How To Start Marketing Your Business On Pinterest

Are you on Pinterest? Does your business need Pinterest in the first place? Before getting started let’s see whether your business needs to be present on the second fastest growing social network? 

Who all use Pinterest? 

 According to Mashable, 68.2% of Pinterest users are women who have $1,00,000 household income annually. Apparel and lifestyle brands get 3.83% referral traffic from Pinterest, which increased 289% from December 2011. Overall, Pinterest referral traffic is more than LinkedIn, G+ and YouTube combined. If your target audience belongs to this sector, Pinterest is a must-use channel for you. For retails brands and lifestyle stores too, Pinterest is unavoidable. Apart from that, if you’re a blogger, Pinterest can prove beneficial for you.  

Why Pinterest is important for marketing:

Get huge referral traffic: If you can rank your pin for a given keyword, Pinterest users can prove truly contributing to your website traffic.  Showcase your products and services: Pinterest gives you enough space for promoting your services and products in the most stylish way possible. And this is true for every industry. We’ll explain the possibilities later in the article.  Research about the market: It’s an amazing tool to research on the market. There must be several businesses in your niche that are doing well on the platform. If you follow their user-base, you will understand what type of products they like, refer and prefer to buy.  Boost your sales: Pinterest pins will land the viewers on your website. So, there is high chances of conversion, once they’re on your website. It also increases your audience periphery.  

How to use Pinterest for marketing:

Get a business account: First of all, get a business account on Pinterest, if you don’t have one already. If you have a personal profile, you can convert it into a business account. Bloggers might want to do it. However, after you get it, some important things need to be taken care of.  

 Check if the exact user name is available for your business. If not go for the nearest option. Write a professional and clear description of your business. And verify your website. It’s one of the ways to know that the account represents a business and adds a trust factor. Check out the red tick mark beside the brand name.  Pin with SEO in mind: When you would pin, make sure you give all the relevant details of the content. Pinterest allows you to add keywords in pin description. If you have plenty of pinnable images on your website, make sure to add their meta data properly, so whenever a user pins from your site, it appears with right headline and description.  

 When we searched with “summer accessories”, Pinterest gave us the following pin as one of the top posts. As you can see the pin has “summer” in the description. It fulfills the searcher intent too.  Use HD quality taller images: Always use high quality images on Pinterest, else your updates will go unnoticed. Remember, big international brands are now on the network. The only way you can compete with them is, create engaging and high-quality images that would grab eyeballs.  

 Another factor to keep in mind while marketing on Pinterest is, taller images work better on the platform, compared to squarish or rectangular images. This is because Pinterest doesn’t restrict the vertical dimension of images. But don’t make it beyond 3000 pixels, else the viewers will not scroll up to repin, or like or share.  Use rich pins: Pinterest offers 6 types of Rich Pins: app, movie, recipe, article, product and place. These pins are very much effective to make your pins more attractive. In additional to that, rich pins include extra information about your pin that is missing from the normal ones. 

 Look at these two pins. The first one is a rich pin. You can figure out the differences from the second image. The second one doesn’t have a bold description nor the website source with its logo.  Engage customers with contests: Pinterest is a wonderful platform for contests and crowd sourcing. HuHot is one of those brands that are leveraging the platform for contests to its optimum level. They occasionally conduct Pinterest contests to get new ideas for their recipes.  

Make your site Pinterest ready: Social media marketing is a two-way traffic. Your social properties must be linked with other web properties of your business like website and blog. There are Pinterest tools that can help you get started.  Install a Pin It button on your website, so whenever a user wants to pin directly from your site, you have a tool for him.  

 Apart from that, there is a Pinterest profile and board widget that you can install on your website or blog. These widgets are excellent to showcase your latest pins on your website.  

Image: business2community Your website viewers can also go to your Pinterest page, clicking on the widget. There is also individual board widget available if you want to bring any particular board in notice.  Invite pinners to pin: Your Pinterest page requires more and more followers to grow. Creating a group board will help you achieve this goal. Start with people who would be interested to contribute in the category. Select the niche and invite all of them to pin. This would create a ownership among them and that’s the reason they would contribute willingly.  

Over to you

Have you included Pinterest marketing in your social media plan?Do you need a push to start? Write to us. We’ll guide you through.