Pinterest for Restaurant Marketing

Transcription

1 Pinterest for Restaurant Marketing Overview and Recommendations April 2, 2012 Restaurant Marketing Made Simple. zipscene.com pinterest.com/zipscene

2 In this document, we will cover a lot of details about Pinterest. If you re looking for just the highlights, then you can skim through the document and look for the our bubble icon. That s where you ll find the most critical information. In addition, we have included a What to Do Now section at the end of the document, which will give you some concrete steps you can take today. Pinterest for Restaurant Marketing Introduction Unless you haven t been online or read the news over the past few months, you ve probably heard about Pinterest. Even if you re not a user of the fast-rising social media site, it s important to understand the implications it may have on your business and how you can use it to your advantage. Fortunately, Pinterest is fairly straightforward and with far less features and options compared to other social media sites like Facebook. This means you can get up and running quickly without the steep learning curve. But before going any further, it s probably worth explaining what Pinterest is for the uninitiated. Quick Description Without over-complicating things, Pinterest is basically a digital bulletin board. People pin content that they find interesting or like and share it with everyone else. Pins are organized on individual boards, so you can have a number of boards with different content subjects and neatly organize your pins. Of course, you re not only limited to viewing your pins, you can view everyone else s as well by simply browsing the site. There are no private pins or boards, so it s all available for you to see. If you like something, you can repin it and add it to one of your boards. You can also add a comment or like a pin. You can choose to follow individuals or topics, which will populate your Pinterest homepage with content when you log in. You can choose to follow everything from a person or just a single board. And, of course, others can follow you if they like what you re pinning. There s a bit more functionality than this, but this will get you started. We ll go into some of the more detailed areas throughout this document. 2

3 The Impact The next question you probably want to ask is whether or not you should care about Pinterest. It s too early to tell if Pinterest is going to be around for the long haul or if it s just a flash in the pan. One thing is for certain, it s popular and its popularity has grown faster than almost any other site in history. The key stat comes from ComScore: Pinterest is the fastest standalone site to hit 10 million unique monthly visits in the U.S. Here s a quick look at their growth curve: While the growth (blue line) is pretty impressive, there is another impressive stat on this chart. The orange bars represent the average minutes spent on the site per user in a month. In the latest months, the average time is more than an hour and a half a month. That s a lot of time spent browsing around the site and speaks to the deep immersion the site seems to create with its users. Unlike many other new social media sites (like Google+, for example), the early adopters aren t techie types, but rather middle America with demographics skewing towards women in the Midwest. So, chances are that your target audience for your restaurant are the people on Pinterest. One final place where Pinterest s impact can be seen is in referral traffic. Most pins are pinned from another website (like a brand website) and when this happens, the pin includes a link back to the original site. This makes it simple for people to click through to the original source. Some sites have already found that they get more referral traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook. That s pretty impressive considering the user base sizes of the two companies. We ll discuss in this paper later how you can check if your content is on Pinterest already and if you re getting any referral traffic yet. Getting Started Despite all the buzz and traffic numbers associate with Pinterest, the site is still officially invite-only. You can request an invite and expect to get one in a couple of days. If you want to speed up the process, have a friend who is already on the site invite you. You ll get an invite the same day. If you don t have a friend on Pinterest, send us an (contact info at the end of this document) and we ll be happy to invite you. 3

4 Assuming you are creating a company account, we recommend that you have the invite sent to the same address that you have connected to your company Twitter account. You ll need either a Twitter or Facebook account to register on Pinterest. Signing up with your company Twitter account will allow you easily share your pins on Twitter directly from Pinterest if you want. This will also automatically populate your Pinterest profile with information and your picture from Twitter, which will help with your brand consistency. After you complete the registration process, including selecting a user name (which should be your company name), you ll be directed to a series of screens to get you started. Here you can select topics that might be of interest to follow, which will help populate your Pinterest stream and give you some content to repin if you choose to do so. For restaurants, it might make sense to follow the Food & Drink topic. On the next screen, you can get started with creating a few pinboards. You can keep the ones they suggest or delete these by rolling over each one and clicking the X that appears in the box. You can add your own now or wait until later when you know what you want. Keep in mind that you can change the name of your pinboards, add more and delete later, so these aren t cast in stone. 4

5 On the final screen, you ll be encouraged to add a Pin It button to your browser s bookmarks bar. This screen also has instructions on how to do it. We recommend you add the Pin It button now even if you don t plan to share content from other sites. We ll use it later to help you visualize how pins from your own website might look on Pinterest. Now, you re ready to start using Pinterest. First, let s set up your profile. Once you re on your Pinterest homepage, go to the upper right of the screen and roll over your username, select Settings. On the settings screen, check everything and make sure it s right. If you used your company Twitter account to register, then everything should be pre-filled including your profile photo. Make any adjustments you want. Getting your profile correct is important, as it ll be one of the key ways people interact with your brand on Pinterest. Your profile page (make a note of the URL at this point) will contain your image, description, and any boards you may have already created. Here s where you can rearrange multiple pinboards if you have them (use the button right next to Edit Profile seen in the above image). 5

