One of the more underrated social media platforms is Pinterest. A good Pinterest marketing strategy is invaluable as it will allow you to reach more people who otherwise may have fallen through the cracks.
How To Create A Winning Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Pinterest works in a way that is highly conducive to interaction with products and ideas – meaning that a solid Pinterest marketing strategy has the potential to produce fantastic results.
Is it worth it? Well, according to Pinterest, over 200 Million people use Pinterest every month! That’s a lot of prospects…
So how does it all work?
First of all, Pinterest is almost exclusively dedicated to imagery. Everything from photographs, artworks and illustrations to infographics and ads. This mean that you’re not going to be writing posts or articles on Pinterest…everything will be visual.
The very term ‘social’ in social media is somewhat loosely applied in the case of Pinterest. The primary use of Pinterest is not direct interaction with others, but rather the sharing of ideas and images.
Pinterest is based on the idea of being the virtual equivalent of pinning images to boards. The idea is that boards are created by users about interesting topics, and then the users pin any relevant, interesting or valuable content to these boards.
For example, if you’re looking to bake a cake for your child’s birthday, you can look through various ‘cake recipe’ and ‘birthday cake’ boards and will find a bunch of cool birthday cake ideas.
Let’s say you like the bee-themed cake below. You’d click on it to bring up the below page. From there, as you can see, you have options like saving the pin to come back to it later, posting a photo of your attempt to make that cake, and commenting on the pin.
So as you can see, Pinterest is a pretty simple social media platform. It’s basically the ultimate online, interactive database of cool ideas, photographs, products and infographics. With so many people using Pinterest, there is always the possibility of a pin going viral – a digital marketer’s dream.
How Can I Successfully Create a Pinterest Marketing Strategy?
After all, that’s what you’re reading this for, right?
There are some great tools and advertising methods that you can use in your Pinterest marketing strategy. But before we dive into them, let’s take a step back for a second.
Pinterest is a fantastic platform for digital marketers. It offers powerful opportunities that aren’t as accessible on other social media platforms.
But Pinterest is also a very specific social media platform. The content types that you can post on Pinterest are much more limited than, say, Facebook.
This doesn’t make Pinterest inferior. In some ways, it’s specificity makes it significantly more powerful than generalist social media platforms. But you need to have a very clear idea of how your business can integrate its offerings and marketing tactics to assimilate with Pinterest. Particularly, you will need strong, eye-catching visuals more than you’ll need lots of powerful copy. Since your content will be amidst a sea of highly visual content, it is harder to stand out – but the benefits are amazing.
Alright, now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s have a look at some great Pinterest marketing tactics you can use to give your strategy the boost it needs.
9 tactics you can use to boost your Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Tactic 1: Rich Pins
Rich pins give you the opportunity to add more details to your standard pin. For example, if you are a retail brand you can add details like pricing, stock availability or links to your website on a pin.
There are 4 types of rich pins available:
1. Product Pins
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Product pins are pins that include product information. They serve as visual advertisements, complete with a bunch of functions like:
- Price
- Availability
- Where to Buy
In a lot of ways, product pins serve as the Pinterest equivalent of ad forms like Google Shopping. The power of product pins is that people are actively looking for ideas on Pinterest, so if they come across your product within the field of things they’re wanting to do, they’re potentially more likely to convert than someone who is surfing a website and sees product advertisements on the side.
What’s great about product pins is just how native they are. Since Pinterest is actually designed for people to post things like products that others may find interesting, product pins don’t feel forced or out-of-place at all.
Product pins also allow the prospect to click through directly to your offering, which makes the process direct and simple. All-in-all, it’s a fantastic offering that can offer high click-through and conversion rates if executed well.
2. Recipe Pin
Recipe pins are pretty self-explanatory. You get to post a recipe as a pin, complete with ingredients, the recipe itself, and imagery of the finished product.
Then you get to link to your website, where people can buy the ingredients required to make this food themselves. Since people who are searching for recipes will by this process’ very nature be looking to take action, this is a great opportunity to stick your hat into the ring and streamline people onto your Ecommerce website.
Of course, this only works if you sell food products. If you do, however, this is probably the most powerful tool you could add to your Pinterest marketing strategy.
3. Article Pins
Article pins are sneaky ways of getting people on the short-form social media platform that is Pinterest, to engage with longer-form content types like articles and blog posts.
A huge mistake that a lot of digital marketers might make is ignoring this rich pin option, seeing it as designed for news and magazine websites. In fact, it is hugely valuable for almost any brand, since you should be running your own blog (and it should be a gateway to collecting email addresses).
