Chelsea Allenby is a Digital Marketer of 9 years and Managing Director of Allenby Digital Ltd, an online marketing agency she set-up in 2015, specialising in social media and content marketing. www.chelseamarketing.co.uk
Pinterest is a hugely popular social network, especially amongst women. From a user point of view, Pinterest is mainly used to gather inspirational content in one place. It’s ideal for generating home decor ideas, wedding plans, craft tips and motivation for health and good nutrition. The amount of food and nutrition related content on this platform makes it an ideal marketing space for restaurants.
Although it’s all too tempting to post solely about your restaurant and your brand, this shouldn’t be how you approach Pinterest. It might seem counter-intuitive to share things that don’t directly relate to you. However, social media is about building a community of people that are relevant. The only way to do this successfully is to ‘be social’ rather than to ‘do social’.
So what does this actually mean? Well just as you would on a personal level when you’re trying to make new friends or you’re simply chatting with peers. You wouldn’t speak only about yourself, you’d find out what that other person was interested in too. You would chat about topics that you both relate to either directly or indirectly. Pinterest is the same. In addition to sharing your fantastic menu, beautiful images of the restaurant and food, you also want to focus on wider topics. Each board you create on Pinterest should relate to a new topic.
Here are some ideas:
Recipe Boards
Here you can pin recipes for home cooked food. Again, you might find it strange to share recipes for home cooked meals when you want to get customers through the door. The fact is that using recipes will attract new followers to your page and in turn direct them to your website to view more recipes.
You could even take this further and have different boards for different foods. A cheese board, dessert board, bread board, healthy recipe boards etc,.
Food Porn Board
A food porn board is simply a collection of visually appealing food. There is nothing better than looking at brilliantly presented food. It can act as inspiration for the next meal or spark creativity for a dinner party.
Now you might be thinking, how can I come up with all of this content on a regular basis? The good news is that you can mix in your own content with other people’s pins. This is called ‘repinning’ and it’s very similar to ‘retweeting’ on Twitter or ‘sharing’ content on Facebook. So if you see a great recipe already on Pinterest, simply repin it directly to your own board and enrich the social experience for your followers.
To get the most out of Pinterest you do need your own content too, so although repins are great, don’t reply on them to do all the work. It’s your own pins that will drive traffic back to your website. You can use a ‘teaser pin’ that draws people in and forces them to click, like the example below:
What Kind of Restaurants are on Pinterest?
Larger restaurant chains are more commonly found on Pinterest. This is purely due to their size and their dominance over the amount of content they can create. However, this doesn’t mean that small or independent restaurants can’t utilise Pinterest in a beneficial way too.
One strategy could involve using Pinterest to remarket to previous customers. For example, you could let customers know they can find one of your very special recipes on Pinterest. You could even try a competition where customers need to submit their best homemade cooking to be featured on one of your boards.
Like any social media strategy, you need to get your creative hat on and start thinking about how you can offer something a little different and unique. Good luck and happy pinning!
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