These three great accounts prove that Pinterest and tourism are a match made in marketing heaven.
Due to it’s visual nature, Pinterest is a great way for tourism sites to promote the beautiful and entertaining things to see and do in their area. Not only do eye-catching scenes perform wonderfully on the platform, but Pinterest is also well known for being a source of escapism. However, tourism marketing has the distinct challenge of selling a culture rather than a product or service. In spite of the challenges faced, these three sites have proved that Pinterest and tourism are a match made in marketing heaven.
Visit My Smokies, a website dedicated to helping “plan your Smokie Mountain dream vacation”, has done a great job of building links with users in the area through both a local “Blog” board and the use of community boards. On the “Blog” board, Visit My Smokies links to blogs from around the region highlighting the unique aspects of each. Through community boards, like “My all time favorite travel pictures,” they are able to get gorgeous pictures of the Smokies out to an audience beyond their profile followers.
Now, California doesn’t seem like too hard of a place to sell, but that doesn’t stop Visit California from putting in time and effort into their Pinterest page. By using the boards to highlight unique areas around California, Visit California provides a virtual Pinterest tour of the various escapes around the state. They also encourage users to interact with the account by sharing their CA adventures with the hashtage #VisitCA on pins.
With an astonishing 487,000 followers and a 96% engagement rate, Texas Tourism is performing exceptionally well on Pinterest. All of their boards, including the popular community board, “Travelin’ Texas,” focus on various activities you can do in Texas. Because almost every board has the oh-so-important keyword “Texas” in it, their boards have a better chance of showing up in search results about the state.
Take advantage of your existing audience. By cross-promoting your profile over Facebook, Twitter and email, you’re informing current fans that you have branched out onto Pinterest. Just sending out a heads-up to your pre-existing following that you’re on Pinterest will help to quickly pump up your page.
Drive traffic with specific keywords. As we explained last week in our post on boosting your Pinterest SEO, using localized keywords can help your account pop up in the right search results to the right people. An extremely effective way to target users using the keywords associated to your region is to sign up for PinLeague’s Audience Engine to automatically engage those users.
Create sharable content. To drive traffic to your site, make sure the content from your domain is pinnable. By simply using high-quality images with the pin it button, you make it easy for users to spread the word about your awesome area. If you need a few tips on generating content, Marcela De Vivo wrote a great article on using Pinterest to influence your content marketing.
Even though this is a Pinterest tourism post, don’t think these Pinterest tips are only for tourism marketing. Implementing locational keywords, maximizing your Pinterest SEO and generating great, Pin-worthy content are things every brand needs to do to make the most out of Pinterest marketing. What other tips have worked for you?
This article was orginally published on the PinLeague blog as 3 Great Pinterest Tourism Marketing Accounts.