Pinterest is an online photo sharing site. While, this may not seem perfect for the Dental Marketing industry, it actually offers quite a few benefits.
Here are tips for how you can use Pinterest to market your Dental Practice:
1) Create user-generated boards – Since you can open up boards to other Pinterest pinners, create a board hosted for your followers. Then ask them to pin stuff in those boards based on that theme. For example, your office could create a board that allows users to pin their dream smiles, their own before and after images. Apple could create a board that allows users to share their own photos of before your work and after. A great way to do this is in group shots.
2) Create a testimonial board – A great way to leverage your customer and fan enthusiasm is to create a board dedicated to ways that your product or service has helped them. Asking Leveraging testimonials is an excellent way for companies that don’t fit the lifestyle mode to use Pinterest.
3) Pin about your event – If your brand or business is hosting an event, create a board around it and pin content leading up to the event. Sponsoring a local event? Pin it! Show your exclusive banners or t-shirts or images of why you are a sponsor to the event. Boards could curate pins on topics related to the event, profiles of the event founders, images of your staff participating, even personal touching stories of why this event was chosen to sponsor. Such as Breast Cancer awareness, St. Jude, etc.
4) Pin about a new staff member – Create a board that introduces your staff members to the Pinterest Community. Does a member of your staff enjoy marathons? Have them post images of themselves at the latest marathon event. This creates the humanness of the social media world.
5) Offer exclusive discounts – The most direct way of promoting on Pinterest is to offer exclusive deals on products for your Pinterest followers. You can also pin a QR code with compelling content that will drive visitors straight to more description of a product. Local businesses could benefit by offering QR codes for iPhone users to bring into their stores for special discounts. Ask us about creating a QR code for your website.
6) Host a Contest – Suggest to your followers that they create boards on their accounts about your brand…and then pin images that reflect why they like you. Lands’ End created a holiday contest called “Pin It to Win It” that bridged other social media sites to generate interest in the contest…and ultimately in the company.
7) Show the human side of your brand – Pinterest is great for having fun…and showing your customers that you can have fun. Or that you are quirky and that you are not all about the bottom line.Today Show pins pictures of funny things there anchors do. How could this work for you? Imagine you are a startup with a small staff…you could create boards for all of your employees, make them contributors and then allow them to share stuff that lets their personality shine. Pinterest is great for relationship management, leveraging the hopes, dreams and desire…not only of your customers…but your employees as well.
8) Use Pinterest as a research marketing tool – A great way to crawl inside the minds of your customers is to crawl through Pinterest looking at what your fans are pinning. Remember, pinners are curating content that is important to them. A lot of the content revolves around major milestones in their lives…getting married, buying and decorating a home and having a baby…plus, things that inspire them.
9) Use Pinterest as a minimum viable product – You can even treat your followers as a focus group by creating a board that revolves around an idea you have for a product…and then see how they react. Did you get a lot of comments? Repins? Likes? You probably wouldn’t get enough statistically reliable data to build a new revenue model, but from a cost perspective, this would be an ideal way to get customer feedback.
Finally, we monitor visits and traffic from all Social Media Profiles. Pinterest is an engagement tool for your customers, and that your before and after photos are very impressive, this is a platform to use these images to your advantage. We find that Pinterest is your target demographic for cosmetic dentistry, smile makeovers and six-month smiles.