How to Plan Your Pinterest Boards for Your Social Marketing Campaign

By Shiv Singh and Stephanie Diamond from Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Boards are the way Pinterest organizes its users’ content and this requires some planning by social media marketers. Pinterest organizes in a manner that resembles a series of bulletin boards hanging on a wall, with each board having its own label. Boards organize your pins into categories of your choosing.

However, if you treat your Pinterest boards as mere categories, you end up with a bunch of random, generic groupings. If you treat boards as a marketing tool for your product, brand, or business, you can create content that people want to follow that encourages them to find out more about what your brand is all about.

Basic boards can accomplish any number of goals, such as

Showing steps in a process, say, creating a craft project and visually listing the instructions.
Reflecting different elements of planning. For instance, for party or wedding planning, creating a board for food, drink, table settings, and theme ideas.
Providing an industry overview; perhaps the clothing styles, designers, and fabrics of the fashion world.
Highlighting the departments of a business, and including sales, marketing, engineering, and manufacturing.

Before you start pinning, you want to have several boards in place. You’ll create new boards while you progress on Pinterest, but do plan out the first few. What follows are some suggestions for your first boards:

History of your brand: Go back to where you began and show how things have changed throughout the years. Pin promotional material or product labels from prior years to show how they’ve evolved.
History of your products: Have your products received a makeover over the years? Has the packaging changed? Or maybe you have an archive of print ads spanning back through the decades. Use these items to create historic boards. When viewers see how long your product has been around, it tells them you have a product and a name worthy of their trust.

Kodak has a great example of how to feature your product in this manner at http://pinterest.com/kodakcb/historic-photography and Blockbuster’s Old Hollywood board tempts viewers to rent an old black-and-white at http://pinterest.com/blockbuster/old-hollywood.
Showcase your brand: Entice people into buying by showing them how they can use your product or service. You can even pin unusual or uncommon uses. Additionally, community members love it when they’re highlighted on brand pages. Ask your community members to send photos of them using your product or service.
Who you are: A Pinterest board can make a great About page. Use it to highlight team members, your location, your mission, and what you’re selling. A couple of great examples of boards that tell about a brand can be found at New Media Expo’s Pinterest account, where they feature team members at http://pinterest.com/NewMediaExpo/meet-the-nmx-team, and brief bios of all the speakers at their events http://pinterest.com/NewMediaExpo/blogworld-ny-2012-speakers.
Tips, how to’s, and DIYs: Use your pins to teach. For example, if you’re a writer, give tips for creating headlines and hooks; if you’re a carpenter, share tips for creating projects that don’t look homemade.

A great example is Whole Foods. Their Kitchen Basics board includes food preparation instructions, such as prepping and storing strawberries, and recipes for things like homemade ranch dressing. Check them out at http://pinterest.com/wholefoods.
Gift ideas: Product-oriented brands can benefit from pinning gift ideas. Take it even further by pinning a series of gift boards.
Books: Recommend books to your community that relate to your field. Lead a discussion in the comments section.