The emergence of social media and its continuing popularity adds a new avenue for businesses today. Devising a marketing strategy around it, then, makes perfect sense.
Yet, one platform, in particular, Pinterest, offers a unique marketing opportunity for businesses but is often overlooked.
Most likely, this is due to Pinterest’s reputation for being a place for consumers to save ideas and gain inspiration.
If you look deeper, however, you discover that Pinterest is the perfect platform for showcasing your brand, content, products, or services. You can also engage with users and inspire them along the way.
By doing so, users can discover the newest products and services and find answers to their questions.
With over 400 million people currently on the platform, it just makes sense then that Pinterest pins need to be part of your content marketing strategy.
Ready to know more about it?
What is Pinterest Marketing?
Pinterest is a social media platform that users go to for exploring, compiling, and sharing visual content they find helpful, entertaining, and inspiring.
Underneath all that, Pinterest is its own type of search engine, using an algorithm to determine the ranking of the various pins.
With this in mind, your business needs to be strategic in creating pins for this platform.
Pinterest marketing involves leveraging what the platform has to offer to meet your specific objectives, such as reaching new audiences, building brand awareness, gaining high-quality leads, or increasing website traffic.
You will need to incorporate an SEO strategy along with visually pleasing, useful, and emotional content that speaks to user intent.
Pinterest Objectives and KPIs
When it comes to devising a social media marketing strategy for Pinterest, much will depend on what your overall objectives are and what Key Performance Indicators (KPs) you wish to measure.
Some of the most beneficial objectives and KPIs for Pinterest include the following.
Impressions
Impressions provide the number of times your Pins appear in front of the Pinterest users. These appearances may be in their Home Feeds, through a different user’s boards, or in search results.
These impressions can show you if you are expanding your reach. They can also show you any existing patterns and alert you to trends.
Closeups
Closeups on Pinterest measure the number of times a user clicks or taps on your Pin so they can gain a zoomed-in view of it.
Usually, this closeup action occurs when the user is intrigued by the visual or the content shared. It is also a good indicator of just how interesting your Pin is to targeted audiences.
Link Clicks
Link Clicks will alert you to how many times the Pinterest users clicked on a linked Pin and made it all the way through to your site. These are a great way to measure your ROI.
Saves
Saves are the amount of saves your pins receive by Pinterest users. The higher the amount of saves, the more valuable your content appears to be, creating higher brand awareness.
Engagement
Engagement is a measurement of how much user interaction your Pins generate.
The weight you place on any of these measurements will depend on your marketing strategy and what is most important to you.
If your focus is on raising brand awareness, the number of engagements or saves may be most important.
If expanding your reach beyond your current audience is a goal, then you’ll want to measure the number of impressions.
For those with a focus on increasing the number of sales, link clicks will provide a valuable clue to whether content shared on Pinterest is being effective.
6 Tips for Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Pinterest requires and deserves its own unique marketing strategy. Here are 6 tips for making that strategy the best it can be.
1. Focus on Educating Customers
As mentioned previously, Pinterest is the prime platform for users to find new products and services and find answers to their questions.
As such, a focus on educating your customers and potential customers will be a beneficial approach.
You can do this by designing content for Pins in the form of tutorials, how-to articles and videos, interactive infographics, and other types linking to educational content.
Start by knowing your audience and creating buyer personas to help guide you in developing educational content to share on Pinterest.
2. Drive Traffic to Your Website
Design your content for Pinterest with the goal of driving more traffic to your website, increasing conversions, and boosting your online sales.
The benefit of Pinterest is that you can link your visual content in your Pins directly back to your website, a feature not available on Instagram.
As a result, more traffic can lead to an increase in online sales.
Use your Pin strategy to provide images of your products while also sharing content.
For example, a specialty home decor company creates a Board on Pinterest where it shares home design tips paired with the items they sell. Viewers learn something while viewing the brand’s offerings, often leading them to click through to the website.
Also, by sharing a shortcut button or widget to Pinterest on your website, visitors can easily connect with your boards, become followers, and comment or share your Pins.
3. Leverage keywords
The leveraging of keywords is also an important element in your Pinterest marketing strategy. Utilize your keywords in the following:
- Your profile
- Pin descriptions
- Board titles
- Board descriptions
- Paid Pinterest ads
You can use keywords in the alt-text for your images also.
Leveraging your keywords increases your chances of appearing organically in the feeds and searches of users.
When a user searches for a distinctive keyword, phrase, or niche, your profile, images, or posts will show up in the results and on the users’ feed.
One way to find related keywords is to conduct a search on Pinterest. At the top of the results screen, Pinterest provides related keywords that users are also using.
4. Include Keyword-Rich Descriptions for Your Boards
Strategically creating Boards on your Pinterest business account is a valuable way to focus your marketing efforts.
When doing so, be sure to optimize these Boards with keywords in the titles and use keyword-rich descriptions.
Pinterest Boards are searchable. While users are searching for specific topics, not Boards, if your keywords are included in the title and description, the Pinterest algorithm will notice.
It will use that information to discern the board’s content and whether it responds to the user’s search intent. As a result, you have more of a chance of ranking and showing up in their feeds.
First and foremost, your board descriptions must tell users what they can find there. So, build your boards around primary and secondary keywords.
Within those boards, you can create subcategories and topics as well.
5. Know What Pin Types Are Available
Your Pins are an integral part of your marketing strategy on Pinterest.
Fortunately, you have different types of pins available on the platform. Find the right ones to benefit your business.
One of the highest performing pins is those showcasing a service or product in action and including an irresistible Call-to-Action (CTA).
You can promote special events or offerings, limited-time discounts, and so much more.
Get to know the types of pins below and build your strategy to incorporate as many as fit with your particular business or brand.
Product Pins
Product Pins provide up-to-date information about your product, including price and availability. You can also include a product description.
Video Pins
These pins tell a story by way of video, visually showing your products or services in action.
Article Pins
Promote your blog posts or articles with this type of pin. Create unique titles, headlines, and descriptions to entice users to read more.
Story Pins
Use story pins to educate, providing users with recipes, guides, DIY instructions, and even interactive content. Tell stories with images, text, and links.
Shop the Look or Buyable Pins
Add a high-quality photo to your Pin and allow users to buy directly from the Pin.
Rich Pins
Rich pins provide the user with additional context and details surrounding a Pin and are a free feature on Pinterest. Individual types include Product, Place, Article, Recipe, and Movie.
6. Analyze Your Results
As with any marketing strategy, tracking performance and analyzing results is imperative to success.
With it, you can learn what content users like the best and what content results in more interaction or engagement.
Analyze how well your Pins do, including how they perform when it comes to conversions and visits to your website.
Maintain data on the number of engagements, leads generated, referrals, and anything else that matters to you specifically.
One way to easily accomplish this is through the Pinterest Analytics feature. This valuable feature provides you with the following:
- Insights into the number of users saving and re-pinning your various content.
- An understanding of how users interact with your content types.
- Details about your most popular pins.
Use what you find to improve your content for pins and boards.
Pinterest enables you to create ways to attract, inspire, educate, and help users while gaining benefits on the business side, including increasing brand awareness, conversions, engagement, and more.
Wrap Up
Today, Pinterest is an often overlooked opportunity for providing more value to customers and achieving marketing gains for businesses.
This extremely versatile and engaging platform can be a boon for your business once you recognize all it has to offer.
One way to stand out and get noticed on social media today is with the use of interactive posts. We tell you what these are and how to create them!
