Despite lacking a marketing strategy, many travel brands are popular on Pinterest, the social scrapbooking site.
Pinterest is in the news because of rumors that it is raising a fresh round of financing at a valuation of up to $2.5 billion, according to the WSJ.
Missed opportunities
Travel brands are quite popular with the site’s users, 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. Consider the Daily Escapes images posted by Travel Channel or travel blogger Johnny Jet’s Dream Trips board.
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.
Some examples from the past several months: Users Ash Huang  and Sabrina Majeed created a board of all the sights they wanted to visit in New York City as a trip-planning tool, while Joanne Ong and Kara Cooper pinned their way through 14 European countries.
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. ScottVest, the makers of travel clothing, recently created a board ”Things you SHOULDN’T put in your Scottevest.”
- Think “holidays.” America’s largest domestic carrier Southwest created a board of awkward December holiday photos of its staff.
- Re-use existing, archival content. Southwest has had good success with this in re-purposing vintage photos of its aircraft.
- 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.
- For instance, TravelVision, the marketing platform, reached out to travel bloggers via Pinterest Group invites to ask them to pin images to the company’s board, “Favorite Places to Stay – Share Yours
- 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 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.
- Create infographics. Visual.ly, Wordle and Piktochart can help.
- Invite customers to share photos from their trips to post on your pin boards, to gain word-of-mouth referrals post-trip.
- Learn how to use the site and see examples of what’s popular and effective by visiting Pinterest’s official blog.
Get pinning!
An irony of the situation is that Pinterest is built from the ground-up to drive transactions and welcome brands. Yet at least when it comes to travel brands, there has been little strategic planning.
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About Sean O'Neill
Great perspective Sean!
In my experience with Croft Global Travel, an adventure travel company based in Arlington, Virginia, there are positives and negatives. We were early adapters on Pinterest for travel brands and have nearly 6500 followers. For travel, I think it’s a great tool for SEO and branding purposes but so far has fallen short in terms of real traffic and/or revenue generation for tour operators.
Although, I think its an excellent tool for tourism boards and destinations if they get creative with it (one bit of advice your article mentions).
https://pinterest.com/CGT/
Thanks for sharing your experience using Pinterest for branding at Croft Global Travel!
Thanks Sean for the timely post!
We’ve started experimenting the past week for our visitor attraction website DayTripFinder.
Right now we’re starting with boards to inspire visitors on day trips http://pinterest.com/daytripfinder/.
Good point about making sure links are working and futureproof, it’s something we’re trying to figure out the best way to handle.
The next step is to add ‘pin it’ buttons onto the galleries itself i.e. to http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/quest/photo-gallery#3
Like Ryan I think it’s a great tool for building awareness and we’re hoping that’s the case for us. Let’s see on the SEO front and you want to be careful not to compete for you site’s own keywords with the board category names.
Dominic
Excellent points, Dominic. Great example, from DayTripFinder, too!
One of our biggest learnings from Pinterest was that you don’t necessarily need big, beautiful images to be pinned to boards, and that utility can be a sufficient motivator for pinning (although it does help to have a strong logo).
The other great learning has been discovering the categories people are pinning us under. For example, we noticed hundreds of visits coming for someone who pinned our Cost2Drive app to their ‘Camping’ inboard http://pinterest.com/pin/208361920231500259/
This, wouldn’t have been intuitive to us, and will help inform our editorial approach and how we’ll approach Pinterest and other social media channels as well. Here are some other categories our app has been pinned under: http://pinterest.com/source/costtodrive.com/
That wouldn’t have been intuitive to me, either.
Thanks for sharing that insight!
Great article Sean! We see a LOT of followers repin our visuals but the call-to-action back to myTab.co is not great. We spoke with many customers about this. They said they love our boards and pins but don’t associate it as a way to then venture outside of Pinterest to action this. So in theory regarding travel, it’s a fantasy on Pinterest but distanced from reality and possibility. But the trigger effect is two fold: a – customers really appreciate and like our pins so it generates brand reinforcement. b – they do use myTab as a result of the inspiration yet not though clicking a pin link. Ultimately we get the traction back to myTab that we want yet not directly. I truly believe that customers can’t connect the dots between fantasy pins and reality of actually taking the trip. It’s too disconnected and an isolated experience on Pinterest. But it’s interesting trying to bridge that gap
Hi Heddi,
That’s an interesting insight from Mytab’s experience. I certainly think that if something’s not really working as a marketing technique, it’s best to put time and resources into something else that IS working.
