5 Pinterest Marketing Tips for Business | The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
If you’re already a Pinterest user, then you’re likely familiar with its appeal. With colorful images and fun ideas galore, it’s one of those sites where you decide to scroll for a few minutes and the next thing you know, it’s been over an hour.
As a business, you can use Pinterest to your advantage: by making it part of your overall marketing plan, you can expand brand awareness, drive your audience to your website, and increase sales.
Before we dive into the 5 beginner-friendly Pinterest marketing tips for business, let’s cover the basics…
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest describes itself as “a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.”
When users log in, they arrive at the home feed, which displays pins, people and brands that they’re likely to be interested in based on recent activity. Pins include an image or video and text, and can be linked to a website that users can click through to. Users can save these pins to their boards to make them easy to access at a later time. Topics you’ll see across the site include style, beauty, food and drink, home, travel, and more.
Pinterest has achieved over $1 billion in annual revenue, has more than 300M active users, and billions of pins. It provides a great opportunity for showcasing your products and ideas and engaging with your audience. If you’re using Pinterest for your company, note that you’ll want to set up a business account.
Start with a strategy
Pinterest is an engaging site, but remember – if you’re planning to use it as part of you social media marketing strategy, then you need to start with a plan.
What are your overall business goals?
What are your marketing goals?
How will reaching them help you achieve your business goals?
What steps do you need to take in order to reach your goals?
How will you measure success?
These are all things to take into consideration before you start using Pinterest marketing for business & creating pins.
Be sure to also think about your target customers’ interests, and what information they would find entertaining or useful. What’s your brand voice? What elements ensure your visuals have a cohesive, on-brand look?
Having a well-thought-out Pinterest marketing strategy in place first will help ensure that the actions you take on Pinterest will help you achieve success on the platform.
5 Pinterest Marketing Tips for business
1. Create quality, visually appealing content
Pinterest is a highly visual platform. If you want your pins to stand out, they’re going to have to include interesting, quality images. If you use photos, make sure they’re not distorted. If you include text on the image, make sure it’s easy to read. Ensure that the pin’s colors and style align with your brand.
Types of pins: There are four formats you can choose from when creating a pin: standard, video, product, and collections. Standard includes an image, video includes a video, product includes pricing and availability of the product shown, and collections allow you to feature multiple products in one image.
Consistency: Just like any other social media platform, posting consistently is important. Luckily, the scheduling feature makes that easy. Simply create a pin and choose to publish it at a later date. You can have up to 30 scheduled pins. Scheduling is a great way to ensure you’re being thoughtful in your posting rather than doing everything at the last minute.
Links: Linking your pin to a URL is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Consider linking to pages like product pages, blog posts, recipes, and more - whatever makes sense depending on the content of the pin.
Boards: After creating pins, organize them by adding them to your boards. Each board should have a specific topic to make it easy to know where to save the pin. For example, if you were a clothing store, you might have boards labeled “Coats,” “T-Shirts,” “Accessories,” and so on.
2. Create multiple Pinterest pins for the same content
When creating multiple pins, try using different imagery and text, while still staying on brand. By creating multiple pins for the same content, you can potentially reach a wider audience than you would with just one pin because the different visuals are going to appeal to different people. Using multiple pins is also a great way to test which visuals resonate the most with your target audience.
Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
3. Optimize your Pinterest pins for SEO
Pinterest is essentially a visual search engine, so it’s important to incorporate search engine optimization when creating pins.
First, think of what keywords best relate to your brand, products, or the topic of the pin. If you need help with ideas, try searching for a generic term in the search bar, and use one of Pinterest’s suggested terms that will appear below. Then, use these keywords in the pin’s title and description to help your pin get discovered. In the pin’s description, you can also add hashtags, which will assist in gaining visibility for your pin.
When you post videos, be sure to make use of the tags feature, which allows you to categorize your pins. This makes them more easily discovered and can help increase your video views
4. Pay attention to Your Pinterest analytics
Pinterest Analytics helps you get clear insight into how your pins are performing. You can filter your content by date, content type, source, device, and claimed accounts. You’ll be able to see data like your top video pins as well as your top 50 pins, plus impressions, engagements, saves, link clicks, video views, and more.
Pinterest also offers audience insights, which provides information on what your target audience might be interested in based on their activity. You can also view your audience’s demographics information.
When you have a better understanding of who your audience is and how they’re accessing and engaging with your content, you can more strategically create pins in the future.
5. Benefit from paid Pinterest content
While reaching your audience organically is great, making use of paid content can help you increase your pins’ reach.
Take Pinterest ads, for example. There are five formats for ads: Standard, Video, Shopping, App install, and Carousel, each with different features to help you reach your specific goals. You can turn an existing pin into an ad, or you can use the Ads Manager to build campaigns, ad groups, and custom targeting.
With Pinterest’s targeting capabilities, you choose to have targeting automated for you, or you can reach certain audiences based on demographics, interests, keywords, customer lists, and actalikes. You also get to decide how much to spend on ads.
Pinterest is a fun, effective tool for reaching your audience, driving traffic to your website, and helping you achieve your marketing goals.
Overwhelmed? Let the Healthy Dash of Social team help you out! We can take care of your Pinterest marketing and other digital marketing needs while you focus on doing what you love – running your business.
