Resort Marketing
Pinterest for Resorts 2 of 3 Driving Traffic
(Video Transcript)
Welcome to Resort Marketing Vids. I’m Michael Grimm and today we’re continuing our series on marketing with Pinterest for resorts.
If you haven’t watched the video from last week, I highly recommend you stop now and go back to do so. In that video we really explained what Pinterest is, how it works, and what it’s for.
Today, we’re explaining a strategy to drive traffic to your site via
Pinterest.
If you really want to drive traffic to your resort site and generate leads from it you are going to need to take a different approach than we covered previously. You have to approach it in a similar fashion to that of an Adwords campaign. Start at the end and work your way backwards. If your end goal is to generate a tour you need to first craft a compelling offer and build a webpage around it. This is going to be your landing page. This is where it gets tricky. You need to have a link on every page of your website with a headline that drives people to click in to your landing page.
You see, we want members and guests to pin the images on your website. Once they’ve pinned your images, they Live on Pinterest. What we want is to get strangers on Pinterest to click on those images and be redirected to your website. Once on your site we want to drive them to your landing page.
In order to get anywhere with this audience on Pinterest you first must have compelling images on your website. This is how the site works. If your pictures are bad or even mediocre, they won’t attract any attention and will fail to drive any traffic. This means instead of running around with a camera trying to snap a bunch of pictures to put up on Pinterest you need to hire a professional photographer. This does not mean go out and buy a professional camera. A camera is a tool, you need a skilled, trained operator to handle it for you. In addition to knowing the angles, lighting, and framing to best capture a moment, a professional photographer will be able to masterfully retouch the images for you, after the fact, to enhance them even more.
The next thing you need is Compelling content. If you take a picture of your pool, it probably won’t do you any good. But if you capture a fantastic moment with a family playing in the water, you may have a better shot. Likewise if you serve food at your restaurant, don’t just take a picture of your dining area. If you have great workers in the kitchen who build fancy specials, get shots of them and put the recipes online. That has a Much higher chance of getting pinned.
Let’s break all of this down into a few easy steps to follow. Step 1 – Hire a professional photographer to come into the resort for a few hours to get some killer photos. Pay between $50 and $200 for this. Step 2 – Get these photos up on your website. Step 3 – have your web developer add Pin It buttons to these images on your site. (All of you out there using a content management system like WordPress are going to be glad you are because it makes this step drop-dead simple.)
Step 4 – Craft an offer inducing people to request more information on your site. Make this offer visible on the pages where your new compelling images live. Step 5 – Share with all your members via your other social media channels that your website is now Pinterest optimized and encourage them to Pin their favorite images.
That last step is important because we’re letting the members do the work for us. This is instead of creating a Pinterest account ourselves, organizing several boards and following loads of other people, which we’ll cover next week. Additionally this benefits you through borrowed credibility and social proof. This is because your resort, as a brand, is not the ones pushing these images in front of people. It’s your loyal members who have valued your brand enough to share the images with the rest of the world.
That just about covers the basics for now. Next week we’ll show you how to take the other approach and actually create an account for the resort, organize your boards, and share relevant content. Until then, I’m Michael Grimm for the Resort Developers Association. I’ll see you later.