Intro to Pinterest Marketing
During the Covid-19 lockdown I was really intent on making the most of the time. I took my online pre and postnatal yoga teacher training, I took a course on Facebook ads and I took a course on Pinterest for Business. The Pinterest for Business course was probably the most mind-blowing of them all because, for me, Pinterest has only ever been a place I’ve scrolled through mindlessly in search of funny memes and interior design inspiration. But I was shocked to learn that Pinterest could be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and I made the decision to step up and start making my Pinterest account work harder for me.
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Why is Pinterest such a powerful Marketing tool?
Check out these latest stats from Tailwind:
As of the Q4 2019, Pinterest has more than 335 million monthly active users
90% of weekly pinners have used Pinterest to make a purchase
40% of Pinterest users have a household income of $100,000
45% of all women online are Pinterest users
50% of new signups are men
Two-thirds of all pins represent brands or products
73% of pinners say content from brands makes Pinterest more useful
93% of users use Pinterest to plan purchases
55% of users shop on the site
34% of Americans ages 18 to 34 use Pinterest
Pinterest images reach 83% of US women ages 25-54
There were 600 million Pinterest Lens searches in February 2018
59% of millennials have discovered products on Pinterest
You’re probably reading this and thinking just what I was thinking; “whoah! This is a HUGE audience that I’m missing out on!” I was kicking myself that it had taken me so long to realise it too! So, if utilising Pinterest for your blog or business is a new idea for you, or maybe something you didn’t even think about until you found this article, here are a few starter points:
1. CREATE A PINTEREST BUSINESS ACCOUNT
This may not seem like a big deal, but it IS. When you have a registered business account Pinterest takes your content more seriously; you can create rich pins and your pins are much more likely to be shown. Not only that, but Pinterest offers analytics for business accounts, so you can see which pins are performing best. I started using Pinterest as a marketing tool a little over a month ago and the traffic being driven to my website from Pinterest increased from literally zero to contributing to a quarter of all of socially driven website traffic (higher than Instagram by far!).
2. PIN CONSISTENTLY
Pinterest loves users that are consistently adding value to the platform; it’s much better to share 5 pins each day than 25 pins one day, then 25 pins 2 weeks later. So start by simply adding 5 pins to Pinterest as part of your daily to-do list to get into the habit of using the platform regularly.
I started my Pinterest strategy by keeping a pretty intense looking spreadsheet of all the pins I’d created and shared and which boards I’d shared them to, so that I could re-share pins after a month or two months on a different board and show them to new followers. This would probably work well when you’re just starting out and only have a few pins, but I have HUNDREDS, so I became overwhelmed pretty quickly. That’s when I turned to Tailwind.
Tailwind is an approved-by-Pinterest scheduling tool that shares your pins for you at peak traffic times to optimise your engagement. You also have access to some invaluable marketing tools like Tailwind tribes (where like-minded folks share your content for you and visa-versa) and Smartloop (where you can set a timer to automatically pin your most popular pins year-round or by season - *round of applause). If you have a lot of blog posts, a lot of pins and you’re serious about growing your online presence you NEED to get Tailwind. Tailwind’s free trial offers you up to 100 scheduled Pinterest posts and access to Tribes and Smartloop, so you can get a very good idea of how it works straight off the bat.
*Tailwind for Pinterest and Tailwind for Instagram are separate subscriptions. Tribes & Smartloop Power-ups are available on a paid subscription.
3. PIN HIGH QUALITY PINS
Studies have shown the ideal pin size is 600 x 300px. Any bigger and your image risks not displaying fully. Any smaller and it tends to get lost in the Pinterest jungle. Not only is the size of your pin important but how it looks is important too. If you find yourself short on high quality images and you can’t afford a photographer, the internet will come to your rescue! You can find free images on websites like Unsplash or Pixabay. If you want to take it a step further then you can also buy images from Shutterstock or other image providers. If you’re not into designing your own pins, then you’ll be thrilled to know that Tailwind now provides its very own pin creator called Tailwind Create (more on that in point 4).
Now the great thing about Pinterest which, in my eyes makes it so much more powerful than a platform like Instagram, is that the pin links directly to your page - remember that humans are ultimately very lazy creatures so it’s important to make your content really easy to access. Once you’ve nailed the visual make sure your pin links to the correct page. A pin that takes you somewhere you didn’t expect makes you look sloppy, it puts people off your content and the Pinterest algorithm doesn’t like it either.
4. CREATING YOUR OWN PINS IS EASY!
You want your pins to be high quality and have clear, readable text that is consistent in style. Consistency is really key here; people should be able to recognise your pins just from the way they look, and that way they become more familiar with you and are more likely to follow you and to engage with you. I LOVE creating content, so this part of the process is really fun for me and I use Photoshop to create my pins.
If you’re not confident with photoshop or graphic design is just not your thing you can use Tailwind Create, which gives you access to thousands of layouts, fonts and stock images so you can create visually stunning, on-brand pins quickly. You’ll try Tailwind Create as part of your Tailwind free trial and then you can create up to 15 pins each month when you move on up to Tailwind’s basic package. Isn’t having all your eggs in one neat and tidy basket just wonderful!
5. SEO THE HECK OUT OF EVERYTHING
The Pinterest algorithm works much the same as the Google algorithm and the bonus is that you can write SEO optimised copy using Pinterest’s very own search bar because the moment you type in a key word or phrase to Pinterest’s search bar you will immediately be presented with the top-searched terms and you can begin to tie that in. And you want to tie this is as much as possible to your title, description and even your board name and description if possible. I sometimes like to work backwards on blog posts; so if I plan to write a blog post about Pinterest I’ll search “Pinterest” in the search bar and find a popular search term then try to tie that in to my blog post title and content. As I’ve done in this blog post :)
I truly believe that taking the time to invest in learning and understanding effective digital marketing platforms like Pinterest can really make or break your online presence. So, I hope this has been a helpful overview of how you can get started using Pinterest to help you get the word out even further about your business.