When formulating your marketing strategy, images can be crucial to conveying your message to members of your target audience.

Don’t think so?

How about your website, brochures, commercials, YouTube videos, billboards, business cards and more?

So, as you can see, your company is a bit more visual than you give it credit for.

This brings me to Pinterest. If you are currently using Pinterest to market your business and connect with prospects – well done. Pinterest is not an easy fit for many businesses, as the link between their visuals and their product offering is not always straight-forward. But for early adopters with extremely visual companies, it has been an exciting new venue to market their wares.

Today I want to speak with those companies that are currently using Pinterest to market their businesses. Do you feel like you are using it effectively yet?

Here are 5 tips that you might be missing when using Pinterest for your business. These will help you easily tweak your current strategy to not only get more hits to your website, but will also help you to connect and engage more effectively.

1. Complete Your Profile! This seems obvious, but I’ve seen enough incomplete profiles to feel the need to bring this up. Make sure that your logo is high resolution, can be fully seen in the given space and is easy to read. Fill in the “About You” section with your full company bio and make sure to add info on your key products and services.

2. Verify Your Website! For the non-tekkies out there, this can seem a bit daunting, but Pinterest makes it pretty simple. Give it a stab yourself, but my advice is to ask your IT wizard to get it done for you. It should take them all of 5 minutes and then you will be able to prominently display your website to get that all important exposure and clicks.

3. Maximize Your Pins! Make sure that your pins have links to related content on your website. This is how Pinterest is driving traffic to websites and has made marketers sit up and take notice. No links = no website traffic from Pinterest. Also, don’t forget to add your keywords in the description.

4. Make Your Boards Relevant! I’ve seen many companies that are just repinning random information without a strategy. You want to make sure that you have boards setup that reflect your business AND will interest and engage your audience enough to compel them to view, click and share. Puppies, babies and sarcastic cartoons are cute – but do they really convert? Make every pin count.

5. Build Your Network! If you haven’t looked for connections on Twitter, Facebook and your email database – this should be your first step. Use the “Find Friends” feature and follow Pinterest’s easy instructions. A great tip is to find a direct competitors profile and see who is following them. My bet is that those are potential prospects for you. Choose some of their followers and follow their boards. This will get you in front of them and increase the probability of them engaging with you!

These 5 items will help you make your professional Pinterest profile more attractive to members of your target market. Now…get Pinning and remember to follow us on Pinterest by clicking here: http://pinterest.com/thegoagency/