5 Proven Pinterest Travel Marketing Tips to Grow

If you own a tourism-related business, you need to be on Pinterest. Travel and tourism is an extremely visual experience (as you know) and Pinterest is the ultimate platform for that. This is a full guide on how to use Pinterest for tourism companies.

I’ve been a digital marketer and growth hacker both through my travel blog called ViaTravelers and other blogs in completely different industries.

I’m a huge fan of building an audience and doing all the hard work to grow websites from idea inception to full-fledged brand.

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Table of Contents

Why should the tourism industry use Pinterest?

As I already alluded, Pinterest is an excellent platform for tourism companies due to the visual nature of travel.

Pinterest can work no matter what job you operate within the travel industry, including hotels, travel agencies, airlines, tour groups, etc.

Pinterest now allows video uploads and stories posted to Pinterest, so you can share video walkthroughs and other visual experiences directly to a new audience.

Let me walk through a few examples of how tourism companies can use Pinterest to succeed.

Pinterest Examples for Hotels

Hotels can use Pinterest to showcase their unique branding and make your product more tangible/visual for your customer.

Showcase your key amenities like a pool, lounge, restaurant, spa, etc.
Have a real visual depiction that illustrates why your hotel rooms are unique
Provide short-form videos of a walkthrough of rooms, views and experiences at the hotel.

If you are a hotel owner or manager, check out these other epic digital marketing tips for hotels.

See Related: Hotel vs Motel vs Inn

Pinterest Examples for Travel Agents

If you are a travel agent, you should definitely be on Pinterest. You can market your knowledge and better deals that you can offer to clients.

It’s better if you are a home-based travel agent that works more on a B2C basis than B2B.

However, Pinterest is a great visual channel to showcase why someone should work with you.

It’s a great way to build a base of leads as well.

5 Easy, Proven Steps for Pinterest Travel Success

Let’s get into a step-by-step example of how you can succeed on Pinterest.

As a Pinterest enthusiast and digital marketer myself, I want to show you exactly how to use Pinterest to help grow your travel business.

Step 1: Hire a Writer to Publish Blog Posts or Other Content

Content is king in our society. If you are producing content, you are getting eyeballs on your brand.

By creating content, this gives you the opportunity to promote your travel brand in a variety of ways and to a wider audience.

In today’s age, you can have content created in a matter of minutes.

A great Pinterest strategy is by doing keyword research on Pinterest (I’ll get to that in a second) and then create the articles.

You can hire a writer easily through WriterAccess to produce content in batches that is perfect for Pinterest.

See Related: Best Travel Agent Jobs to Consider

Step 2: Outsource Your Graphic Design

I’ve used this gig on Fiverr that seems to work pretty well for my sites.

In the gig, you also get the PSD (Photoshop) source files so you now have drag and drop templates to make pins over and over again. I’ll get to why that’s so important in a bit.

But always have the source files so no matter the circumstance you are not “wed” to one designer or the other.

The good part is that you can use Tailwind to schedule out your Pinterest pins for months. So you can front-load all your work in a day to reap the benefits for months.

I’m on Tailwind and I love the Tribes feature where you can collaborate and work with other top influencers to grow together.

Step 3: Use Pinterest Trends to Target the Growing Topics

If you buy a big on Fiverr or use someone on 99designs to create 50 pins, you should pin 2 new pins to your profile per day.

That will give you runway for pinning for 25 days consecutively.

Use https://trends.pinterest.com/ to do keyword research for your pins (you can do this based on the articles you already have to get the right pins created in advance).

Let’s take a look at an example.

I first do a Pinterest tends search of ‘Europe travel.’ This segment of travel was clearly impacted significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Okay, let’s layer on some other information.

To do so, I think the “related terms” section at the bottom is very interesting. The Pinterest trends tool is very cool in that you can layer in and compare terms similar to how Google Trends information.

Pinterest Trends for Travel during COVID

Alright, what if we want to layer in another related term to this Pinterest trends search related to travel. I like a particular search term that stands out to me. It’s “ beautiful places.”

That’s remained steady. I wonder why? Check out the image below.

The key indicator here is that even despite COVID, people still want to DREAM about travel. That’s important.

A lot of people are stuck at home wishing they could be exploring extraordinary destinations.

This is extremely valuable information particularly as it relates to Pinterest. If you are a tourist company, you can remain relevant to your brand. Trust me.

Other brands are doing this too.

If someone forgets about you when times are tough, will they remember you when times are good? A free resource like trends can help you make a ton of decisions about your business.

Step 4: Use Pinterest Campaigns to Get Insight into Search Volume

Pinterest Tends are great, but you should always get another data source to add your resources.

Cross-check your keyword research on Pinterest Ads. Don’t run a campaign obviously. Just use their keyword research tool for free.

Here’s how you should do it. First, ensure that you have a business profile on Pinterest. You’ll need this in order to create a hypothetical campaign on Pinterest.

Then, start creating an ad on Pinterest by clicking this button.

Next, let’s run an example of using Pinterest ad campaigns to get search volume data for particular keywords. It’s not as robust as doing keyword research for Google.

There are tools for keyword research out there for Google that have become multi-million dollar businesses. I’m surprised there isn’t as much out there for Pinterest.

I imagine that only time will tell as Pinterest grows.

That’s okay. It’s better than no data at all.

To get to the keyword search section, scroll down to this “keywords” area in the “Ads Manager” of Pinterest.

Okay, now remember my comments on the trends about “ beautiful places“? This is what we get in the Pinterest keyword research tool:

So these suggestions are not entirely helpful out the gate, but they can help you plan a better content strategy plan.

Use these keyword opportunities to create content that is optimized for Pinterest. If it works for Google and SEO, then it’s a double win as well.

Obviously, these keywords are short and likely very high competition. So, what if we evaluate something a bit more long-tail.

This time I take a look at the keyword “amazing places in the world” but offer something a bit more specific that includes the exact match framework.

You just need to add brackets around the keyword. So it looks like this “[amazing places in the world].”

Check it out here.

As you can see, there is a ton of opportunity to mix in different variations. This isn’t exactly for hotels or travel agents per se. However, think of all the possibilities.

Mix in the suggestions with the keyword that you are searching for. An optimal combination would be something like “20 Amazing Places in the World to Visit” or “20 Stange and Interesting Places that You Need to Visit.”

That’s just a start but the combinations are infinite, which will provide you more and more opportunity to gain exposure as a company in the travel industry.

Now that you have some results, get some content with WriterAccess going and some pins designed from Fiverr for those specific pins.

Wait for results of top performing pins and reuse top performing templates to recreate pins for new articles/keywords.

Step 5: Evaluate the Analytics to Work Smarter

Each pin should be viewed as a silver bullet. You need to keep engagement high and you’ll see exponential growth.

Just because some pins didn’t fully work out for you does not mean that you are done.

Always be optimizing. Create more of what people love and less of what people don’t love. It really is that simple.

You can monitor robust analytics for free through the Tailwind app. They’ll show you top engaging posts and boards for your Pinterest account.

Once you think about it through that lens.

It will get easier and easier as you go. You just need to analyze the data as that will show you where you need to go and where you need to focus your efforts.

Final Step: Repeat Your Efforts.

Pinterest is all about consistency. You need to continually feed Pinterest with high-quality imagery.

If you think Pinterest is a resource where you will instantly gain traffic and revenue, you’ll be in for a rude awakening. However, if you think about the long-term and maintain repetition, you will see results.

Follow the data and listen to your audience.

Over time, you’ll be rewarded.

Plus, your followers over time will love your consistency and imagery with your posts. As long as they are visually appealing, you’ll stand out and increase your reach.