Pinterest can be an effective tool to promote hotels or vacation rentals. When marketing, many brands overlook its use, yet this platform can drive significant amounts of traffic directly to their properties.
Pinterest provides an ideal alternative to Instagram in that you can create boards around topics that interest your audience such as DIY projects, food or home decor.
Create a Brand Page
Pinterest provides an ideal visual platform to showcase your hotel. By using your hotel’s branding, logo and photos to create an eye-catching page that tells a compelling narrative, Pinterest makes for an engaging customer journey experience for guests. When creating brand pages on Pinterest for your hotel brand refer to customer personas to determine what content will appeal most.
To get started, create a business account to gain access to all of the analytics tools in-app. After doing so, begin creating boards incorporating keywords in both board names and descriptions to help people easily locate them when searching.
Use your boards to promote special offers, events, and information about your hotel. Allow guests to pin items from your website onto your boards – this will increase traffic to your website and can lead to direct bookings.
Once your boards are in place and content has started being posted, take a look at the heat map above. As can be seen, people tend to focus on your profile picture, bio, website and boards – make sure that these all look their best and showcase what makes your hotel great!
Note: Your Pinterest profile should match up with your website and social media posts for consistency. Be sure to use engaging and conversational language that allows guests to get comfortable with your brand.
Another thing to keep in mind is creating group boards for your most popular boards to attract more followers and increase visibility – increasing your chance of being featured on Pinterest’s home feed in turn.
Encourage your followers to tag their Pins with your hashtags in order to increase exposure for your brand. Anthropologie’s board called ‘Your Anthro Favorites’ encourages their fans to upload pictures of their favorite finds; this has generated thousands of new followers for them and increased the visibility of their content.
Pin Unique Images
Pinterest content is heavily dependent on visuals. To capture your audience’s interest, be sure that your images are beautiful and high-quality – whether or not you’re an experienced photographer, there are several free online tools that can assist with this task. Vertical images with 2:3 aspect ratio (around 1000x 1500 pixels) typically perform best while including keywords in descriptions, board names and profile names is key for optimal success.
Add an eye-catching pin with an explicit call-to-action such as, “Book Now” or “Contact Us”. While this might seem obvious, adding such a reminder may remind your target audience to click through to your link and book their accommodation.
Pinterest users don’t subscribe to an “follow-for-follow” culture like Instagram does; instead, they follow brands they find engaging. Create engaging boards featuring content related to both your hotel offerings and target audience’s interests, like local restaurants or popular attractions.
Pinterest’s topic tagging feature allows you to organize your pins so they are easily discoverable, while still remaining relevant for your business. Tags can be either generalized or specific as desired; their relevance must remain constant regardless.
Engaging your target audience on Pinterest can be done through the creation of a contest where users have an opportunity to win something, for instance offering one winning entry a complimentary night’s stay at your hotel. This will encourage users to share and repin your content, leading to new visitors and bookings for future business ventures.
Pins that include prices are more likely to get clicked than those without, generating over three times more clicks than pins without pricing information in their titles.
Add pricing information to your pins is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive click-throughs compared to simply posting images without prices. People prefer knowing what a product or service costs before making a commitment to purchasing it.
Create Boards
Pinboards provide the ideal way to display visual content on Pinterest, which allows you to organize pins that relate directly to your hotel and persona. Sharing Pins across multiple boards increases their exposure, helping your business connect with more potential guests who might be interested.
When creating a new board, it’s important to select a title and description that will inform people what your board is about, while adding keywords can help your rank in search. A well-optimized title and description increases the odds that people will click through your pins and visit your website or blog.
If you need to post numerous Pins, creating sections within your boards may help organize them more easily. While having all your Pins in one location might seem easier, having a board with multiple subtopics provides greater SEO advantages.
Each board should have a clear theme. Be it as specific or general as you desire; just ensure they align with who your target audience is searching for on Pinterest. For instance, create boards around weddings while also including topics like travel or food which your target audience might be searching for on this platform.
Your boards should feature your logo to allow potential clients to quickly locate them and remember your business more easily. Also consider including links that lead back to your website or social media channels in your description for added credibility and follower acquisition.
Pinterest allows you to create multiple boards at the same time, but too many at once could lead to your account being flagged for spam and will prevent you from taking advantage of features like Place Pin maps. Furthermore, keeping boards organized and clean will prevent followers from being lost among them.
Promote Your Pins
Pinterest is a perfect platform for marketing products or services with visual elements, particularly visual services that appeal to affluent clients who like browsing classy items. Therefore, marketers must ensure their images have high-quality visuals with elegant aesthetics to attract this target market.
Pinterest’s search functionality is one of its hallmarks; adding keywords in image descriptions allows people searching for similar topics to easily locate your pins. As there are only 100 characters allowed per description on Pinterest, limiting how many words there are can allow for greater detail in images and CTR increases.
However, keywords should also be utilized within board titles and descriptions to improve search optimization for any specific location. An optimized listing helps people traveling directly to your destination find it more easily – Glamping Hub was successful at drawing in visitors from the US, Canada and Australia to their vacation rentals through Pinterest by including details for each location in their description as well as pinning photos that relate directly to these boards.
Pinterest offers businesses various advertising solutions that enable them to target specific audiences with content delivered at an opportune moment. Promoted pins can be an excellent way to reach new customers; just remember this is still a relatively new platform and take any results with a grain of salt.
One of the best ways to drive traffic and bookings on your website is with Promoted Pins that link directly to it on Pinterest, however this feature only becomes available once your business has claimed it on Pinterest.
Promoted Pins have tracking capabilities that let you monitor how many impressions, repins and clicks your ad has received. You can set both a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) limit or daily budget limit; with CPC you control how much money is spent while with DTB your spending automatically adjusts depending on performance.