Event Marketing
June 1, 2015  •  by Sean Burke

Quick Tip: Getting The Most Out Of Pinterest

post about event marketing on social media platforms here, and what I said then is still true today: it’s mostly female oriented and definitely geared for creative types. However, even if your current event doesn’t fit these specs, you’re likely going to be doing events that will fit this type of target market in the future, so keep reading! Once you’ve made your own board for the event you want to market/are planning for, here’s some tips to get the most out of your time and the pins you’ve placed. #Hashtagsarethefuture What’s that? Sick of hashtags? Sick of me making fun of hashtags? Well you’d better get #usedtoit, because Pinterest also utilizes a hashtag system. If you’re doing an event based around gardening, then you’d add in hashtags like #greenthumb or #gardening. “Place” Pins Placing Pins is a very neat feature and allows you to mark locations of items in your Pinterest “pin” board. The great thing about this feature is that you can create your own boards, or edit other boards to place your items. It’s a very powerful feature and can easily get a lot of people interested in a short amount of time. We’ve personally used this to great success during New Years’ 2015, where we got more than 200 followers in the span of a couple days. You can see that board here. Good Pictures Required Think of Pinterest like Instagram: pictures are everything. This isn’t Twitter or Facebook where pictures are nice, but these pictures need to do extremely well. If you want an idea of how to market your events on Pinterest, look at the McDonald’s pinterest. And yes, they do have one. These days, if your marketing sticks out like a sore thumb and it’s too sales-y, people immediately turn off. It’s why online marketing is so tough these days, but always remember that the best marketing has always been what doesn’t even look like marketing! Traditional Advertising You’ll recall in my social media event marketing post about the different social media platforms that Pinterest was still working on advertising features for marketers. Unfortunately this is still something that’s in limbo. You can join a waitlist, however, by signing up here. The feature is going to be called “promoted pins”, and looks to be extremely similar to Facebook’s “promoted posts”. As always, remember that Pinterest needs you to be creative first so while you can certainly use some of the same tactics as on Facebook, remember that each niche’s social network is going to have its own power plays and strategies. Business Accounts Pinterest has options for business accounts that allow you to see things like analytics, popular pins, and other features that will help you to gauge the success of your Pinterest campaigns. I highly recommend this feature, and Ticketbud has used this to great effect to double up on to more successful campaigns and to pivot from ones that may not be working as well.]]]]> ]]>