Pinterest As A Digital Marketing Tool

My previous post discussed Instagram as a digital marketing tool, now I will look at Pinterest and also then compare it's use cases to those of Instagram. As we learned in class, Pinterest allows individuals to engage in virtual scrapbooking where they pin links, videos, articles, images, etc to their pinboard. All this great stuff can hopefully be used to increase interaction between customers and your brand and to drive traffic to your site where you may be selling some sort of product. Some digital marketing goals you can accomplish with Pinterest include:

• Contests - you can assign hashtags to be the equivalent of contest entries on your website and then if customers pin that hashtag to their board, they have entered. You now have a wider network of individuals exposed to your brand by making the average Pinterest user your evangelist, and all it cost you was one give away of some sort for what would most likely be much more expensive marketing. For the right type of consumer product, this is definitely a powerful strategy.
• Product Offerings - you can showcase your products on a pinboard and allow customers to leave their feedback. Additionally, you can even offer exclusive coupon codes to Pinterest users who pin to your products. In this way, again, you get a viral marketing effect in exchange for a coupon instead of large amounts of ad spend.
• Drive traffic to your site -  by participating in the ecosystem and getting pinned on various pinboards, you can cause individuals who would never have been aware of your brand to now know about you and visit your site. This is of course dependent upon how engaging the content you create is and how compelling your call to action is, but it is most certainly possible with Pinterest.
• Utilize other social networks - you can add a "pin it" button to your own website, and in addition can even promote your pins and pinboards on Facebook and Twitter. This will hopefully allow you to reach more individuals and bring them into the powerful ecosystem of Pinterest where you can interact with them in the ways above in addition to what is possible from the more traditional social media channels of Facebook and Twitter.

Looking at the differences between Instagram and Pinterest, I see both Instagram and Pinterest as useful channels for both branding and direct response. That being said, I would view Instagram as a more effective branding channel, while I see Pinterest as being more powerful for direct response. This also has to do with the nature of the platforms, as individuals come to Instagram to consume content without necessarily taking any action. Pinterest on the other hand, engages the user a lot more in taking the action of pinning, and browsing through various products and content that they find interesting. This action of pinning and moving all over the Internet better lends itself to making calls for action and hopefully prompting direct response from the customer.

Article: http://holotrope.com/pinterest-and-instagram-whats-best-for-your-digital-marketing-strategy/