing RSS readers (iGoogle, Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.) to get a live feed of your pins.  If you’d like to share your Pinterest feed with other users on your blog or website, you can go to feedburner.google.com and “burn” your Pinterest feed URL.  The Feedburner site will provide you with the additional tools you need.

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  The book contains not only tools but tactis for board organization, pin content,  pin copy, link conversion, and getting followers.

• Pin, don’t just repin.  There is a dramatic difference in the number of repins, likes, and followers you get when you pin your own content rather than just repinning something you saw on Pinterest.  There are a lot of popular pins that show up again and again on Pinterest and people have already seen a lot of the repinned content already.  When you pin something new that you found yourself on the web or content you created, you’ve added real value to Pinterest and it will get noticed a lot easier.

• Don’t pin everything.  Remember that your role on Pinterest is that of a curator.  People follow you because you are filtering all the content in the world to bring them the very best of some category.  If you pin everything in sight, you’re just contributing to the information overload and you’re not adding any value.  Only pin the best of the best.  While “best” is subjective, if your followers consistently see low quality pins from you, they’ll stop following.

• Don’t just pin your own products and services.  If you’re laser-focused on marketing your own brand, products, and services, it may be tempting to only pin your own branded content.  Don’t do this.  You want to expose your brand to people who have never seen or heard of you before.  The most effective way to do this is to first attract a following of people who love the lifestyle or category you’re promoting – and only then introduce them to your brand.  For example, if you are Amy’s Bridal Gowns, you want to first attract people who are planning weddings and not just those who are already aware of your product line.  One way to do this is to pin about wedding design ideas – flowers, hair, dream locations, makeup.  Then, you can also include bridal gowns and include your products.  While you don’t need to be so fair that you pin products from your direct competitors, you should consider pinning from sources beyond your own site so that your visitors know that you are bringing them the very best from across the web and not just your own brand.  This will encourage more people to follow you and provide you an audience in the future if you want to extend your products and services into new categories.
• Experiment with different image sizes.  Most images on the web are wider than they are long.  One way to get more attention for your pins is to choose images that are longer than they are wide.  This type of “skyscraper” format is advantageous because of the way Pinterest does page layout – your images will be visible longer as a user scrolls down a long list of images.
• Do competitive research.  One quick way to find out what is popular for repinning is to look at competitors.  Use the Source URL technique (explained in more detail in the “Pinterest Tools” section) to view the type and most popular content that is being repinned on a competitor’s website.  Consider pinning similar content as it is likely to be in categories that the Pinterest community is most interested in pinning to their own boards.
• Choose pins that fall within popular categories.  Even if your pin is visually stunning and loved by other Pinterest users, they won’t repin if most of them don’t already have a board that your pin fits within.  To get an idea of the most popular categories on Pinterest, start by clicking the “Everything” menu in the top toolbar and looking at the categories. Also, keep an eye on the type of pins that show up most frequently when you select “Popular” from the menu.
• Only pin visually stunning content.  Your pin image is going to be featured on a long scrolling list alongside hundreds of other images.  Pinterest users will quickly scroll through these images to find something that jumps out at them.  To even have a chance of getting noticed, your image needs to visually pop.  Consider composition, color, perspective, and recognizable faces as important criteria in choosing which images to pin.  If your image doesn’t stand out, look for a different image.
• Add variety to your pins.  Don’t pin nearly identical things all at once to the same board or your audience will be overwhelmed and stop following you.  Especially for products, don’t pin the green model, light green model, blue model, and 20 different variants of the same product in rapid succession.  Pick your one favorite to pin.
• Don’t oversell.  Think of Pinterest as the very top of the purchase funnel… it’s about discovering new things.  The decision to buy comes a little bit later and can happen on your landing page once the Pinterest user decides to click through on the pin image.  Focus within Pinterest on making the user curious and emotionally excited about the product or service.  Don’t try to turn your Pinterest image into a small ad with prominent branding, comparisons, or ad copy.  The PInterest audience doesn’t want their discovery process to be filled with overt advertising and it won’t help you sell.
• Pick the right products and services for Pinterest.  If you find you want to add text into your image because your product needs more education and explanation to understand, it may not be the right product for Pinterest.  If no matter how you photograph the product, you can’t make it visually interesting or emotionally exciting, it may be the wrong product for Pinterest.  You may want to focus instead on brand values rather than promoting the products directly.  Refer back to the “What Brands, Products, and Services Can You Most Effectively Promote on Pinterest?“ section for selection criteria.

• Pin what you know.  You can’t fake passion.  In order to be a great curator, you have to genuinely love what you’re pinning and understand the category.  If you don’t, find someone else to contribute to the board – you can even invite someone from the Pinterest community.  Your followers who really do love the category will be able to tell the difference.

