If you’re looking to add Pinterest to your targeted social media you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you in creating a Pinterest marketing strategy for your business and goes over the key things to keep in mind.
We won’t get super in-depth here, this is meant as an overview for someone new to marketing on Pinterest. If you like this article, bookmark this page, we’ll be going more in depth on each step in future articles. With that out of the way, let’s get started.
Benefits Of Pinterest
Let’s start by looking at some of the key ideas to keep in mind when using Pinterest. Currently sitting at over 478 million active monthly users there’s certainly a huge opportunity here if done correctly.
Demographic Information
The first thing to keep in mind is the demographic of Pinterest. The interesting piece here is that over 77% of active Pinterest users are female. This makes it a great platform if that fits your target market.
It’s also worth mentioning that many of those users are using Pinterest to help inform purchase decisions. This makes it a great social media platform to help inform your customers, and ultimately help them decide on purchasing your product or service.
Pinterest is a Visual Search Engine
It’s also important to keep in mind that at its core Pinterest is a visual search engine. That means people are using it to find new ideas primarily through a visual reference.
While images are important to Pinterest, that also means other SEO type ideas like keywords are also key. You need a mix of keywords to help users find your content, while also giving them engaging visuals they want to interact with. It’s a two part dance, and missing one part can ruin your results.
Shop Tab
As noted above, Pinterest is a key piece in making purchase decisions for lots of its users, and with the shop tab that’s getting even easier. The shop tab lets creators list their inventory for sale directly in the app.
This is a great way to reach new customers without a lot of friction. Users can browse right in the app, and make purchase decisions right then and there. This is a great option if you have physical products to sell, especially if they lend themselves well to a visual sales process.
Setting Up a Pinterest Marketing Strategy
With the basic details out of the way let’s jump into actually creating a plan. Here we’ll walk through some key steps to getting your marketing strategy off the ground.
Set Up a Business Profile
First off, you’ll want to set up a business profile and fill out your page. The business profile will give you lots of details on analytics and data which is extremely important in evaluating your results.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll then want to finish filling out your profile. This includes filling out your bio, adding an image, and linking your website. These all help you not only look professional, but also help with discovery. You’ll want to, for example, weave in some keywords into your bio to help potential customers find you easier.
Brainstorm and Setup Boards
Boards are the place where your pins live, and are groupings of related content. You’ll want to create boards to help separate your content, and also to help users find related content they might enjoy.
Start by brainstorming the broad types of content you’ll be creating. For example, a fitness instructor might have something like:
- Workouts
- Exercises
- Diet Tips
You can then further break these down and create boards. The broad topic “workouts”, for example, might have boards like:
- Ab Workouts
- Chest Workouts
- Cardio Workouts
Then each of these would get relevant pins related to that topic. This makes it really easy for users to see what a board is about, and also keeps them engaged with relevant content. Someone interested in “Ab Workouts” could explore that board and see a variety of them.
Start with 10-15 board ideas and create them in your profile. It’s okay if you don’t have a bunch of content right now, you’ll have a lot of time to create it and post it later.
Use a Consistent, Engaging Aesthetic
When you start creating content for Pinterest the name of the game is consistent and engaging. Each of these are important to building your brand on Pinterest.
If you already have design and content guidelines then you likely already have a consistent format for your posts. If not, then that should be something you sit down and create before moving forward. It's crucial for pretty much every social media profile, so it’s an important thing to have.
You want people to see your posts and understand that theme across them. Having consistent colors, text, and sizing help to make your brand familiar. It also looks better and brings consistency to your profile and boards. When someone lines up your content it should look similar and visually appealing.
Consistency only gets you half way there though, you also need to make sure it’s engaging. Good content makes users want to click on it and learn more. There are lots of tips for creating engaging content, but a lot of it boils down to using good imagery and relevant text. You also want to make sure your content is discoverable, and we’ll touch on that later.
Make Sure Your Content is “Pinnable”
Building off above, engaging content gets more pins. More pins means more traffic, so you’ll want to encourage that as best you can.
Look to create content for Pinterest in a 2:3 aspect ratio for best results.
