Power Up Your Marketing with Pinterest

Power Up Your Marketing with Pinterest

Pinterest was one of the very first marketing platforms we used when we started our online business back in 2010 and we taught it to a lot of first time entrepreneurs

Sadly we lost access to our account so we are starting again and will come back and update this post with our account details so you can follow along with us and see how it works.

It was a really powerful platfom but over the years became less popular for online marketers.  Today it’s having a resurgence in popularity as we’ve discovered (we’re currently following a 5 day Pinterest Challenge)

Pinterest is a unique type of social media platform that is less about engagement and more about the organisation of ideas and content paired with the ability to share it with others who are planning to use the information later.

On Pinterest, your audience can take your content Pin and put it on one of their boards. So if you’re in the pet niche and you have a blog post about 10 ways to prepare homemade dog foods, you might create an image on Canva that shows a dog waiting for their meal, and a text overlay with your blog title on it.

When you create the Pin and upload it, you’ll be able to link to that blog post so that people can click on the Pin and read it. Someone who has a board about pets might pin your content to their board, and everyone who follows them can then see it as well.

It has a very viral component to it, which is why many  marketers love it. Plus, it’s free to use!

Many different age groups use Pinterest and while it has a larger female audience, many men use it, too.

You can have a personal account or a business account.

Setting Up Your Pinterest Account

The first thing you want to do is open up Pinterest and start an account using your e-mail address. You can choose to have a personal or business account, but if you are using a business account you’ll be able to access more data analytics and also tap into paid advertising if and when you want to.

You want to brand your Pinterest account the same way you are branding across all platforms. That means you will have a profile image as well as a bio. In your bio, you can include a little blurb about yourself as well as a hyperlink to your domain.

People will be able to follow your profile on Pinterest and see all of your boards, unless you make a board private for any reason. You’ll be able to toggle between the pins that you have saved to your profile and the ones you have created.

Strategic Pin Planning

When you are pinning for business purposes, you want to have a strategy in place that draws attention to your pins and helps you get shared by others. This is a visual site, so all of your pins need to be compelling and attractive.

If you are creating pins using a tool like Canva, you want to make sure that you are using a vertical pin so that you take up more space on the page. You also want to include a call to action with your pin so that they know to save it to their board and follow your account for more ideas.

When you create a new pin, you are going to give it a title and a description so that people know what the pen is about. You can also add a hyperlink to each pin, whether it’s an image or a video and put it on one of your organized boards.

Take some time to thoughtfully organize your boards so that they are categorized according to certain keywords. For example, if you are in the weight loss niche, you might have one board for healthy shakes, another for the keto diet, one for cardio exercises and so on.

When you are on your profile, you can click the + sign, and choose between the creation of a board, a pin, or an idea pin. For pins, you can drag and drop or upload the image, which should be under 20 MB.

You can also add alt text and a link for where people will go when they click on it. Make sure your description area is rich with keywords and hashtags, too. Choose which board you’re pinning it to.

You can create a new board and give it a keyword name, such as “Keto Weight Loss.” You may want to create what’s known as an Idea Pin. This is good for uploading multiple items, such as images and videos and you can tag it with relevant keywords so that others can see the collection of information you have organized.

Many marketers take part in collaborative boards, where they partner up with many other Pinterest users to all contribute to a single board so that it becomes very popular with average consumers.

They usually have a deal in place where, for every one pin that you upload, you pin two of the other pins to one of your boards. Collaborating with others in this matter helps everyone enjoy more exposure and traffic.

Optimizing Your Pins for Performance

On many social media platforms, such as Pinterest, you want to always optimize your content so that it performs to the best of its abilities. On Pinterest, much of that revolves around the keywords you choose to use so that people can identify what your content is about.

We’ve already talked about using keywords in the tags and titles as well as the boards themselves, but you can also improve your optimization in other ways. You have to track how your pins are performing on this social media site.

For example, you want to know how many impressions you got with viewers, versus how many click throughs or repins you achieved. You’ll want to pay attention to your pins to see which types are performing best so that you can create more of those.

Consider using things like rich pins to help you with your efforts. For example, if you have a product and you want people to know what the pricing is or the availability, you can use a rich pin that will keep that updated at all times.

You can also use them for certain articles from your blog. It lets people see more about the content than just what a normal pin would show. For example, it will show them the headline, description, and other details so that they know whether they want to click through and read more.

These types of pins, along with aesthetic vertical pins get more traction than a normal pin does. In order to use these you have to apply to Pinterest and validate your website first and add a bit of code that can handle the rich pin process.

You want to optimize your monetization efforts, too. This means you are not only promoting your own products, but also other people’s products as an affiliate. You can even make shoppable product pins they can click through on to buy something, but you have to have a business account for this purpose.

Improving Traffic and Engagement with Your Pins

You can create a community within your Pinterest profile and engage with people who follow your boards. They will leave comments on your pins, and you’ll get notifications so that you can respond as a brand or niche leader.

You always want to make sure that you are giving a call to action that they click through to read your blog or to learn more about a product. Don’t just have aesthetic pins listed without giving them the instructions for taking the next step.

You can always ask a question in the description so that you are prompting them to leave a comment with their answer period then, go through and respond to each person so that your pin has many comments and is social proof that you are getting the engagement everyone wants.

You might even ask people to leave a testimonial if you are teaching a strategy and they are trying it out in their own life. Have them come back to the pin and give their results so that others know your advice works.

Like many other social platforms, people on Pinterest like to follow boards that consistently have fresh pins on them, and sometimes, the time of day may impact how prevalent your pin shows up in their feed, such as nights and weekends being a popular time.

Next Steps

If you would like to dig deep into using Pinterest we highly recommend this course (the lady we are doing the Pinterest Challenge with)

And if you have any questions or want to talk about using Pinterest for marketing your business feel free to book a call with us here

Thanks for reading today’s blog Power Up Your Marketing with Pinterest and would love you to share your thoughts and feedback.

If you would like to get started setting yourself up online and have some questions please just contact us

Or book a free call here

Power Up Your Marketing with Pinterest