I speak to business owners all the time who have Pinterest accounts, but they usually don’t know what they’re doing with them. So when I ask them if they’ve ever run a Pinterest contest, many of them aren’t sure what that means.
Let me explain: a Pinterest contest is simply a game or challenge you set up on your page and encourage your followers to participate in.
It can be as simple as asking people to submit photos to you and reward your favorite one, or it could be something more elaborate like asking people to create their own boards based on one of your themes and then choosing a winner from those entries.
Contests are great for engagement because they get users actively interacting with your brand rather than just passively scrolling through it, which makes everyone happier.
And if you’re not sure where to start when it comes creating these contests yourself? Don’t worry! We’ve got 13 ideas that should help inspire some awesome new promotional activities.
| Takeaways |
|---|
| Pinterest contests can be effective marketing strategies. |
| Contests can engage your audience and increase brand visibility. |
| Consider your target audience and goals before running a contest. |
| Clear contest rules and guidelines are essential to ensure fairness. |
| Utilize eye-catching visuals to create appealing contest posts. |
| Prizes should be relevant to your audience and brand. |
| Promote your contest across different marketing channels. |
| Analyze contest metrics to measure the success of your campaign. |
| Pinterest’s guidelines for contests must be followed. |
| A well-planned Pinterest contest can generate user-generated content. |
To Increase Your Followers
Pinterest is a social media platform that is great for increasing your brand awareness, building your audience, and finding new customers. It’s also a great place to build relationships with existing customers.
If you’re looking for ways to grow your business, Pinterest should be high on your list of strategies.
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To Identify Your Most Engaged Fans
If you’re running a contest, it’s important to identify your most engaged fans.
These are the people who are going to be most likely to share and repin your content, as well as comment on it. If you can identify them, they’re also great candidates for providing feedback on new products or services that might help boost sales in Pinterest’s virtual store.
Here’s how to identify your most engaged followers:
Get a list of all users who have pinned one of your Pins (or boards) at least five times in the past month and then sort this list by the number of likes per pin.
This will give you an idea of which pins and boards were liked the most by users with whom you have not yet interacted via comments or other forms of engagement (eg, repins).
Look at which Pins have been repined at least five times within the last month. Pay attention here this isn’t just about volume; it’s also about quality! You want people who care enough about what they’re seeing on Pinterest that they want others to see it too!
To Convert Users Into Customers
Pinterest is an easy way to drive traffic, sales, signups, and conversions. Here are some tips on how you can use Pinterest to get the results you want:
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Drive Traffic To Your Website
Use Pinterest as the first step in your sales funnel. For example, if someone sees a pin from your brand that has a link back to your website (and it’s not just an image).
They will be able to click through and learn more about what you’re selling or sign up for something like a newsletter or email list.
Drive Sales
Have links directly on pins themselves so people can buy products right away without having to go anywhere else on the internet.
This also works if someone clicks through from another pin that is related but doesn’t have direct links built into it;
This way users don’t feel like they’re being pushed into buying something too quickly or feeling overwhelmed by all the options available with no guidance whatsoever from either party involved.
You won’t feel pressured into purchasing anything because everything has been presented beforehand – which means customers don’t feel rushed into making decisions about whether or not something fits their needs/wants when shopping online through Pinterest!
Drive Downloads
Include download links within each pin description box so that users don’t have any difficulty accessing whatever multimedia files might be included with them (such as PDFs).
This can also help increase engagement since users aren’t forced into opening up separate tabs while reading content provided by various brands across social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook where there may be only one link per post;
Instead, they will have access at all times without needing anything extra installed onto their device before using these features.*
To Expose Your Brand To New Audiences
Running a contest is a great way to expose your brand to new audiences, get more followers, and increase traffic and sales.
Pinterest is one of the most popular social media platforms out there with over 300 million monthly active users. You can use this platform to promote your brand by creating boards that are relevant to your product or service and pinning images that relate to those boards.
This allows you to expose new customers who may be interested in what you have to offer without having them leave Pinterest for other sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Where they could lose interest in what you’re selling because it’s not relevant enough for them at the moment (or ever).
It’s also worth noting that if someone isn’t following you yet on Pinterest but likes an image from one of your boards then they’ll automatically start seeing what else comes out of that board.
And if nothing else does then eventually they’ll just stop checking back because there’s nothing new happening there anymore!
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To Develop Better Relationships With Current Customers
To develop better relationships with current customers, you need to get to know them. The best way to get to know your customers is by asking them questions or running a contest on your platform.
You can use the contest as an opportunity for people who have already engaged with your business to share their feedback on what they like about it, how they use it, and more. You will then be able to incorporate their suggestions into future campaigns or product offerings!
There are other benefits of running a contest as well: it helps grow the community around your brand and increases engagement rates among existing followers while also attracting new ones (and guess what? They’re more likely to remember the experience because they participated).
