Pinterest Marketing For Business Growth

The popularity of Pinterest is undeniable but is it useful for businesses? According to Pinterest’s own statistics, the site boasts more than 300 million users per month. Of these users, 83% have made a purchase based on content from brands seen on Pinterest. Strong numbers for convincing any business not yet using the site as part of their marketing strategy that they should be.

Set Up A Pinterest Business Account

Getting your account set up correctly is the first step towards success. For businesses, Pinterest offers a different type of account than those of a non-business user.  The benefits of which include insights into your audience and their engagement with your content. To set up a business account, or if you have already set up a non-business account in error and want to switch it over, navigate to Pinterest For Business. On setting up your account, get the basics right by making sure your branding is consistent with your other marketing channels.

Plan your Keywords

Pinterest is essentially a powerful search engine meaning that how you use keywords and what keywords you use are vital to your marketing success. There are six main areas that you can use keywords within your Pinterest Account. They are:

1. Account Name
2. Bio
3. Pin title
4. Pin description
5. Board title
6. Board description

Keyword research, if you haven’t done it yet, starts with Google’s keyword planner. This free tool will tell you what words are associated with your brand, product or services. Once you have them, do a little research on Pinterest to see what results they bring from existing and competitor accounts. This can give you useful insights into what will and what won’t work for you on Pinterest.

Engage With Your Pinterest Community

Your Pinterest community are brand ambassadors for your products and services. They will create pins from your website and other marketing channels. They will Pin (share) your Pinterest content. And, they will comment and add their own photos to your pins. They will hurt easily if you do not engage with them with the same level of loyalty.

When a community member comments on your pin, always respond. Even if it is just to say thank you. If they add a photo of themselves using your product, then let them know you saw it and like it.  Consider creating a board dedicated to featuring content from your audience showing them using your brand. Be sure to credit them by tagging them.

Connect Your Website For Proper Effectiveness

You have an option within your Pinterest account to add your website address as standard. Pinterest strongly recommends that you go one step further and verify or as they put it ‘own your website’ as well as any other social media sites you may have. The benefit of this is that your Pinterest analytics will be more accurate. Claiming your website is set out in Pinterest’s Help Centre in just a few easy steps.

Watch What Works

With your Pinterest Business account, you have access to analytics that will clearly show you the number of impressions your content is receiving, how many times your Pins were saved, and how many people took a closer look (aka a Close-Up). Check in on your analytics weekly, monthly and quarterly as you would with any other channel. By monitoring your Pinterest performance, you can learn what does and does not work for your brand on the platform. In turn, this will help you to plan strategically and to work more effectively, creating only the kind of content that you know your audience will like.

Strategize Then Automate Content

Creating a strategic calendar of when to automate your posts means that you can optimize your content to go live at peak audience times on Pinterest. Like your website, there are times of the day and days of the week when people will visit more. For Pinterest, the best times to post are later in the day, 8 – 11 pm and 2 pm – 4 am. Keep your specific audience in mind when automating. If you are aiming to reach a global audience, stagger your Pin timing to suit the different time zones that are relevant to your audience.

Similarly,  if you are running a TV campaign or are about to be featured in a publication, you can schedule Pins for the same day and time to compliment the campaign or feature and drive sales.

Don’t Let Your Content Get Stale

Fresh content shows that a brand is active and healthy. As part of your Pinterest strategy, ensure that you keep content publishing consistently. Equally important, never create content for the sake of it. Create a calendar that is part evergreen and part product campaign. Unlike other social media channels on which posts have a short life span of 20 minutes (Twitter), a few hours (Facebook), and two days (Instagram), Pinterest posts have a minimum lifespan of four months.

Evergreen content is the best approach for the larger chunk of your content, think like AirBnb who use their Pinterest boards partly for inspiration, for the likes of house plants and accent walls, and partly for good old plugs of their services – think Unique Places To Stay’ and ‘Travel Trends’.

Thanks to the visual appeal of Pinterest, one piece of content can become several pins. Take, for example, one interview link and share it on Pinterest using different (but relevant images). It is the Pins with high-quality photographs that will get you better traffic. If you are struggling to create high content images inhouse, for Pinterest marketing it is a definite area worth investing in. If your budget is modest, turn to sites like Fiverr to partner with freelance photographers at a price you can afford.

With proper planning and optimized quality content, Pinterest can become an invaluable asset to your inbound marketing strategy. It is a channel that organically supports and encourages user-generated content like no other. Boosting your brand and sales with minimum effort.

About the author

Beatrice is a professional copywriter at Phdkingdom and Nextcoursework specializing in all kinds of topics. She is always open to share her personal experience and give some advice to beginner writers uncovering all the peculiarities of creating content that sells.