5 Pinterest Marketing Tactics

• Updated on: 2018-10-20
• Read original article here

Would you be able to guess which social media network has been the busiest of them all in the last year? Yes, it’s Pinterest.

Pinterest has definitely earned your consideration for your social media strategy. Previously it was tailored for housewives, pretty pictures and 'quotes' that annoy most. However it is now comfortably taking on the 'big boys' of social media.

It is interesting to note that Adobe’s research shows that 15% of all social media referrals come from Pinterest – this figure is more than twice the share of Twitter and second only to social media behemoth, Facebook.

According to the above-referenced data from ComScore, Pinterest users spend twice the amount than the average shopper spends online.  When comparing Facebook users and Pinners, Pinners are more generous with their online spending by leaps and bounds.

Not only is Pinterest a star social media referrer in terms of traffic, it also delivers in terms of revenue per visitor and average order value. According to a Shopify study across its websites, Pinterest delivers the highest average order value; twice the average of Facebook.

We are hopeful that the above will convince you enough to get you to consider Pinterest as a real option for your social media marketing. So, once you have gone ahead with your pinning spree, there are a few basics that you must take care of:

Don’t look at Pinterest as a backup social media platform. It is much too important to be viewed as one. Give it, its due importance and you’ll start seeing results soon enough. Pinterest users are voracious consumers of content – there are currently 30 billion pins and counting on Pinterest. If you’ve signed up your business for it, put aside a fixed amount of time every single day building up your boards and pins on your Pinterest account. You don’t want to serve up the same old boring content on your page for days together. Build an inviting and complete profile page for your business. A great image so that you can represent your brand as your profile picture, a well written brand description that tells users what to expect from your brand in your brand’s signature style, links to your website and your other social networks to allow users to learn more about your brand and so on. Ensure you include your most important keywords and industry terms in your profile description – it’ll go a long way towards attracting the right users to your pages.

Some of the most popular brands on Pinterest let their imagination run wild and offer reams and reams of content on their pages. With dedicated boards for every possible interest that their ideal users might have, successful brands ensure that they don’t lose any opportunities at all in connecting with the right audience and becoming more relevant in their lives.

It’s quite easy to see the connection between variety and engagement. The brands with the largest number of boards on the most varied topics see the highest engagement rates on Pinterest.

We would advise you to get inspiration about what boards to create by analysing the keywords your audience uses to find new content.

Another way to discover fresh content ideas or board topics is to check out the competition. See what it working for them and use those as inspiration to build your own popular boards.

Your hard work can be spread across other platforms and newsletters. Don't just confine it to your boards.

Going the other way around, let users pin your blog posts to their Pinterest profiles by including a simple ‘Pin It’ button on all your posts. If you’re unsure how to do that. If embedding your pins to your blog gives you a kick about Pinterest, you can take it a notch higher by using some lovely Pinterest themed plugins on your blog.

Another great way to spread the word about your pins on Pinterest is by promoting them via your email marketing. You would be in good company too, as according to Experian Marketing Services, 64% of brands that are active on Pinterest promote their Pinterest accounts via email.

Pinterest, like most other social media platforms, helps boost your SEO rankings. Use the right keywords in the descriptions of your pins, so that you can attract the right audience. Pinterest’s own search function, which was revamped earlier this year, helps well fleshed out pins and business pages to be discovered more easily by pinners, whether they follow your page or not.

Another simple yet extremely effective addition to your descriptions are hashtags. Use hashtags on Pinterest the way you would on Twitter or Instagram and be discovered more easily.

Pinterest is still largely driven by organic content as compared to its competitors and any overt self-promotion can come back to bite you. Use Pinterest search to look up relevant, “re-pinnable” content from other pinners and share it on your own boards. It spreads the love, gives your users more diversity in content, and makes your brand look like an enabler rather than a self-promoter.

Pinterest has plugged the gap in its ‘being social’ repertoire and now it allows users to have conversations with each other through direct messages. The caveat here is that both users must follow each other to avoid spam.

This means as a business owner, you can now reach out to a follower one on one, instead of having just boards of content passively communicating your brand idea to your fans. Imagine how cool it would be as a fan to have your favorite brand talking back to you! Yeah, offer that experience to your own users. Group conversations have a limit of supporting up to 9 users at a time.

There’s so much that can be done with this messaging feature. For example, you could:

Pinterest also has remarkable analytics for its business accounts. With Pinterest Analytics you can know who your users are – their gender, age, location, etc. You’ll get insights into the interests of your followers, what type of content from your site they pin the most, how many leads your site receives from Pinterest, and so on.

You can actually do so much with each bit of these free insights that Pinterest reveals to you. Take users’ interests for example.

Pick those interests that are common among a majority of your followers and create pins around them. Even better, start a board for a topic that interest the majority of your users. Increase engagement with them by inviting them to pin on these boards by making them collaborative.

Use an all-encompassing dashboard like Cyfe that lets you see all analytics data from your social media accounts, your website, your CRM tools, and elsewhere in one place. Cross-reference your social data with visitors’ interactions on your website or their activities on Pinterest to create unique blog content or email newsletters that they will enjoy.

Pinterest marketing firm managed to put a price on each pin posted by users on their Pinterest pages. Turns out, every new pin is worth 50p of incremental sales to the brand that is featured in the pin. With over 30 billion pins racked up already, that’s a goldmine waiting to be tapped.

So perhaps you can now see why we recommend this social media platform so highly.