Pinterest for Contractors – A Golden Marketing Opportunity?

Social media has captured the marketing world’s interest in recent times as a method to connect and engage potential customers in ways previously unattainable just a few years ago. While many social media platforms have come and gone over the years, none has grown more explosively than Pinterest.  What is Pinterest and how can contractors benefit from its meteoric rise?  For opportunistic contractors in the right niche, it’s a potential goldmine in free marketing exposure with many benefits far superior to other popular social media platforms such as Facebook or Linkedin.  Can your construction business benefit from Pinterest?  Let’s take a look.

What Is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social media platform that boasts over 10 million members and is especially popular among affluent women interested in design and aged 25-34.  The platform allows users to establish profiles and “pin” images to an online bulletin board that are of “interest” to them, and hence the name.  A Pinterest users profile generally looks like a collage of images that are categorized according to themes and easily shared among other users that have similar interests, giving it the feel of an organized online magazine with fewer words.  The cause of the huge popularity of the site is debatable, but at its core, Pinterest allows users to consolidate their hopes, dreams and passions in an ultra simple, yet elegant format using images that are much easier and faster for the human mind to disseminate than words.

Why Should Contractors Care About Pinterest?

Care to guess what the most popular category “pinned” on Pinterest is?  According to Mashable, the most popular Pinterest category is “Home”, which compromises everything from designer couches and imported rugs to full kitchen renovations.  Certain construction niches such as remodel contractors have a huge opportunity to display images of their best projects, concepts or ideas on their Pinterest profile with links back to their website.  As interest in design concepts takes hold among prominent users, popularity can grow exponentially as images are “re-pinned”, leading to increased levels of direct referral traffic back to the contractor’s site from visitors that have a displayed interest in the contractors work.

How effective is Pinterest in generating clicks to other sites?  According to the Huffington Post, Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google +, Facebook, and Linkedin… combined.  In addition, one of the most important metrics when evaluating any social media platform is the level of engagement among users.  Pinterest users spend approximately 15.8 minutes “pinning” each time they visit the site versus just 12.1 minutes for Facebook according to the Huffington Post.  Best of all, the average user has a median income approaching 100k per year, giving them substantial purchasing power that can be used towards fulfilling their home improvement dreams.

Getting Started

Getting started is simple.  Go to www.pinterest.com and spend some time researching the site layout to see how to properly position what your business has to offer.  The beauty of Pinterest for some contracting niches is it allows a business to show off previous projects without coming across as pushy, gimmicky or in your face.  To the contrary, businesses that come across as ultra professional will benefit not only from an increased level of awareness, but also an increased level of brand trust which is critical in converting prospects into customers.  After deciding on an appropriate strategy, set up a profile and show prospects why your business has what it takes to make their dream home improvement project a reality.

By Jeremy Schaedler

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