I’m afraid I didn’t come across hard data in travel specifically that says inspirational pins lead to bookings, but in retail and other sectors there is a lot of data. So there must be something behind it.
But if you want to keep trying at Pinterest, here are some more new tools that may help:
1. Pinfluencer
2. Viralheat
3. PinLeague
4. Pingraphy
See details here: http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/4-new-pinterest-tools-to-try.html
Also brands should know that as of last November, Pinterest created special brand specific pages with special terms of service and an interface. http://blog.pinterest.com/post/35710687813/new-tools-for-businesses-in-the-pinterest-community
Hey Sean, I only just got a notification you’d replied. How very strange. Thank you for these tools. Really appreciate them and will now get busy testing them out
Viator has been active on Pinterest for over a year now, and we have been enthusiastic about jumping into trying different things on the site. We agree it can be a very useful platform for the travel industry and we’re curious to see how Pinterest will continue to evolve as a social marketing tool. Sean provides some fantastic advice, and here are some other things we have found to be useful:
- In addition to creating group boards, being active on existing group boards (especially those with a lot of followers and contributors) is a great way to reach lots of potential new followers who you know are interested in travel
- Although it doesn’t seem to be exactly accurate, checking the source pages is a great way to gauge how many people are pinning from your site (http://pinterest.com/source/viator.com/ for example)
- Each month we track new followers, referral visits and revenue from Pinterest, which shows us how effective our efforts have been
- #PinUpLive is a new weekly Pinterest chat organized by travel bloggers Beers and Beans, which focuses on travel. Similar to Twitter chats, participating in them is a great way to interact with the travel community.
- We’d love to hear more about travel-related Pinterest contests! We have tried a couple variations of the “Pin to Win” model (http://pinterest.com/viatortravel/holiday-travel-wishlist/), which work well, but we’d love to hear what other companies in the travel industry have learned from Pinterest giveaways.
Jenna,
Those are amazing tips! Especially about using the source page as a metric, what metrics are worth tracking, and what kind of travel-themed contests are effective.
Thanks for sharing!!!
Sean
Anyone have any data on conversion numbers on Pinterest traffic? My gut is it’s not serious traffic, it’s looky-loo…but maybe I’m wrong.
‘Fraid not. I’d be curious on conversion numbers, too.
Comscore does estimate that about 16% of online travel shoppers also visit Pinterest.
http://www.brafton.com/news/pinterest-is-key-for-travel-marketers
Really a great article, Sean. We have a 3* hotel in Lucca, Tuscany, and I’ve started using Pinterest since the beginning. Now we have 1100 followers that is not so bad for a little hotel like ours. We have created a sort of travel guide with pictures and videos about the city, the food, the events, etc. and I love the way people interact with us there. We have increased the traffic to our website.
http://pinterest.com/hoteluniverso/
Congratulations on seeing success from your strategy! Having 1,100 followers is great for a property of your size! It’s interesting that you can see you have increased traffic to your website by providing a helpful travel guide and inspiration source for the area.
Best,
Sean
This whole discussion around conversion numbers seems pointless to me. Try to ask your guests where they first heard about your destination or brand, or ask them what eventually made them book a trip: They probably can´t tell you. When planning your vacation there are so many touch points, that it´s impossible to distinguish which touch point lead to an actual conversion. For example I will spend some weeks in Jordan this summer and I happen to know exactly how I came up with that idea: I saw a picture of Petra at night in my Twitter feed two years ago. But I have no idea who posted that picture and how is a destination supposed to track this sort of conversion?
I would recommend that tourism marketers think of Social Media as a tool of inspiration and not necessarily conversion. Brand your pictures with your logo and make sure they link to a good landingpage, so potential customers connect a great landscape or beach with your brand in particular. That will make them come back to you for the actual booking, even if it´s in two years from now.
Great points, Carolin.
I think if brands own the rights to the images they use, they ought to add watermarks on them to drive the impression home — and not have competitors steal your hard work.
It’s a definite challenge trying to properly attribute what parts of the funnel deserve credit, rather than just focusing on the last click.
Best,
Sean
We ask our travel operators to supply pics that we can pin and further promote their products on our Pinterest.com/toptravelsights and we are quite pleased with our progress to date.