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  The book contains additional tactics including board organization, pin copy, link conversion, and getting followers.

The greatest contributor to success at this stage of Pinterest’s rapid growth is your ability to remain nimble.   So the last thing you need is an exhaustive strategy session building complex plans that will almost certainly change.  Instead, we recommend that you build a laser-focused, one or two page document that crystallizes your goals, engagement plan, integration plan, and metrics.  We want you to get started quickly.  You’ll only learn what works best for your brands and products by doing – not drawing up more detailed plans.

Your plan should focus on strategy rather than tactics.  We’ll go into detail on tactics in a later section so you will be prepared to execute on your strategy.  For now, your focus is understanding what you want to accomplish on Pinterest and a rough idea of how Pinterest fits with your specific brand, products, and services.

Here’s what should be covered in your “Pinterest Marketing Strategy Brief”:

• Define your business goal for Pinterest.  What do you want to accomplish?  Don’t start with a Pinterest-focused metric like “get X number of followers or clicks from Pinterest.”  You need to start with a business goal.  What business result do you want from marketing on Pinterest?  Are you trying to build brand awareness, increase affiliate sales, market test new product concepts, get more traffic, or directly drive sales?
• Define success metrics.  Based on your business goal, how will you measure it?  What level of traffic, sales, or signups would constitute success?
• Education/Training.  How will you educate management and the other stakeholders on the importance of Pinterest?  How will you train the people with day-to-day responsibilities for Pinterest marketing activities?  One easy way to do this is simply to get copies of this book for everyone on your social media team and management.  But no matter how you choose to educate your team and stakeholders, make sure everybody understands the magnitude of the opportunity and how marketing on Pinterest is different from other social networks.  Of course, don’t forget to get everyone signed up for a Pinterest account and using it!
• Engagement Plan.  What will you actually do on Pinterest to achieve your goals?  On a regular basis, you will be coming up with new ideas for campaigns and ways to improve performance so you shouldn’t feel that you need to forecast everything you plan to do for the next year.
• Content Strategy. Not all of your brands or everything in your product catalog is a good fit fo Pinterest.  Which ones are most likely to be successful?  Refer back to “What brands, products, and services can you most effectively promote on Pinterest?” section for criteria to assist with this process.
• Integration Strategy.  How can your other online properties or teams work together to promote Pinterest?  Pinterest does not exist in a vacuum.  You will want to cross-promote your Pinterest boards and profile with the communities you have already built on your websites and other social media.  In the section on “Getting Followers with Other Channels” we go into more detail on specific techniques for integration.
• Campaign Strategy.  What promotional campaigns can help you get more followers on Pinterest?  Create an initial list of ideas is for campaigns that you could run on Pinterest to achieve your business goals.  Refer to the list of “Campaign Ideas” in the next section for some different approaches.
• Reporting.  In order to track your marketing efforts, you need to consider what you can measure.  Can you measure traffic referrals from Pinterest.com?  Can you measure sales through specific affiliate or referral codes that you use in your Pinterest links?  Can you report on progress in the number of repins and followers?  Chances are good that you already have most of these basic statistics available through existing web analytics tools but you should highlight anything here that requires development work to implement or automate.  You should also have a regular schedule for reporting to be sure that you able to monitor the results of your campaigns and strategies and respond quickly.
• Tools. At this time, most of the tools you will need will be in the “Pinterest Tools” section.  You will likely also utilize your existing web analytics tools or a free web analytics service like Google Analytics to help you track referral traffic from Pinterest.

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  The book provides Pinterest case studies as well as specific tactis for executing on your Pinterest strategy.

While a brand, product, or service doesn’t necessarily need to match all of the following criteria to be successful, you want as many of the following characteristics as possible:

• You can see what separates you from the competition.  There are successful brands that differentiate solely on price, availability/selection, support, or durability.  But if that’s all that separates you from the competition, you’ll have a much harder time promoting it on Pinterest than a competitor differentiating on style and product design. Pinterest is all about images and what you can see with your eyes.  However, don’t discount Pinterest as a solution if you differentiate on service as long as you can capture emotionally compelling images of people being treated to unique and unexpected experiences or personal attention.
• It’s unique.  On Pinterest, your pins will be just one image among hundreds that a user scrolls through in a session with Pinterest.  Your product won’t get noticed or shared if it’s commonplace.  It needs to be something out of the ordinary, something distinctive.
• Appeals to demographic of women and families.  Given the unique demographics of Pinterest, does your brand appeal to women?  How do your products and services fit with the challenges and joys of raising a family?
• The appeal is emotional. Imagine looking at a photo of one of your products or a photo of people using your service.  What do you feel?  Does it trigger a sensory reaction?   Pinterest connects with people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one.
• The size of your brand doesn’t matter.  Pinterest levels the playing field.  Whether you’re selling handmade crafts from your garage or you’re a big company, everyone is just an image in the Pinterest gallery.  Pinterest offers the opportunity for small brands to be discovered and for large brands to give exposure to more niche products that may not have the distribution of the top sellers.
• Aspirational. Are you selling a better life?  Pinterest users are pinning inspiration for the life they want someday – the dream home, the exotic vacations they are anticipating, the fantasy wedding, and the perfect dinner party.  Do your brand and products help people achieve that higher vision of themselves?

