How Brands Are Using Promotions to Market on Pinterest

 How Brands Are Using Promotions to Market on Pinterest

Pinterest’s traffic and engagement are spiking, and marketers want a piece of the action.

After launching branded profiles, many businesses are now developing promotions on the platform, encouraging users to follow the profiles of individual brands and pin items from their websites.

Most recently, British Midland International (BMI) launched a “Pinterest Lottery.” The airline has posted a series of boards on its Pinterest page, featuring numbered and logo-clad photos from five destinations: Beirut, Dublin, Marrakech, Moscow and Nice. Users are asked to repin up to six images. At the end of each week, the company will choose a number at random; the users who had repinned the image with that number will be qualified for a chance to win a pair of free return flights to any BMI destination.

In December, Lands’ End Canvas launched a promotion called “Lands’ End Canvas Pin It to Win It.” Fans of the apparel brand were asked to pin items from landsendcanvas.com to designated Lands’ End Canvas pinboards for a chance to win one of those items.

Barneys New York launched a similar campaign ahead of Valentine’s Day. The Manhattan-based retailer encouraged followers of its other social channels to follow its Pinterest page and create a “Barneys New York Valentine’s Day Wish List” board in the Women’s or Men’s Apparel categories. Participants were welcome to pin anything they wanted to their boards, but at least five items needed to be sourced from barneys.com to qualify for the contest. Entries were handled by email.

The campaigns are very similar to the ones marketers ran in the early days of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, when brands offered free goods or discounts in exchange for Likes, follows and retweets. These types of campaigns can sometimes up follower counts and “engagement” in the short-term, but offer little long-term value.

“If the goals are short-sighted, then using cheap tactics like [that] are effective,” Shelby McLeod, group director of earned media at The Barbarian Group, and Noah King, senior social media lead at The Barbarian Group, wrote in a joint email to Mashable. “[But] the short-term gains won’t have much of a long-term impact.”

 

Whole Foods’s pinning strategy isn’t overtly promotional.

“Rather than using people for statistical gains, brands and marketers should focus on defining their voice and creating a community of dedicated followers with whom they regularly interact,” they advise. “The best practice is to think of each pin, each Like, each comment and each follow as a tiny gesture between two people building a relationship. Through many small interactions, a connection is fostered that is based on trust and loyalty. And those are the types of connections that make a single community member so valuable.”

McLeod and King pointed to Whole Foods as an example of a brand that uses Pinterest just like any other user. The pins tend to relate to Whole Foods’ core values — natural, sustainable, organic, etc. — but the content isn’t promotional, and it doesn’t necessarily point back to the grocer’s site. Much of its content is culled from interesting blogs and other third-party resources, making Whole Foods a resource for upcycling advice, DIY projects, recipes and more. People need no other incentive to follow the brand.

Pinterest users, how would you like to see brands use the platform? Do you want to engage with promotions and contests on Pinterest?