To Spread The Word About Your Products Or Services
If you’re looking for a place to share your brand, Pinterest is a great option. It’s the second biggest social media platform in the world, and it’s particularly popular with women 83% of online consumers who are on Pinterest are women.
That means that if you’re targeting this demographic, you should consider using Pinterest to help spread the word about your products or services.
If you already have an established brand identity on other social media platforms (like Facebook and Twitter), then sharing that same content on Pinterest can help build up followers on this new platform as well.
You can also use it as an opportunity to share blog posts with people who haven’t seen them yet or would like something easy-to-digest at their fingertips rather than having to go through lengthy blog posts every time they want some useful information from you.
To Organize Your Content And Inspire People To Pin More Of It
You’ve spent a lot of time creating, editing, and curating your content and it’s not just for you. It’s for your followers so that they can benefit from the information you share with them.
By organizing and promoting your content on Pinterest, you’re able to make it easier for people to find what they need intuitively. Users can search for images based on their interests or preferences (like “food” or “travel”).
Making it much more likely that they’ll be able to find exactly what they want with just one click. And because your pins are organized by topic (so if someone finds something interesting in one area but wants something else in another), getting back into the groove is simple as well!
It’s true: many businesses struggle with how best to organize their social media platforms.
But Pinterest makes this task far less daunting than other platforms do because there aren’t any strict rules about how things should look or work when compared with other networks like Facebook where users generally expect posts from brands/entrepreneurs
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To Generate More Blog Subscriptions
If you’re looking to attract new readers, Pinterest is an excellent place to start! According to HubSpot, 42% of Pinterest users subscribe to blogs and 75% read them regularly.
Additionally, 42% share content from blogs on other social media platforms, and 78% visit a blog directly after following it on Pinterest.
It’s clear that the platform is an excellent source of traffic for your blog but what if you want more than just traffic? That’s where contests come in!
A contest will help build excitement around your content and encourage participation from your followers as they attempt to win prizes by sharing or repinning it.
In general, people are more likely to engage with brands when they have something at stake: whether that be a discount code or free product samples.
Users are more likely to engage with brands who offer them chances at winning something rather than simply advertising products or services without any chance of winning anything themselves.
This is especially true when we’re talking about content-based platforms like Pinterest where there isn’t much else users can do besides pinning images (and maybe write reviews).
To Gather More Newsletter Signups
To get a leg up on your competition, you can use Pinterest contests to gain more email subscribers.
Many brands will use a contest as an excuse to gather more email addresses and social media followers by asking users to “like” or follow them after entering the contest.
For example, RewardStyle offers Pinterest contests where users must subscribe or follow the brand to participate.
After entering your name and email address into RewardStyle’s form, you’re then asked: “Would you like us to add you as a follower on Pinterest?” This is also where RewardStyle asks for permission to send out emails from time to time (which will be covered later).
Asking for someone’s Twitter handle or Facebook page is another way to collect contact information that can later be used for marketing purposes
To Collect Product Reviews
Pinterest is a great place to collect product reviews. Here are some of the advantages of running a contest on Pinterest:
It’s easy to do you can set up your contest in just a few minutes.
You get the feedback you can use customer reviews are one of the most valuable pieces of information you can have when you’re trying to improve your products or services, so they must be honest and constructive!
You can use these reviews to make changes that will help improve your brand image in the future.
It works running contests on Pinterest have been shown by multiple studies (like this one) to be effective at increasing traffic, pageviews per visit, and social media engagement for brands as large as Coca-Cola and as small as local businesses like restaurants or nail salons (even though those don’t typically sell products).
To Build Up A Large Number Of User-Generated Images Of Your Product, Brand Or Service
You’ve probably heard that Pinterest is a visual platform. But what does this mean? On Pinterest, users collect and organize images around specific topics of interest. It’s the perfect way to get user-generated content (UGC) on your product, brand, or service.
On Pinterest, people are likely to create a board around your product or service perhaps even multiple boards, and pin images of it in different settings and contexts.
By creating contests with prizes like gift cards that can be redeemed at retailers such as Amazon or Best Buy you can encourage this type of UGC generation.
And increase brand awareness among potential customers who may not have been aware of it before they started using Pinterest as part of their purchasing decisions.
To Get Some Original Content For The Next Redesign Of Your Website Or Social Media Properties
Pinterest is a great place to find images for your website, social media accounts, email newsletters, and print materials.
You can easily search for the type of image you want and then use the Pin It button on Pinterest to save it. You can then repin or share this image on your site or social media accounts.
If you’re running a contest on Pinterest, here are some ideas for how you could use this content:
- Design an original landing page for your contest that features one of the images from the winners’ boards (this will help them stand out from all other contests)
- Create custom graphics based on these images (e.g., use their photos as part of an overlay when sharing posts)
To Turn Your Pinterest Account Into A Promotional Hub For All The Other Things You’re Doing Online
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to run a Pinterest contest.
