Now here’s something an advertiser can love: new Pinterest Place Pins. Digital Market Asia explains exactly what they are:
Pinterest has introduced a whole new initiative: Place Pins. With about 1.5 million places being pinned every day, Place Pins were designed to combine images with an online interactive map. This is powered with Foursquare’s location API, along with Mapbox’s map technology, to aid users to explore and plan travel trips which can then be shared with friends.
More advertising avenues, with a few things to remember
Although Pinterest currently doesn’t offer ads on the site outside of Promoted Pins, Place Pins have ad potential as Pin locations include information such as addresses and phone numbers. This can be especially useful for travel and tourism businesses to, for example, help visitors discover things to do in an area. There is however a list of things that brands need to know.
Available on iOS and Android: Not only can Pinterest users find inspiration and plan trips online, they can keep track of places they would like to visit while they are on the go, through the Pinterest app.
Any Pin can be a Place Pin: Any existing pin on a board can be updated to include geographical data by selecting ‘Add Map’ in the Edit section of a board.
Any location can be Pinned: Even if a location isn’t on the map, pinners can add locations of their own.
Make a site Place Pin-friendly: Pinterest have partnered up with various businesses such as Foursquare and Hotels.com that will automatically include location info on their Pins. This and Pin It buttons on site images make it easy for pinners to save places they want to go to.
Create a place board: Make sure the place boards reflect and are relevant to the brand. The actual creation of a place board is simple enough: select ‘Add a map’ when creating a new board or edit an existing board’s settings. After this, you can map all your new and existing Pins to the board. For some inspiration check out Visit Britain’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the UK.
In this example, the Visit Britain UNESCO World Heritage Sites page on Pinterest displays a map with clickable pins.
Clicking on any of the pins reveals a pop-up with more details about that particular destination and a button to learn more.
In this example, clicking on the Learn More button takes users through to the Foursquare site for more information.
The opportunities for travel and tourism advertisers are fairly obvious (and this Pinterest enhancement is especially designed for travel planning), but what about other marketers?
- Any business that has more than one location could benefit from this facility
- Alternatively, Pinterest Place Pins lend themselves to promotional usage, for example if you want to organise a treasure hunt or a car rally or any other location-based event
- you could link yourself to other businesses in your region that offer complementary products or services
The possible marketing uses are really only limited by your imagination.