6 Creating Content There are basically three ways to create content on Pinterest for your pinboards. First, you can pin content from other sites, which is probably the most common way people add content. Second, you can repin the pins of others. Finally, you can directly add an image, which is probably the least used method to add content to pinboards. Here s a quick look at the first, most common, method to add pins: Go to any website and click the Pin It button you added to your browser s bookmarks bar. An overlay to your screen will show the images from the page that you can pin. Select the one you want. Choose the Pinboard to add it to (or create a new one) and enter a description. Click Pin It and you re done. The posted pin is what you see below. You ll notice that the final pin includes a link back to the webpage where the content came from. This is how Pinterest can generate referral traffic back to your site, which is why we recommend using this method to add pins versus uploading images directly. When you upload images directly, you cannot include a link, so you miss the potential referral traffic. 6

7 Critical Legal Considerations Before you start pinning too much, it s important that you be aware of some legal considerations that may adjust how you use Pinterest. Until recently, Pinterest s own Pin Etiquette recommended avoiding self promotion and encouraged users to only post content of others. However, this has changed and now Pinterest says that posting your own content is just fine. Most people and companies are using the site use it in this manner. Also recently, some have expressed concerns regarding copyright issues with how Pinterest is used. Since pins are essentially copying content (like a photo) from one source and displaying it in another, many consider this to be a copyright infringement since the original owner never gave anyone permission to copy their content and use it elsewhere. Some liken it to copying someone s photos and reprinting them without permission in a magazine. Clearly, this would be an issue and the same could be said for Pinterest. Pinterest s own terms of service make it clear that the user is completely responsible for any copyright issues that may arise (i.e., if someone sues you for pinning their content without permission, you re on your own). This has yet to happen, but the risk (albeit small) still exists. It is important that each company review and understand the Pinterest terms of service. You can find the terms of service here: One way to avoid these copyright issues is to post only content that you own or have permission to use. A perfect example of this would be images of your menu items or photos of your stores. We ll discuss what makes for good content later in this document. To be completely safe regarding copyright issues, you can also avoid pinning other people s content (e.g., from someone else s website). This could also could extend to repinning. The other issue to consider is whether or not you want to allow people to pin your content. It s likely that they are doing it already. You have the option to block all the content from your sites from being pinned and also requesting that existing content of yours be removed from Pinterest. We don t recommend this, as you will lose all of the potential benefits of having your content on Pinterest including the free exposure and the referral traffic. As we ll discuss later in the document, we believe you should encourage people to share your content. If you decide that you don t want people pinning content from your website or other sources, you can file a complaint with Pinterest regarding a specific pin. The form for this can be found here: If you want to block people from pinning content from your site, you can add one line of code to your site that will prevent pinning. Full details can be found at the bottom of this page: All you need to do is add the code shown below to the header of any page where you want to block pinning. When someone tries to pin content, they ll get the following warning: This site doesn t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting! Here s the code you need to add: <meta name= pinterest content= nopin /> 7

8 Optimizing for Pinterest You ve already created an account and now it s time to add some pinboards and pins. We ve already shown you how you can add a few starter pinboards. You ll need a few so that you can neatly categorize your pins. If you ever want to add more pinboards, just click Add at the top of the page and add one. We ve also already shown you how to add a pin using the Pin It bookmark in your browser. We highly recommend using this method to add your pins versus uploading directly to Pinterest. The reason is that when you pin from a website, the source URL is included with the pin. This is how you can ensure that you get credit for the image and also that a link to your site is always included with the pin. Now that you know how to do the basics, you need to know how you can get your content spread throughout Pinterest. There are a number of considerations here and a few techniques that we ll share to ensure that pinning content from your site is easy for people and results in great looking pins. Making sure that you have content that will look great on Pinterest will encourage others to repin and come visit your site. Here s how you can get started optimizing your site for Pinterest. 1. See what s already on Pinterest from your site. It s easy to check if anyone has already pinned content from your site. There might already be some quality content that s generating referrals back to your site. Simply use this link and substitute yoursitename.com with your site s URL: You ll get a screen of all the pins from your site. Feel free to Like or repin any of these to one of your pinboards. You could make a pinboard just containing pins of content from your website created by others. This is also a good time to see if anything objectionable is showing up. There could be content from your site that people have pinned that you don t want shared. Perhaps its an image that was supposed to be deleted from your site at some point. If something is particularly bad and it s an image that you own the copyright for, you can request that it be removed by Pinterest. 8