Now that you have all the information you need to start running your own Pinterest contest, it’s time to get started!
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To Prove That Pinterest Is Working For You
Pinterest is a great way to build your brand, increase traffic to your website, increase engagement with your audience, and increase followers and social media reach.
If you’re not using Pinterest (and many people aren’t), it may be time to start. Entering contests on Pinterest is one of the best ways to promote yourself and drive traffic back to the site.
You can run contests in two ways: by having users pin a certain number of images or add a specific hashtag at the end of their pin description before an agreed-upon deadline;
Or by having them create an original piece based on a theme or prompt (e.g., “Make something inspired by our brand).
In this article, we will explore both methods in detail so that you can choose which one works best for you based on your goals and resources.
But first, let’s take a look at why running Pinterest contests are such an effective way for brands large and small alike to attract new customers:
Run A Pinterest Contest If You Want To Use It As An Engagement Tool
Use Pinterest to increase followers. Pinterest is the second-largest social network in the United States and has over 200 million monthly active users, most of whom are women between 25-54 years old.
Get more followers on your business account by running a contest that promotes your brand.
Use Pinterest to identify your most engaged fans. Run contests that ask users to submit an image with a specific theme or message.
Then analyze the data from those submissions and find out which ones get the most likes and repin to identify who are some of your biggest advocates online.
Use Pinterest as a conversion tool for sales or email signups. By offering prizes (like gift cards) for people who follow you on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram;
You’ll be able to grow your audience without spending much money doing it.
So and when someone does buy something from you later down the line because they saw an ad campaign advertising it on one of those networks earlier this year? Well then count yourself among the lucky few responsible for having done “influencer marketing” correctly…
Conclusion
If you’re going to run a contest on Pinterest, it makes sense to follow the best practices of the platform and focus on images. That’s what Pinners are there for!
Once you have your contest up and running, make sure your pins are consistent with your brand guidelines and don’t forget to measure the results so that you can replicate them in future campaigns.
If all else fails, remember why people love Pinterest in the first place: it’s because they use it to be inspired by things they love! So, if nothing else works out as planned if your pins aren’t getting seen or they don’t get any repins try focusing on the creative aspect instead.
Use contests as an opportunity to tap into your fans’ creativity and showcase them as artists themselves. After all, that kind of authenticity is what makes Pinterest so authentic in the first place!
Further Reading
Here are some additional resources to learn more about running successful Pinterest contests:
Ampfluence: Pinterest Marketing – How to Run a Successful Pinterest Contest Short Description: Learn effective strategies for running engaging Pinterest contests that capture audience attention and boost your brand’s presence.
Wishpond Blog: 7 Tips – How to Run a Successful Pinterest Contest Short Description: Explore seven actionable tips for organizing and executing Pinterest contests that drive user participation and amplify your marketing efforts.
Gleam: Pinterest Contest Platform Short Description: Discover a powerful contest platform tailored for Pinterest, enabling you to create, manage, and optimize contests to engage your audience.
FAQs
Have questions about running Pinterest contests? Here are some common queries answered:
How do I start planning a Pinterest contest?
Starting a Pinterest contest requires careful planning. Begin by defining your goals, audience, and contest mechanics to align with your marketing objectives.
What types of prizes work best for Pinterest contests?
Prizes that resonate with your target audience and are relevant to your brand tend to work best. Consider offering products, services, or experiences that align with your brand identity.
How can I ensure my Pinterest contest complies with platform guidelines?
Review Pinterest’s official guidelines for contests and promotions. Adhering to these guidelines will help ensure your contest follows the platform’s rules and regulations.
What are some effective ways to promote my Pinterest contest?
Promote your Pinterest contest across your social media channels, email newsletters, and website. Collaborate with influencers or partners to expand your contest’s reach.
How can I measure the success of my Pinterest contest?
Track key performance metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and the number of entries. Analyzing these metrics will help you gauge the impact of your contest on your marketing goals.
Should I Run A Pinterest Contest?
Yes! Pinterest is a great way to engage your audience and increase engagement with your company. Running a contest is an easy way to do both of those things.
How Does It Work?
You create a graphic for the contest and post it on your page, along with an easy entry form that users can fill out to enter the contest. Once you’ve chosen the winner of the contest, send them their prize!
What Kind Of Prizes Should I Offer?
That’s up to you! You can offer anything from free products to gift cards or discounts on future purchases whatever gets people excited about entering your contest will work just fine.
Make sure that whatever prize you offer is something that will be valuable to your audience and aligns with your brand values.
Costantine Edward is a digital marketing expert, freelance writer, and entrepreneur who helps people attain financial freedom. I’ve been working in marketing since I was 18 years old and have managed to build a successful career doing what I love.
