How to be awesome on Pinterest: Inspire Travellers Right Now!
HOW TO BE AWESOME ON PINTEREST: INSPIRE TRAVELLERS RIGHT NOW! Did you know that 62% of Pinterest users say they use it to help them plan their travels? It is one of Pinterest’s top 10 search categories. If your business is in the travel industry, you should seriously consider including it in your marketing strategy. If you haven’t, you are missing out on a great deal of potential business. Find out how right now!| via #BornToBeSocial, Pinterest Marketing & Consulting

How to be awesome on Pinterest: Inspire Travellers Right Now!

How to be awesome on Pinterest: Inspire travellers - Did you know that 62% of Pinterest users say they use it to help them plan their travels? It is one of Pinterest’s top 10 search categories. If your business is in the travel industry, you should seriously consider including it in your marketing strategy. If you haven’t, you may be missing out on a great deal of potential business.

How people use Pinterest to plan their travels

To show you how Pinterest attracts travellers to businesses in the tourist industry, let’s take a look at how Anna recently planned a trip to France. Anna is an avid Pinterest user who regularly pins all sorts of practical information to her Pinterest boards. Last summer she decided that the next holiday would be in France, so she created a new board My perfect holiday in France. She invited her partner William to pin to the board too. Throughout the year they both pinned images to this board. Within a few months, it was filled with ideas of places to stay, interesting regions and cities to visit, things to do and places to eat.

Some of the content on Anna’s board she discovered whilst browsing the platform during spare moments. Since Anna started following boards, interests and accounts related to holidays in France, some of this content found its way into her home feed. Whenever the couple saw something interesting they pinned it to the board.

She decided to create two more boards: one dedicated to Paris, since it was on top of her list of places to go and another entitled to Places to stay in France. Anna made her boards public. Anyone else interested in a French holiday was able to subscribe to her boards, follow them and save some of the pins to their own boards. Some people even added comments to his pins. One of them was added by a Pinterest-savvy hotel in Paris, offering her a 10% discount if she decided to stay with them.

Anna used the visual search engine to dream about, plan and research her family vacation. She shared lots of helpful content on her boards that, in turn, was shared by others. When it was time to decide she made a shortlist to plan and book the trip. Whilst in France, she regularly consulted Pinterest to find even more information about the places she was visiting.

How to inspire travellers

These travel & tourism businesses are doing a great job of marketing on Pinterest by sharing inspiring content:

Travel France Online on Pinterest
Lou Messugo Blog & Gite on Pinterest
Holidays to Europe on Pinterest
Four Seasons Hotel Paris on Pinterest

Here are 3 suggestions to reach travellers from a recent article on Pinterest’s business blog:

“Inspire people on Pinterest to explore the world, and they’ll be inspired to explore your products too. Add Pins on travel trends, such as stories of traveling solo, a guide to exploring the national parks of Croatia or ideas for vacationing on a budget.

Grab attention with quotes, informative tips and vivid imagery of this year’s top destinations. This works well for businesses that aren’t in the travel industry too. For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, you could create a travel board with road trip outfits and suitcase-packing tips.

Reach a Millennial audience with Pins specifically about traveling in the summertime, from the latest summer fashion to the hottest beaches.”

The power of Guided Search

Pinterest is a visual search engine with a unique searching tool: Guided Search. The Guided Search functionality is particularly suited to the pursuit of travel interests. It lets users explore things they didn’t even know they were looking for. It guides people to areas of interest through a visual discovery process. It is a more “serendipitous” way of searching.

Here’s how it works:

Say Anna typed the keywords Paris and Hotel in the search box. She may see something like this:

Example Pinterest Guided Search - BornToBeSocial.com, Pinterest Marketing & Consulting

Then if she clicks on Room, new and more precise search results are displayed:

Example Pinterest Guided Search - BornToBeSocial.com, Pinterest Marketing & Consulting

Wouldn’t you love pinners to find your content this way?!

The thing that Guided Search gets right is the understanding that often when people surf the web, they are looking to get inspired. This means that when you search for something, you don’t arrive at one obvious conclusion. Instead, it gives you a wide choice of different but all equally interesting answers. By optimizing your pins for Pinterest’s guided search, you will increase the amount of views directed towards your business and its products.

Whilst I was searching for great examples of businesses getting it right (see above), I found that Pinterest’s potential to attract business is hugely under utilised by travel & tourism businesses. Especially in Europe. Many travel & tourism businesses can be found on Pinterest, but are not using it to their advantage. They give it a go, but give up when they do not see immediate results. In many cases, most recent pins date from over a year ago and the content format is not optimised for sharing on this visual search engine. One of the secrets of success on Pinterest is to pin vertically formatted content on a daily basis! Sounds like hard work? It doesn't have to be!

​Would Anna have found any of your content to save on her boards? Are you inspiring pinners with content that leads them to your website? Share your tips in the comments below !

Mary Lumley - Pinterest Marketing Consultant

WORK WITH A PINTEREST PRO 
Mary Lumley

Let's create the next Pinterest success story.
Together.

HOW TO BE AWESOME ON PINTEREST: INSPIRE TRAVELLERS RIGHT NOW! Did you know that 62% of Pinterest users say they use it to help them plan their travels? It is one of Pinterest’s top 10 search categories. If your business is in the travel industry, you should seriously consider including it in your marketing strategy. If you haven’t, you are missing out on a great deal of potential business. Find out how right now!| via #BornToBeSocial, Pinterest Marketing & Consulting
Mary Lumley | BornToBeSocial - Conversion Focused Pinterest Marketing | Consulting | Conseil
How to be awesome on Pinterest: Inspire Travellers Right Now!

Did you know that 62% of Pinterest users say they use it to help them plan their travels? It is one of Pinterest’s top 10 categories. If your business is in the travel industry, you should seriously consider including it in your marketing strategy. If you haven’t, you are missing out on a great deal of potential business.

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