Utilize Keywords and Hashtags
When you get to pinning your content you’ll want to make sure that you’re targeting the right keywords and using hashtags to help with discovery. Both of these help users find your pins, and should be weaved into both the title and description of your pin.
You want to make sure your keywords feel natural though, don’t keyword stuff. Your title should include the primary focus keyword, and then your description should have 2-3 secondary ones. Make sure it sounds natural to a user, you don’t want to sacrifice your user’s experience just to shove in a few more keywords.
You can also add hashtags to the bottom of your description. Much like Instagram, these help with discovery. Add a few relevant hashtags to the end of your pin’s description.
Interact With The Community
Pinterest is a social media, so don’t be afraid to interact with others. This includes standard ideas like commenting and engaging with your followers, but, unique to Pinterest you can also repin others content.
Repinning is simply reposting an existing pin onto another board. You can repin others' content as well as your own. It’s a great way to help generate content to fill out boards, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have a ton of content yet.
Bear in mind, that you should be sparing in how much repinning you do, whether that’s someone else’s content or your own. I generally like to have at least a 3:1 new to existing pins. Pinterest has said that they favor original content, but you’re not going to get penalized for repinning existing, interesting content. Just don’t overdo it.
This also applies to your own content, you can repin your existing pins to different boards. This is a great way to help reach more people who might only be interested in specific boards and helps increase the lifetime of a pin. Part of any good strategy should include new content, but also resharing old content that performed well.
Join Community Boards
Community boards are a great way to reach a larger audience and supercharge your growth. These are boards where multiple people post on a related topic, and can therefore have much larger followings, especially when you’re just starting out.
Community boards typically have rules you have to follow when you join, and breaking these can get you kicked out. Always make sure you’re respecting the rules of the group, and self-promote sparingly.
I suggest accounts join a few community boards after you’ve established yourself a bit so you don’t look like a spammer, Once you’re accepted you can start posting to the community. I like to post very sparingly, maybe once in every 20 pins. I also make sure that the content I’m posting there is the best of the best and super relevant. People who run these groups are very wary of spammers, and if you come off as one you’ll likely be kicked out pretty quick.
Utilize Rich Pins
Rich pins are ways to improve your pins with dynamic content. They are a great way to make your posts more engaging and relevant to your audience.
For example, a recipe pin can include information on ingredients right in the pin. This makes users much more likely to interact with your pin than others.
This requires some easy setup on your website to enable. Once you do, all pages that qualify will begin to include the rich pin data. You should evaluate the type of pins you're creating, and if they’re a fit for rich pins implement it.
Explore Different Media Types
Pinterest isn’t just for static images, you can also implement carousels and video content. Depending on your overall content strategy, exploring these options can help improve your reach.
One thing I like to do is to create carousels by taking several existing pins. Going off the fitness instructor above they might have a bunch of individual leg exercises on their exercise board. By turning those into a carousel I create a valuable piece of content solely through reusing existing graphics.
By expanding your content types you can increase the reach you achieve and bring in new users. It can be a bit more effort to create a video, but can be well worth it in the long run.
Stay Consistent
Lastly, like any type of marketing, Pinterest requires consistency. You need to make sure that you’re constantly adding content and building out new boards and pins.
Pinterest is interesting in that you can post a lot without overwhelming your followers. Many experts will say even as much as 10-12 new pins per day is perfectly okay. Don’t be intimidated by that though, for my sites I tend to try and get 1-3 pins per day with a mix of new and repinned content.
Personally, I use Later to schedule Pinterest and my other social media posts. Later offers a free plan, and I’ve found that great to get started. I’m not sponsored by them or anything, I just really like their platform so far. If you’re at all serious about social media marketing I’d suggest checking them out, or any of the competing services.
Next Steps
All that’s left now is to get started. Nothing beats experience, so start creating some boards and pinning some content. Over time you’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and you can focus on that. If you set up the business account noted above then you’ll have access to Pinterest’s analytics tools. Use this to help you evaluate your successful pins and focus on what works.
Lastly, be sure to check back soon. We’re always improving our articles and will be going more in-depth on the above steps. Keep in touch with us on Twitter to stay updated.