Despite lacking a marketing strategy, many travel brands are popular on Pinterest, the social scrapbooking site. According to Pinterest analytics firms Curalate and Pinfluencer. That makes intuitive sense, because the site is about being a place where you can save images of things you want to remember and travel images can be quite inspirational. When users pin (that is, add an image to their page on Pinterest, where their followers can see it), repin, comment on or like images from destinations or travel content, this can drive traffic to a brand’s website.Here are tips for marketers, first for larger brands and organizations — and then for smaller ones.Pinterest for larger brands

The biggest missed opportunity for travel marketers is to make sure that one’s popular pins have working links when people click on the Pinterest pin. For larger travel brands, especially, the biggest problem is that social and digital marketing staff members often fail to communicate with the e-commerce team.

A conversation needs to be opened to make sure that product pages remain live on their sites even after a vacation offer, content, package, poll, promotion or giveaway has ended. At the very least, you want to look like a working site, so users have a chance to click around and find the most up-to-date content.

Here are some advanced-level tactics for mid-size to larger brands:

  • Be aware of upcoming changes to Pinterest. Says the company: “For example, on each pin, you’ll see pins from the same board, other boards this pin was pinned to, and a whole slew of related pins.”
  • Show you have a sense of humor by creating amusing board topics.
  • Invite key travel influencers to pin images to your board. To add contributors to a group board, go to that board and click the Edit button. On the next page, you can type in the names of other people you would like to add as contributors. You must follow at least one board belonging to the “Pinner” you’re inviting.
  • Provide some sort of reward for incoming Pinterest users (which can be recognized based on the Web address the users is arriving from). It might be a coupon or a free e-postcard or simply a thank you message.
  • Start a Pinterest contest to gain new followers. Get the word out via your e-mail newsletter or Twitter and Facebook followings.
  • Put a red Pinterest button by the images on your site you want to encourage users to pin to their Pinterest profiles.

pinterest travel

Pinterest for smaller brands

For travel agents and small travel companies, the biggest mistake is to fail to promote visual marketing. Here are some quick tips:

  • Read a no-B.S. explanation of why Pinterest has the potential to be the most important social strategy component for destination marketers.
  • Create “pin boards” to inspire prospects to plan trips. These should represent your area of specialty (cruises, South Africa, etc.). For tourism DMOs, it might be ”Local Events & Attractions.”
  • Think holiday-themed content. For example, Savannah, Georgia, has a board for Savannah St. Patrick’s Day for the upcoming March 17 parade.
  • Make sure you use secure passwords on your account, and limit access to those passwords. Or else you could end up like the poor folk at UrbanAdventures, who had their company’s Pinterest profile attacked in November.
  • Post graphics that advertise deals and promotions. Post to your Board “Travel Deals to Get Now.”
  • Forget Photoshop. It’s complicated and if you don’t already have a skill set in it, use instead a new breed of apps and online services to polish your images.
  • Invite customers to share photos from their trips to post on your pin boards, to gain word-of-mouth referrals post-trip.
Always taking enough distance is a good advice to have a better view of the problems. In this case, learning from what other top brands outside the travel vertical are doing is a smart movement. And Starbucks is a perfect example. While its Facebook and Twitter pages are deeply uninspiring, Starbucks has one of the best Pinterest accounts I’ve seen so far.

It only has seven boards but they have more than 900 pins between them, and have attracted more than 76,000 followers. In comparison, Walmart has created 65 boards but has just 12,000 followers, while ASOS’s 13 boards have around 25,000.

The boards are full of fantastic images that are almost entirely sourced from third-party sites. I think this is an important part creating a successful Pinterest strategy, and is something that a number of brands don’t seem to grasp.

There are several brands that have run Pinterest competitions to drive up follower numbers and engagement, and Starbucks is another brand to add to this list. In September 2012 it offered followers the chance to win a Verismo System coffee machine if they created a board named ‘It’s possible’ then pinned six images to it, including one of the new machine. A quick Pinterest search for ‘It’s possible’ shows that it had hundreds, if not thousands of entries. Good Work.