How to grow your business with Pinterest
5 min read
Pinterest is notorious as a go-to place to find inspiration on design, DIY and home decor, but it’s actually a platform for almost any business to impress users with lifestyle motivation, product ideas or useful tips and tricks. Whatever your brand has to offer, posting visual content around your niche on Pinterest can help you to:
- Demonstrate leadership in your field
- Attract new customers
- Build a loyal fanbase
You would be forgiven for having left Pinterest out of your social media strategy and focusing your efforts into the more obvious marketing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but there’s good reason to give pinning your time of day. Pinterest hasn’t stopped growing in popularity, going into 2020 with over 300 million active monthly users, and it is actively used to make purchasing decisions. 90% of people using Pinterest weekly say that the platform influences their shopping habits.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that simply posting your products on Pinterest and using your boards as advertising billboards is going to result in automatic sales growth. It is still a social network, where you need to generate engagement and encourage interaction to achieve your goals. Here are 6 top tips for being business savvy and providing the right content for your audience to grow your brand on Pinterest.
1. Share Infographics
Infographics are incredibly well-suited to Pinterest, because they provide an easily understood visual explanations for interesting, educational, useful or entertaining facts. Make sure that you are hitting at least one of these categories with your infographics, and make it clear why they relate to your business, including a strong call to action at the end. Your infographics could be step-by-step guides to products or services, statistics relevant to your industry, or anything else that easily combines compelling information with good graphic design. If you don’t have the skills or resources to create your own high-quality infographics from scratch, check out this list of free animation software that can help you out. The more attention-grabbing and eye-pleasing your infographics are, the more likely they are to get shared and help your reach new users.
2. Plan Ahead With Secret Board
Secret boards are the secret to topnotch Pinterest marketing. They allow you to upload private content which only you can see, or anyone else you’ve invited to the board. This means that you and your team can create pins in advance to edit and finesse before making public, giving you an easy way to plan your campaigns ahead of time and then move to public boards whenever you’re ready. Pinning consistently is vital to increasing brand awareness and sustaining the interest of your followers, and secret boards are an easy way to ensure you have a steady stream of content going out.
3. Make an Open Board
Open boards allow you to host a board which other Pinterest users can contribute to with their own content. Giving access to other pinners simply requires their name and email address, just like a subscription, and they can then start pinning on the open board and sharing their ideas, inspirations and creations. You remain in charge of the board, its title and description, with full say over what gets published and what doesn’t. This gives you the opportunity to be the leader of a community with an interest in your niche, increasing brand recognition and reputation among your target audience. Remember to be an active member of the community you have created, responding to people’s pins and encouraging discussion among pinners. If you can get other industry leaders and influencers to participate, even better.
4. Optimise your Pinterest SEO
Making sure your content reaches Pinterest users requires being smart with your copywriting, but it doesn’t take much to ensure the right keywords are finding the right audience. Do some research on popular keywords that people use when searching around your industry, business or products, and include them in your pin titles, captions, descriptions and image file names to help them be easily found. Putting a keyword in the first few words of your content, rather than near the end of a caption, tends to trigger search engines to find your content more easily. It’s important to do this while still sounding human and relatable – not a keyword bot – and maintaining a natural flow in your copy.
5. Improve yourself with insights
Staying on top of your Pinterest game means keeping on top of the platform’s trends and your own successes and failures. Pinterest’s new tool “Pinterest Trends” provides data on the top searches of the year and when they spiked in popularity, allowing you to better understand which keywords will get your brand the results it needs. On top of that, your Pinterest profile analytics will give you valuable stats for your own impressions (how often your pins appear on homepages, search results and category feeds), saves (how often users have saved your pins to their boards), engagements (how often users have engaged with your pins via saves, close-ups, link clicks and carousel swipes), top pins (your top 50 performing pins in the last 30 days) and top boards (your top 50 performing pins in the last 30 days). You can also view your audience demographic (age, gender, location and device type) to see exactly who is engaging with your pins the most. Keeping track of these insights helps you to see what you’re doing right and where you need to improve.
6. Pin at the right time
Pinning great content is all very well, but pinning at the right time is key if you want to maximize engagement and brand awareness. Studies show that Saturdays are the best day to post on Pinterest (with Sundays a close second) and 8-11pm is the best time on every day. During work hours is when your pins are least likely to get seen, so try to plan ahead and stick to a schedule that can use peak browsing hours to increase organic reach. It’s also worth doing some research into the particular browsing habits of your target audience – if you aiming a Pinterest campaign at students, for example, the optimum time to pin will likely be different than a campaign directed at working mothers.
