What is a Marketing Matrix?
Before you get too far into this Pinterest marketing article, I want to explain the kind of marketing matrix I promote. One of the hard things about marketing online is exposure and links. Building a quality marketing matrix makes that a bit easier. The idea is simple, find five people in a similar or related niche who are interested in marketing their site and agree to help each other.
It’s hard to find 5 people that you can really work well with, so it may take involvement in 3 or 4 groups before you put together one that works efficiently. In a matrix each person agrees to help the others in the group market what’s important to them that week. So in a six week period someone new is helping to market your projects to their audience for 5 weeks. Take a look at the matrix below:
If you’re Laurent in the above example, you’re helping Rodney with his work in Week 1, Joel in Week 2 and Marjorie in Week 3. And for your benefit Phil is promoting your stuff in Week 1, Veronica in Week 2 and Marjorie in Week 4. The marketing matrix is absolutely fantastic when you’ve got 6 people willing to really help each other out.
Beyond finding hardworking, trustworthy friends to work in a matrix, it also helps tremendously if your group is in a similar industry. For instance nutritional supplements, smoothie recipes, incontinence health, budgeting and meal planning and 5K training may all be related enough that any one person in the matrix will have people interested in the other 5 things.
Including a guy who has an auto-parts supplier email list and matching that with a vanity soap marketer may be helpful from a support or SEO standpoint, but will do little to help with direct traffic or referrals. No group is perfect but some learn to work quite swimmingly together.
So how can Pinterest enter this mix?
Pinterest and the Marketing Matrix
One of the great features of Pinterest is the shared board. When you “edit” a board’s settings you can add pinners to the board. Then the board actually shows up on all the “pinners” walls as one of their boards as well. Adding your fellow 5 marketing matrix team members to the board means each will share the same board on their walls.
Communication among team members is what makes the matrix really useful. If Week 3 comes up and Laurent doesn’t know what Marjorie needs help promoting, a few days of productivity could be lost. That’s where the real value of the shared Pinterest board comes in handy. If the members pin their own stuff they need promoted to the board, the other members know immediately what’s important and needs work.
Plus by pinning your stuff to the board, you already start the process of marketing it, which is a bonus for the plan as well.
Marketing Matrix Activities
So what kinds of things should you be doing to help market your matrix team members? To start with finding a place to repin the original pin among your other boards would be great. Changing the description to include the right keywords and commenting on the pin right away will increase its exposure and searchability.
Changing the default signature line in your email is another great way to promote a teammate. Other ways to involve the simple task of pushing a link include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Digg and Tumblr. If you’re the first person to start promoting their blog post or product or service, these are great indexing and caching activities.
But if you’re the 3rd or 4th person to help promote, avoid pushing links. Since the product has likely been indexed already, a few links here and there will not be tremendous help. Instead take on one of three other roles to be a productive team member, (social media, SEO, and support.)
In a social media role you’d spend your time trying to increase the number of comments or responses the product has. Whether that’s directly on the site, on Yelp.com or somewhere else, Google credits a site with extra value when the Google+ button has been pressed or comments have been left.
From an SEO perspective, look for opportunities to use the appropriate keywords in social comments. Look for sites that are in the same niche where you could reference the product in passing. Look for ways to not only push a link, but to push a link that contains anchor text.
Finally support is the most involved and only the best team mates will undertake it. Support is when you take the time to write a blog post about the product, when you look to methods like EzineArticles, free press releases or blog posts to write all about the subject of the products. Ideally as a support person you are creating new, original keyword rich content that links directly to your teammate’s site or activity.
This is just one way to use Pinterest in your marketing efforts and a useful tool at that. If you haven’t seen our video “Making Money with Pinterest” about affiliate marketing and building a following, please check out the site.