9 2. Check out the pinning experience from your website. Before you start encouraging people to pin content from your site, you should check if there s anything that people can pin and if you want them pinning what they find. The vast majority of what is pinned from sites is images. For restaurants this likely means images of your food. However, on many sites, there aren t large images of most menu items or images are missing all together. If you only have small image versions of your menu items, then that s the only thing people will be able to share. It s likely that these images won t represent your food very well and people may even hesitate to pin them. You likely have large size images of your food somewhere, so you need to try to make these available for people to pin. It s easy for you to test what pinned images from your site will look like. Go to any page on your site and use the Pin It button we added to your browser. You ll see right away what people are able to pin from your site. There are a few things you should check: -Are there any images that come up when you click the Pin It button? -Are there any images that you wouldn t want people to pin? -Are the images high resolution (at least 400px wide and high)? Having high resolution images makes a big difference. They will appear larger and clearer on Pinterest and will be much more likely to be shared. Smaller images don t do much justice for your food. But large images are likely to be pinned and repinned (while making people hungry for your food). 9

10 So, if you are going to encourage pinning from your site, we highly recommend adding large images that people can pin and will represent your brand and your food well. 3. Add the Pin it button to your website. Adding a Pin it button to your site will encourage people to pin your content. You can add as many as you want to a page or add just one. For example, you an add one Pin it button for each menu item or simply add one at the top of that menu section. Adding one per item will give you the ability to add a specific description for the item, but it requires a lot of manual labor, as each button will have a different set of code. Adding the code to a page is straightforward, but you ll need to work within your website s code base. All of the code that you need can be found here: Adding the code can be done by anyone who manages the backend of your site and shouldn t require much effort. The biggest consideration is where to add the Pin it button and ensuring that the page s formatting isn t impacted by the code. So while it may take a bit of work, adding the Pin it button is the best way to ensure that your content finds its way onto Pinterest. Restaurant Marketing Strategies for Pinterest We ve already covered how to use Pinterest and how to integrate it into your site. Not it s time for some ideas for how to use in your restaurant marketing. Pinterest is a lot different than Facebook and many other channels in using the site for marketing isn t immediately obvious. So, we re going to share with you some ideas to get started. 1. Create specific pinboards. As you know, you can create a pinboard about anything. People are more likely to follow your pinboards if you create more specific pinboards, as they ll have more choices and will be more likely to find something they like. A pinboard of your menu items is a great place to start. Here are some other ideas for pinboards a restaurant might create: - Daily specials: pin a new picture each day of your daily specials - Locations: pin images of each of your locations (people will like to see their hometown restaurant) - Recipes: pin recipes of your menu items or specials instead of just the photo 2. Extend the reach of your promotions. You probably regularly offer coupons and discounts and distribute these through a variety of channels. If you ever offer a printable coupon, you can include it on Pinterest. Simply create a pin of the coupon that people can either print and use or that contains a link to where they can get the coupon (if, for example, you require registration to get the coupon). A large number of coupons are being shared on Pinterest, so there are lots of people looking for them. 10

11 3. Cross promote your Pinterest account. Use all of your existing web properties (like your website) to promote your Pinterest account. You probably already do this with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so you can do the same with Pinterest. You can add buttons encouraging people to follow you on Pinterest in the same places where you promote your other accounts. Pinterest even makes it easy for you to add a button by giving you the code. Just pick the type of button you want and add the code to your site in the proper place. You can find the code here: You are also able to embed pins elsewhere. That means you include a pin in a blog or even your main website. Just find a pin you want to embed and click the embed button. Copy the code and paste it wherever you want to see it. You ll notice that the embedded pin includes links back to the original source and your Pinterest account, so people can find and follow you. 11

12 4. Tweet your pins. When you signed up for Pinterest, we recommended that you sign up using your company Twitter account. There s a good reason for this; you can tweet directly from Pinterest to share your pins with your Twitter followers. It s a great way to let others know that you re on Pinterest. When you use the Pin it button you added to your browser bookmark bar, the pin creation screen that pops up has a check box that let s you tweet your pin. If you check the box and then click Pin It, you ll pin the content on Pinterest and send a tweet at the same time. You can tweet pins that you find on Pinterest too. Each pin has a tweet button (and also Facebook Like button) right next to it. 5. Encourage people to share their content on your boards. Unfortunately, there isn t a simple way for your followers to add to your pinboards. You can add contributors to your board if you both mutually follow each other, however, you cannot control what they post, so we don t recommend this. Alternatively, you can ask people to their photos to you. You can promote this on your website or even in the description of one of your boards. Another alternative is to have people create their own boards featuring content about your restaurant. This could be pictures of food they were served in your restaurant or photos from inside their favorite location. You can turn this into a contest by encouraging people to share the board with you (via , twitter, Facebook or something else) and then you can check out all the boards and offer a prize to the best one. 12

