Duct Tape: Pinterest Marketing that Sticks

Brand on Pinterest: Duck Tape brand – makers of Duct Tape
URL:  http://pinterest.com/theduckbrand
Rating: Pin Up

Duct tape is one of my favorite brands on Pinterest. I learned about their boards on Twitter. The brand is a perfect fit for Pinterest because there are already devoted fans who love to show off their creations using the product.

What Duct Tape is doing right:

• Duct Tape has many boards showcasing fun ways to use their products.
• They have boards specifically for their products, which is a quick way to see the various tape patterns they offer. It can subtly market for you. For example, I didn’t know they had tape with university’s logos printed on it.
• They have many boards showcasing things to do with their products, which is a great subtle form of marketing.

Duct Tape’s Missed Opportunities:

• On their “Duct Tape Festival” board the description needs to be filled out. I don’t know about you but I didn’t know they had festivals. I’d like to know if there’s one by me. Adding some information about these festivals would be helpful. I see a big opportunity to start Meetups around the brand (and donate some tape to get the groups started).
• They could interact with people already creating crafts with their product and repin them. They have a little but there is opportunity for more. Just search to see what your fans are pinning from your web site. I found pins that were amazing that they didn’t have. To see what I mean, just search: http://pinterest.com/source/duckbrand.com
• They didn’t secure their username. If nothing else, this is why you need to be an early adopter on hot new social networks. Instead, John Jantsch got Pinterest.com/ducttape (he runs a marketing blog and services called Duct Tape Marketing).
• This brand is perfect for running contests and having people create pin boards with their entries. They could create a board for the winners or repin the best ones to their profile.
• The descriptions and board names could be more fun.
• They need to align their boards with Pinterest categories. No board for Duct Tape fashion?? parties?? furniture/home decor?? Women on Pinterest go crazy for this kind of thing and the good news for this brand is that they will have to buy a lot of Duct Tape to re-create the ideas.
• Add the “Pin it” button to their blog posts and the Follow me on Pinterest button to their web site. I would even add a link from their Twitter profile.

I checked and “Duct Tape crafts” gets almost 50k searches per month. Their web site is listed as #1 but they can get #2 with their Pinterest account. To do that they should name one of their boards “Duct Tape crafts” and use the phrase again in the description. Then they can create blog posts highlighting the best Duct Tape crafts pins of the week and link the phrase Duct Tape crafts to that specific board.

I’d also go back to their crafts and add a link in each post to all of their crafts on Pinterest. That way people can quickly browse all of their crafts and click on the ones they want to try (which will take them to the specific post with instructions).

It’s much easier to browse the craft ideas on Pinterest than through their web site. This is a site that I believe should redesign their blog section to look like Pinterest. They already have categories but like many web sites, you have to click page by page to see them. That adds friction. It’s not mobile-friendly either. The Pinterest style solves this problem because you just have to scroll to see everything in a category. It also makes getting comments much easier.

Duct Tape should be able to get some great PR for their Pinterest page too. I’d create some press releases and release some stats about the traffic it’s sending them (being sure to use and link the words “Duct Tape crafts” in the body of the press release). I can see blogs like Mashable covering it if they have some strong numbers.

I know I listed a lot of missed opportunities but I still think Duct Tape is doing a lot of things right. Just writing this made me want to go by some printed Duct Tape and make these for a party. If I were in college you can be sure I’d do this for Homecoming activities.

Bottom Line: Duct Tape already has a sticky brand. With some tweaks and some more publicity they’ll rack up more followers and repins.