You will need to feature an image for the article on the pin, but then will also have the luxury of adding a headline, as well as a brief blurb about your article. The prospect will then be able to click through to read your content on your website.
This is a great way of guiding prospects from social media onto your website, which in turn allows you to do all of those great digital marketing things like offering lead magnets and encouraging newsletter subscriptions.
After all, your Pinterest marketing strategy should be primarily geared towards taking people from Pinterest, and guiding them through to your own website, complete with your own offerings and branding. All roads lead to Rome home.
4. App Pins
App pins have great potential but are perhaps not the most optimal form of Pinterest marketing at this point in time.
App Pins allow you to link to your app from your pin, which in turn gets you more app downloads. If you have an app, this could be a valuable source of downloads.
The downside, however, is that app pins only work with iOS for now, meaning that non-Apple users can’t download any Android apps you have created.
There are other marketing tools that you should also consider for your Pinterest marketing strategy. Here are a few of them.
Tactic 2: Save Button for Your Websites
Pinterest offers you a special ‘save’ button that you can add to all of your images on your website.
This save button allows your audience to add your images to their Pinterest boards. This means that you are getting more exposure, particularly since all pinned images link back to the site they come from. It kind of works like a super-charged backlink system, where people share your images from your website onto their Pinterest boards, then people see their Pinterest boards and click through to your website. That means more traffic for you!
There are two types of save buttons that you can choose from. The first is a standard save button that is visible at all times on your images. This makes the option always visible to your audience, which potentially increases the number of times people will click on the button.
The second type of save button is a hover button. This means that the button only shows when people hover over your images. While this may mean that less people see the button in the first place, it adds the bonus of not cluttering your images with little buttons.
Which button type you choose should depend on the nature of your images. If your images are the sort that people are more likely to hover over – such as if you run a photography or art website – the hover button might be better. Imagery that is more of a secondary feature might work better with the standard button.
That said, you could always split-test the two buttons, and see which is more successful – both in terms of page performance and click-through rate.
You can also edit the button in HTML if you’d like to make it suit our website better. This will allow you to change elements like its shape and colour. Be careful, though, because you want it to be clear that it is a Pinterest button so that your audience doesn’t ignore it!
The save button also works on mobile, meaning that you aren’t limiting your potential to be shared just to desktop users. All-in-all, the save button is a fantastic little tool that you should definitely consider adding to your Pinterest marketing strategy.
Tactic 3: Pinterest Widget Builder
Pinterest also offers you the opportunity to embed Pinterest content directly into your website.
This includes a few different opportunities, such as pin widgets and profile widgets.
Pin widgets are simple widgets that allow you to embed an individual pin on your website. This allows you to connect your website back to a particularly popular or interesting pin you have previously posted. This completes the two-way street between your Pinterest content and your website, and potentially encourages people on your site to save and interact with more of your Pinterest content.
Profile widgets are similar to pin widgets, but they show a selection of your latest pins, rather than focusing on a specific pin. You can display up to 30 pins in a profile widget.
The benefit of this over a pin widget is that it gives more opportunities for something to catch your reader’s eye. The other side of the coin is that each image is a smaller thumbnail – it’s largely down to quantity versus quality as far as displaying your Pinterest content is concerned.
Tactic 4: Pinterest Analytics
With all of the effort you’re putting into your Pinterest marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to be tracking your efforts.
Pinterest offers a useful analytics tool that will keep you informed about your marketing progress. You can see which of your pins is performing the best, as well as the level of activity surrounding your Pinterest content.
You can also look at individual pin statistics by clicking on that pin’s stats icon. This will allow you to analyse individual pins in greater depth.
You are also given access to the demographics of the people who are viewing your content. This will help you to streamline your content in a bid to appeal to the people who are interested in what you’re pinning.
Pinterest Analytics is also a powerful tool for analyzing how your advertisements are performing. It is therefore a versatile platform that should be able to service all of your analytics needs.
Talking about advertisements, these should also fall under your consideration in your Pinterest marketing strategy. But how can you advertise on Pinterest?
Beyond the promoted pins we’ve already analysed, there are a few other options available.
Tactic 5: Promoted Video Pins
While Pinterest is focused on still imagery, you have the opportunity to take it to the next level by implementing a video pin into your Pinterest marketing strategy.
Video content is generally more popular than image content, so being a video in an ocean of pictures can be of huge benefit.
There is even the benefit of auto-playing videos, which means that your prospect doesn’t have to make a conscious decision to click on your video in order for it to tell them about your wonderful offering.
Tactic 6: One-tap Pins
One tap pins are pins available to marketers like you that take the prospect straight to your website. This idea is targeted specifically at mobile users, making it easy for them to navigate to your website and engage with your business.
