Use These 5 Strategies to Promote Your Event on Pinterest

Although Pinterest doesn’t get as much attention as platforms like Twitter or Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it’s not just as powerful of a tool for promoting your brand and connecting with your potential customers.

According to Pinterest’s official blog, around 250 million people and 1.5 million businesses use Pinterest each month. This makes it one of the best platforms to connect with prospective attendees and sponsors.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the ways you can use Pinterest to promote your event by sharing event content, getting discovered, encouraging attendees to engage with your brand, and setting up an online community for attendees, speakers, and sponsors. But first, let’s take a look at why you’d want to market your events on Pinterest.

Pinterest Marketing for Events

Pinterest is a social media platform that allows users to Pin images, GIFs, and videos to boards. You’re able to create Pins and Boards to share information about your event and encourage followers to engage with your brand.

With Pinterest, you’re able to generate more interest in your event by posting photos from past events and creating boards that prospective attendees would be interested in engaging with. For instance, if you are planning an event around a seasonal holiday such as Easter, you could share outfit ideas or menu ideas that would be appropriate for the season to increase discoverability.

Aside from this, here are some of the main ways Pinterest helps event organizers market their event:

• Pinterest drives referral traffic to websites. Pinterest is a powerful tool for driving referral traffic to your event website. According to the official Pinterest business blog, the platform drives more referral traffic than Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter. By sharing engaging content and posting high-quality photos from past events, you will be able to increase brand awareness and traffic to your event site.
• Pinners have high average household income. According to Omnicore, 40% of Pinners have a household income of more than $100k. If you want to make the most of this demographic, you’ll have to actively promote your content on Pinterest. Posting on Pinterest is more effective than implementing traditional marketing strategies to increase brand visibility because you can target your market more accurately.
• Pinterest influences purchases. Pinners are loyal advocates of the brands they follow and use the platform to make buying decisions. As an event organizer, you can use this information to find inspiration for your own events. For example, you might determine which event venue is trending in your city or what sort of event technology the best-selling events used.
• Can help you grow your event brand. Pinterest helps people find and save content that they find inspiring or perceive to be useful. By designing content with the right mix of inspirational and actionable Pins, you can generate more interest in your events.

As a Pinterest Business user, you can access Pinterest Analytics from your account to gather valuable insight about your followers. This includes user interests, demographics, clicks, saves, and likes.

Here’s how you can track and improve event marketing ROI with Pinterest Analytics:

• Demographics. Pinterest Analytics lets you track how much return you get from your event promotion efforts. You can compare various metrics (such as average monthly viewers, average monthly engaged, and the number of impressions) before and after adding Pins to your Boards to see what sort of content gets the best results.
• Interests. Pinterest enables you to get an idea of what your followers are interested in. You can use this information to create content and share photos that would be most relevant to them. For example, if you find that your audience is interested in inspirational quotes, you could incorporate some in your messaging or if they’re interested in gourmet food you could create a board for gourmet food ideas.

Regularly tracking your Pinterest analytics will give you useful insight into what resonates best with your target audience and how you can improve your event promotion strategy to drive the best results.

How to Use Pinterest With Event Smart

You can use Pinterest’s Widget builder to embed content from your Pinterest profile (such as Pins and Boards) directly into event pages and emails.

Here’s how:

Go to the Widget builder and select the type of content you’d like to embed in your blog post, page, or email. You can choose from:

• Save Button
• Follow
• Pin
• Board
• Profile

For example, if you wanted to add a Pinterest Board to your event site, you would enter the board’s URL and select a size (square, sidebar, header, or custom) using the dropdown menu.

Finally, copy and paste the code given below Preview into your page, post, or email where you want it to appear.

5 Ways to Use Pinterest to Market Your Event

As an event organizer, you have the ability to generate event hype through content marketing. Let’s step through some of the ways you can use Pinterest to market your event:

#1: Share Presentation Slides

Sharing presentation slides from previous events with your Pinterest followers is a great way to generate interest in your upcoming event. You can share presentations created with Slideshare by pinning them to your board.

Alternatively, you can take screenshots of specific presentation slides, add your own thoughts to them, and share a link to the full presentation on your website in the Pin description. This is a great way to engage prospective attendees with your event topic and give them a feel for what they can expect by attending your event.

#2: Promote Your Content

One of the best things about Pinterest is that it’s incredibly easy to share all sorts of visual content including photos, screenshots, graphics, illustrations, infographics, GIFs, and videos. In other words, you can share images that go with every piece of content you create for your own blog or use as promotional material as Pins.

For example, if you write a blog post discussing the topics you’ll be covering in your upcoming event, you could use the post’s featured image as a Pin and link back to your article from the Pin description. This way, you could increase event discoverability and drive traffic to your site.

You might also consider sharing behind the scenes photos from past events to give prospective attendees an idea of what sorts of experiences they can expect to have by attending. And if you’re creating ads to promote your event on other social media platforms (like Facebook or Twitter), you could add those graphics to your Pinterest, as well.

#3: Curate a Crowd-Sourced Photo Album

After an event, you can ask attendees to contribute to your event’s Pinterest board as collaborators. For example, you might encourage them to share the selfies and photos they took at the event. Or you could ask attendees to use your event hashtag and re-Pin images and photos from their boards to your event board.

Crowdsourcing photos from attendees allows you to put together neat photo albums in practically no time at all. This is a great way to amplify your event marketing strategy and increase attendee interest in future events.

#4: Run a Pinterest Competition

You can organize Pinterest competitions during the event to encourage attendees to engage with your brand and learn more about your cause. This will help build interest in your events and boost brand recognition.

By organizing a competition, you’re able to connect and communicate with your customers in a more personalized and cost-effective way. For example, if your event’s theme was famous figures throughout history you could ask attendees to share photos of their costumes (one submission per attendee) and hand out prizes to the winners.

#5: Create Community Boards

Pinterest community boards allow to you facilitate networking among your event attendees, speakers, and sponsors. For example, your speakers might consider giving your Pinterest followers a sneak peek of what they’ll be covering on the day of the event.

You can also increase engagement by inviting your followers to pin to your event’s community board. Allowing prospective attendees to interact with people who’ve already registered for your event or are speaking at your event is a great way to generate more interest in your event and increase conversions.

Pinterest Profiles of Popular Events

#1: New York Fashion Week

Pinterest Boards:

• NYFW: On the Streets
• NYFW: Behind The Scenes
• NYFW: The Designers
• Campaign
• Editorial

#2: SXSW

Pinterest Boards:

• SXSW Bucket List
• SXSW Music Keynote Speakers
• Instagrammed
• Announcements
• Things to pack

#3: Kentucky Derby

Pinterest Boards:

• Kentucky Derby Party Ideas
• The Infield at the Kentucky Derby
• Hats at the Kentucky Derby

Conclusion

Pinterest makes it easy for event organizers to get the word out about upcoming events, connect with their target audience, generate event hype, and encourage followers to register for their event. And the best part is that you’re free to implement different event marketing strategies – before, during, and after the event!

Do you have any more ideas on how event organizers can use Pinterest to find inspiration and promote their events? Let us know in the comments section below.