Is Pinterest an actionable target for local marketing – and if so, how?

(Got your own questions for the show? Ask ‘em here!)

A question from Lori:

Hey, Michelle! This is Lori again. Thanks so much for all your great answers. I have a question about your Pinterest strategy. Can you use Pinterest for local marketing and if so, do you have to use an advanced search option or something? I don’t know much about Pinterest, but I’m enjoying learning from you. Thanks so much. Take care! Thanks. Bye. .

Hey, Lori! Good to hear from you again. So Pinterest for local marketing… yes, it can be done and there are two ways to approach it.

Number one is from an SEO perspective. When you put an image on Pinterest, your caption then acts like an anchor text. When that image gets a lot of traction on Pinterest, a lot of re-pins, that caption that is serving as anchor text can help you rank higher for that key phrase in Google. So that is one way that Pinterest can help you with local marketing – by using a local keyphrase in your image caption.

The other way is if you want to create a local-centric board. I live in the Sonoma County/Napa area of California. It’s a wine county. There’s a lot of really great wineries, resorts and restaurants that are using Pinterest successfully as a local vacation destination, research and information resource. When someone is planning their vacation to this area, they might want to look at great Sonoma tourist attractions or the best wineries to hit and that kind of thing.

So depending on your local area, you may also be able to create boards that will attract people to attractions in your area or news in your area. In San Francisco, I’ve seen a lot of really good stuff with news – not the city itself, but people in the city who have created boards that attract local followers. It can include local news. It can include attractions, events, restaurant reviews and that kind of thing.

Whatever’s going on in the area that can attract people who will be there and then from there, whatever it is that you’re actually selling or you’re actually trying to get people to see, now you’ve got that audience and can funnel them off into your interests and the things that you are attempting to get in front of more folks.

So those are two approaches that you can take to make local marketing work on Pinterest. It’s a great traffic source, so I’m glad that you’re getting into it.

Any more questions on Pinterest, head on over to MichelleMacPhearson.com and I’ll answer them. It’s one of my favorite sites, so I’d love to talk about it more.

We can handle your Pinterest account for you at Social Media Daily.

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