Can Pinterest be a useful medium for professional services marketing?
It’s not immediately obvious why or how a platform like Pinterest can be of use to professional services firms looking to market themselves. The first thing you need to know, is that Pinterest has millions of users, and many of them use the site to check out what they want to buy. While this is mostly useful for B2C, there’s no reason why it couldn’t work in professional services too.
People ‘pin’ all sorts of photos and images on Pinterest, and these include both personal users, private vendors and major retailers. 93% of those polled who are active Pinterest users say that they use the site for planning out purchases, and 87% say that they’ve actually made a purchase based on something they found on the site. As a platform, Pinterest has a major appeal for women too. 81% of users are women, and roughly half of Pinterest’s users are making over $50,000 a year. 10% are making over $125,000 a year. Those numbers are staggering and clearly present an opportunity. The question remains: can professional services make it work? If so, how?
Using infographics
Since Pinterest is a medium that focuses on pictures, infographics are one way that a professional services firm can leverage the platform to its advantage. Roughly speaking, infographics are designed as visual representations of data. Accounting firms can easily represent all sorts of facts, figures, margins and ratios that matter to running a business, self-managed superannuation, forecasting and growth projections and the like. Engineers can represent all sorts of drawings, designs and efficiencies graphically. Lawyers that specialise in family law, for example, can offer potential divorcees tips on getting their finances in order before proceeding with the divorce. It can also be an excellent way to convey recent changes to the law. There’s really no shortage of ways for effectively using an infographic to engage with potential clients.
A visual resume
Visual resumes are great for professional advisors to illustrate what they do. Because of the visual element highlighted by the Pinterest platform, you’re going to need to develop visual ideas around your target market or niche, to showcase your talents visually and let your clients and potential new clients know what you have to offer.
The bottom line
There are two further points to be openly acknowledged here. The first is that Pinterest is a rather awkward medium for professional services firms to leverage. It’s going to be tough generating content, and it’s going to take a good deal of creativity to work with the platform. In fact, you’re going to need a graphic designer to make the best of it, as you don’t want to put out sub-standard graphics, just for the sake of it. That said, there aren’t a lot of competitors using Pinterest effectively in this space, and one of the keys to marketing is differentiation – your communication channels and your message. That alone makes Pinterest worth the effort when mining for potential clients and followers.
Fundamentally, Pinterest is a platform where people go to window shop, so they’re already in the mindset of looking for goods and services that have visual appeal. There’s no reason why they can’t look for professional services too. If you’re interested in learning more about our marketing expertise, check out our website.