In a digital world where users value simplicity and ease-of-use, you should consider one-tap pins to make the process of getting to your website as easy as possible.
If you’re somehow still not sold on the incredible value that you can get from creating and executing a good Pinterest marketing strategy, let’s take a look at how targeting can help you to pinpoint the people you want to show your advertisement to.
Targeting is one of the most important aspects of advertising online. If you are just blindly advertising to anybody and everybody, you’re going to have awful results. Most 70-year-old women aren’t particularly interested in dirt bikes, for example, and your knitting classes won’t be attracting many 20-year-old men.
Targeted advertising allows you to show your advertisements to particular groups of people that you know to be your target audience. Targeting is a crucial aspect of your advertising efforts, and so it is important that anywhere you advertise allows for efficient and accurate targeting.
Pinterest does.
Let’s look at some of the targeting options available for your Pinterest marketing strategy.
Tactic 7: Interest Targeting
Generally, people who are interested in what you have to offer will have interests in common. These interests will usually be connected to your offering in some capacity. If you sell motorbikes, for example, you may find that lots of your audience is also interested in leather jackets.
Interest targeting allows you to identify interest groups that you want to target. This means that your advertisements are reaching people who are more likely to be interested in them. This all results in a superior click-through rate.
Tactic 8: Keyword Targeting
Interest targeting will help you to find your prospects, but keyword targeting will help them to find you.
Pinterest provide two incredible statistics that highlight just how valuable keyword targeting is
- 97% of Pinterest searches do not contain brand names
- 72% of Pinterest users say that they have met new brands through the social media platform.
Now that’s an opportunity you want to get in on!
Pinterest’s keyword targeting functionality is thorough. Not only do you type in your keywords, but you can also choose from options like
- Match Types – choose between options like exact matches and keyword-contained-within-search options
- Negative Keywords – choose which keywords you specifically do not want to show up for. For example, if you make sports shoes, you may want to set ‘heels’ and ‘dress shoes’ as negative keywords.
- Search term reports – find out what people searched for when they were shown your advertisement.
Tactic 9: Audience Targeting
Beyond choosing which interests and search terms you want to target, you can also choose based upon the actual people who are on Pinterest.
Target things like gender, age group and location to ensure that the right people are seeing your advertisements. It’s unwise to sell dresses to men, or your local plumbing services to people hundreds of miles away.
How To Optimise Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Before we finish off, let’s go through a few tips and tricks for optimising your Pinterest marketing strategy.
1. Don’t be scared to show more than one product in a single promoted pin
Pinterest is a creative platform. You aren’t looking to create a sales catalogue with your promoted pins, so you have the liberty to do things like placing multiple different products together in a simple pin if it makes aesthetic sense.
This is actually beneficial if you can get it right, as it means you’re getting to advertise 3 products for the price of 1! It’ll also make you look like you have a substantial variety of offerings.
2. Create your own boards
Promote pins are fantastic marketing tools, but don’t forget about using Pinterest organically! If you create interesting boards around your area of expertise, you can reach prospects without paying a cent. What a great deal…
3. Write good descriptions
While Pinterest is a visual medium, there is still the opportunity to write captions or descriptions about your images.
Don’t pass up this opportunity to communicate even more with your prospects. That said, Pinterest doesn’t appreciate sales copy or direct call-to-actions, so you’ll have to be subtle with whatever you write.
That said, if you can utilise your brand’s tone-of-voice effectively, it can be a useful bonus to the appeal of your content.
4. Brand your images
I don’t just mean using images that fit with your brand. Actually ensure that your logo, or business name, is on your imagery.
Unfortunately, plagiarism is a big issue online. Your imagery should be exclusively yours, so don’t avail the opportunity for it to be stolen.
5. Create How-To’s and Guides
Pretty pictures are nice, but people also want to be given information and assistance. The opportunity to create visual explanations about certain industry-relevant things is something you shouldn’t undervalue.
You can choose how you visualise these content pieces – infographics are great, but so are step-by-step images that outline each step of the process, accompanied by short explanations. The choice is yours.
Final Word On Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Hopefully you now realise just how powerful Pinterest can be. The internet age has seen the rise of visual media as the dominant form of content, and it is no different in marketing.
If you’re interested in creating valuable content for Pinterest, you should consider downloading our 2018 Marketing Managers’ Guide to Community Building, which includes content ideas for 7 different social media platforms, including Pinterest.
If you’re interested in using our specialist digital marketing team – in your social media strategy, and across the other aspects of digital marketing – feel free to get into contact with us!
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