Marie C. Cassandra

I find it quite baffling that I hear so many people say “Sure, Pinterest is popular right now, but where’s the money?”. Here’s a quick look at a couple of their potential monetization strategies:

Last week I discussed Strategy #1: Monetizing Leads to Retailers

Strategy #2: Promoted Pins 

Right off the bat you’ve got a bonus here: alliterative name! Content Marketing is already a key component of many brand’s marketing strategy and Pinterest couldn’t be a more ideal place for promoting this content. If a brand is already creating compelling content, Pinterest is pure gold.

A great example I ran across today is Cabot. Yes, that’s right, the Vermont Cheese Company. They’ve put together this “recipe” for creating a Christmas Tree Shaped Snack Platter for the holidays. It’s already getting a bit of traction, but if Cabot could pay to promote this post, it would broaden it’s reach even further.

For brands that don’t already have a content marketing strategy in place, Pinterest is a great resource for them to start building one. The Cabot people could have just searched for ‘cheese’ to discover creative, “pinworthy” content and find the blogger responsible for creating it. From there, they could sponsor posts, a tactic already widely used by brands in the “mommy blogger” community (which is a core Pinterest audience).

There are several places they could start injecting these promoted pins (not just the main pin feed) and as long as the promotion was relevant, it should not detract from the user experience.