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  The book contains specific examples of products and services as well as case studies of successful brands on Pinterest.

Pinterest is such a fundamentally different model that most Pinterest users are unaware that marketing is happening on the site even when it alters their perception of brands or influences a transaction.  In reality, Pinterest is perfect for marketing precisely because Pinterest users don’t feel bombarded by overt advertising.  They voluntary share their interests and are self-motivated to reach out and discover great new products and services that match their interests.  Because they choose it rather than having it aggressively pushed at them, they don’t feel they are being sold anything.  The early adopters of Pinterest who are able to understand the new model are reaping the benefits.  Do not be fooled by the lack of display ads — there is a lot of marketing already happening on Pinterest.

Here is how Pinterest is being used for marketing:

• Brand Awareness. Through photos and videos, you have the opportunity to showcase your brand values and your products.  As we’ll see, there are fewer privacy concerns on Pinterest so your photos will reach more people since Pinterest users are willing to share exciting pins with total strangers.  Also, Pinterest users see pins based on self-selected interests so your images touch a targeted audience that will be more likely to be passionate about your brand.

• Sales or affiliate commissions.  Yes, people are already directly selling products on Pinterest.  When you see a pin with an image of a really cool product or service, you can click through to a web page.  Typically, this link will take you to a web page where you can get more information or make a purchase.  Even affiliate links work on Pinterest so it’s possible for you to earn commissions using Pinterest to distribute products for other companies as well.

• Product testing/evaluation.  Pinterest has the potential to be a giant focus group.  Since Pinterest is so visual, you can share photos of multiple concept designs to ask for comments or just to see what people share the most by repining.

• Drive traffic.  Pinterest can work together with your other social media initiatives and websites to help you drive traffic.  You can link images on Pinterest pins anywhere – including to your Facebook page or your website.  For the time being, links from Pinterest are even “do follow” links that can boost your search engine ranking.

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  Refer to the book or ebook to learn the unique Pinterest strategies and tactics you will need to achieve these marketing goals.

• People with the right affinities find you. This is backwards from how marketing usually works.  Typically, you start by identifying the interests or affinities of people who are most likely to purchase your products. Then, you find out where those people are and you reach out to them.  On Pinterest, the right audience finds you.  They self-identify their interests through the choices they make about which boards to create and follow.  Then, they are self-motivated to scour the Pinterest site looking for things that fit with their interests to pin on their board.  Of course, there are still important tactics you can use in the “Pinterest Marketing Tactics” section to help more people find you, but the Pinterest model can be very advantageous to marketers.

• You can connect more emotionally through images.   Research has shown that the majority of purchase decisions are driven by emotion rather than logic.  On Pinterest, you won’t be tempted to try to explain your product with logic because Pinterest doesn’t give you a lot of room to write text.  You essentially have only a visual image to stir emotional curiosity and sensory excitement.  If you can do this well enough to stand out in a sea of other photos on Pinterest, you will have created an emotional connection that will be hard to shake – even when your audience starts to evaluate other competitors with logic.

• Your content will be shared further.  People on Pinterest share their interests, not their personal life.  This means far fewer privacy concerns and a willingness to share great pins or connect with other Pinterest users who are complete strangers.

• You can market a lifestyle, not a product.  You are marketing a lifestyle.  Even if all you sell right now are wedding gowns, you can still pin images of flowers, wedding cakes, hair, and other design inspiration for the perfect wedding.  This will give you the ability to expand your product and service offerings in the future and to associate your brand with a larger, aspirational vision.

• Reaches underserved demographic of women and their families. As you can see from the “Pinterest Demographics” section, a large majority of Pinterest users are women.  Women feel underserved by existing advertising and Pinterests represents a tremendous opportunity to communicate with them more effectively.  In fact, 91% of women say that advertisers don’t understand them (Greenfield Online for Arnold’s Women’s Insight Team) yet they account for 85% of all consumer purchases from homes to autos to healthcare (Marketing to Women conference).

The previous article was excerpted with permission from Pinterest Marketing Bible: The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Brand and Products on Pinterest by Leon Cho.  Refer to the book or ebook for more on marketing strategy and tactics.