6 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Professional Services Firm Site Using Pinterest

Use it for Lead Generation, Content Marketing, and Brand Awareness

Lately I’ve been really diving into the social media channel, Pinterest, to see how widely used it is in the professional services industries. For those of you who aren’t aware or don’t know what Pinterest is, here is a quick breakdown according to www.pinterest.com: A pin starts with an image or video you add to Pinterest. You can add a pin from a website using the Pin It bookmarklet or upload an image right from your computer. Any pin on Pinterest can be repinned, and all pins link back to their source. What does that mean in the simplest terms? You can take something you like on the internet and “Pin” it to your account, tag it for SEO, and link it to the original source! This is another great opportunity to promote and share content to an even wider audience.

Here’s an eye opener for you: there’s quite a bit of action on Pinterest that has something to do with professional services! To help you really grasp the power of Pinterest, here’s a challenge: Log onto Pinterest (and if you don’t have an account already, it’s pretty simple to sign up), type in a keyword or keyword phrase that you think one of your prospects would be searching on, and take a look at the results.

For example, I searched on the keyword phrase “tax planning for small business”.  All of a sudden dozens of images related and tagged for tax planning for small business were at my fingertips, and the coolest part about the images is that they each linked back to the original content of a an accounting firm’s website or a professional’s blog post. From info graphics to charts and videos around the topic of tax planning, the amount of goodies I could select from was amazing!

How to Use Pinterest:

• Here are a few ideas on how to use Pinterest as another social media tool to promote and share your content, or to generate leads:
• Use the cover image of a whitepaper to optimize and promote, link the image back to the landing page.
• Spread the word of your blog by pinning the image you used to attract people to read more.
• Just got a brand new head shot? Why not pin the image and optimize your headshot around your services! You could link it directly to your bio page and voila you just drove someone to your firm’s website.
• Why not use a case study to share and promote through Pinterest? You just did all of that hard work to gather information and put it into something comprehensive, give it justice by Pinning an interesting image that has to do with the case study
• Have some ground breaking news? Pin it! Don’t forget to find an image that “speaks” to someone so that they have the interest to click on the image and go to the original source to find out more.
• Did you create some great company videos but not getting enough traffic from your YouTube channel? Take a screen shot of the video and Pin the image and link back to your YouTube account for maximum exposure.

If you’ve got some other cool examples of how you (or, ahem, a competitor) is using Pinterest, please share and comment, below!

Maybe a book really is judged by its cover?

As you can see the list can go on and on for the many uses of Pinterest. But, don’t think any old image will do … the trick is to find the best possible image to Pin so that people are interested in learning more. Here’s an example, using the keyword phrase “business valuation”. Which Pin would you rather click on?

I bet that majority of you were attracted to the image on the left and you probably would click on that image to learn more because it pulls at an emotion and speaks to a prospect more than the other image does. If your firm can use an image to represent its content to get an emotional reaction from the viewer, than you have succeeded at driving more traffic to your website, getting more leads, and realizing a greater ROI from your marketing budget.

According to the 2013 State of Content Marketing Study, 37.8% of marketing professionals worldwide said that photos delivered the best ROI. That’s right under articles, videos and whitepapers! As you can see people find imagery to be an important part of their marketing strategy to deliver more ROI.

So my final suggestion/recommendation is to give Pinterest a chance to drive more traffic to your website, blogs or specific landing pages. You may be pleasantly surprised to see that it’s another social media channel that can help your accounting, consulting or AEC firm get more leads and more new business!