13 6. Sell your products. One little known fact about Pinterest is that you are able to add price information to a pin. That is, you can highlight items that are for sale and include the price. This is perfect if you sell some of your food on your website or if you want to highlight a menu special. This is what your pin could look like: The $3.00 label is what you can add. This lets people know when they see the pin in their stream that it s something they can buy. If they follow the link, it can take them right to the page on your website for the item so they can purchase it. Adding the price label is simple. When you create a pin, just add the dollar sign ($) and the amount. This automatically adds the price label. 13

14 What To Do Now Pinterest is definitely the hot social media site. Whether or not it lasts remains to be seen. However, it is safe to say that it can drive greater awareness and engagement with your brand. There are many different ways you can use Pinterest for marketing your restaurant. We included a number of detailed ideas for how to do this throughout this document. If you re looking to get started on Pinterest with some basic ideas, here are some things you can do now: w Create a personal account. Before putting your company on Pinterest, get comfortable with it by using it personally. You ll start to notice how others use it, what the etiquette is, and what works well and what doesn t. Using a personal account is also much lower risk than experimenting with your business account. w Check out your site s content. Using the Pin it bookmark button, try out your own site and see how well content from your site gets pinned to Pinterest. Are there large images to pin? Is the content interesting? Are there any objects you wouldn t want pinned? Check it out now and make any adjustments to your site. w See what s there already. You can see what items have been pinned from your website by simply navigating to: (where yourwebsite.com should be the URL of your site). w Decide on a company policy. There are some potential legal issues with sharing content on Pinterest. Review the terms of service with your legal team and decide what works for your company. You will also need to determine if you are going to allow people to pin content from your site. You can block them from doing this and also force the removal of your content from Pinterest (neither of which we recommend). w Start gathering high quality images. High quality, large images are the most appropriate content for Pinterest. However, many restaurant websites don t have great shots of their food on their site. This leaves nothing for people to pin. If you already have high resolution images of your food (and locations) make sure they are on your website somewhere. If you don t consider getting some high quality photography done. w Try out the Pin It button. Experiment by including the Pin it button on a few pages on your website. After a while, you can see if people are using the button by checking what content has been pinned on Pinterest. w Check out your analytics. Determine if Pinterest is already driving traffic to your website. If there is no content from your site on Pinterest, don t expect there to be much traffic. However, if you already have some content on Pinterest, see how Pinterest ranks in terms of referrals to your site. Likely, if you haven t been active with Pinterest, it won t amount to much, but this is a good baseline. Once you start using Pinterest more, see how your overall and referral traffic grows. This can help determine if Pinterest is worth the effort for your restaurant. That s everything you need to know to get started with Pinterest. If you have other questions, we re available to help. You can contact us using the information below. In case you aren t familiar with Zipscene, check out the next couple of pages from more information and to see how we can help your restaurant with all of its digital marketing needs. And, of course, feel free to check out us on Pinterest: Jonathan Richman VP, Product Marketing jonathan.richman@zipscene.com Restaurant Marketing Made Simple. 14

15 A complete, integrated digital marketing platform that helps you more effectively reach your customers, while simplifying your life and generating greater sales. Zipscene combines your existing brand information, such as menus, locations, and promotions, together with reviews, discussions, photos and videos from social media sites and delivers it everywhere your customers are. We make it easy to run your entire marketing program by consolidating your current teams, vendors, assets, and initiatives together onto one intuitive management tool that optimizes your digital marketing. Every Screen Zipscene can quickly deploy your digital marketing across every screen including mobile, desktop, and tablet. No matterwhat device people use to engage with your content, Zipscene ensures they have the best possible experience. Extended Promotions Instead of announcing your promotion on just your desktop site or Facebook, extend it to every screen to ensure you reach all of your customers for maximum impact. Integrate with social media to spread your promotion virally across the Web. Consolidated Commerce Integrate your existing programs such as online ordering, loyalty, and gift cards into every screen to ensure maximum reach and effectiveness. Plus, manage it all and see the results in a single report. Restaurant Marketing Made Simple.

16 Restaurant Marketing Made Simple. We work exclusively with restaurants, so we understand your unique needs and challenges. Zipscene Marketing Platform Every Screen Enhanced and consistent versions of your website specifically designed for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Extended Promotions Launch promotions across all of your screens ensuring you connect with all of your customers for maximum reach and impact. Consolidated Commerce Deeply integrate services like online ordering and gift cards to deliver an improved user experience and better results. CRM Social Integration Gather detailed data about your customers allowing you to learn what they want so your marketing can better meet their needs. Include multiple, seamless opportunities for your customers to leverage their social networks to spread your message virally. Contact us to get started today: zipscene.com Restaurant Marketing Made Simple.