Pinterest can be an excellent tool for increasing your followers and community engagement. However, it’s a unique platform and it can be difficult to understand all the ins and outs when you’re first getting started.
In this guide, we’re going to help you overcome any pinteresting challenges and break down the following strategies that you can start implementing today:
1. Know Your Target Market
Before undertaking any new marketing avenues, it’s important that you understand your target market. This is especially important when considering the appropriate pinteresting strategies to leverage your companies' brand, as Pinterest has a vast user base across all industries.
The best way to understand your target market is simply by using Pinterest and exploring the content in your niche. This will give you an idea what tactics you can utilize and whether or not there is an active user base for your ideal demographic.
2. Follow Your Competitors
Going off the previous point, following your competitors can be an excellent strategy to improve your pinteresting endeavors! Look at the posts they’re making and what campaigns you might want to duplicate within your own profile.
While you’re there, don’t just look at their success. You can learn a lot by analyzing what types of content they have that failed to reach its full potential. This can ensure that you avoid making the same mistakes as you grow your Pinterest presence.
3. Complete Your Profile & Incorporate Branding
It’s easy to get excited about your new account and start posting right away. However, you’ll want to make sure you have an appealing profile before you do anything else.
This means going through every aspect of your Pinterest profile that can be customized and working your brand into it, whether it be through graphics or the written copy. We discuss some of the best techniques for incorporating branding into your social media in our guide Where to Apply Your New Brand Elements After a Rebrand.
Having a Pinterest profile that’s on brand is a great strategy to ensure new users who just discovered you turn into long long-time followers.
4. Quality Content Is Key
Gaining traction on a platform like Pinterest is largely due to people “pinning” your content and sharing it with others. So, if you use every pinteresting strategy in this guide but don’t create quality content, your efforts will likely fail.
To avoid this, there are two primary factors you need to keep in mind. First, the quality of the content you are linking to from your post. Second, and often more important with Pinterest, the quality of the graphics you’re using.
Pinterest is an extremely aesthetic driven platform. So, users will be more inclined to share content that’s visually appealing. Because of this, taking time to create graphics that are informative and eye-catching is one of the best uses of your time when it comes to optimizing your content for Pinterest.
5. Post to Pinterest Consistently
Consistency is key with any marketing strategy and pinteresting is no different! You should be engaging on the platform everyday whether that’s through posts, comments or pinning other creator's content.
Being active on your social media encourages your followers to do the same. Not only will this help push your posts to front of users feeds but it’s a great way to build up customer loyalty. The more you create regular content that engages with your followers, the more invested they will be in your business.
6. Plan Your Pins Ahead of Time
A great way to ensure you to maintain a consistent flow of content is by planning posts out ahead of time. We talk a little bit more about this and give some useful tools for scheduling content in our guide Best Online Tools For Freelancers: 2021 MUST Haves.
Planning posts in advanced is especially important when it comes to seasonal content, an active part of the Pinterest ecosystem. Occasions such as the winter holidays can be a valuable time for attracting new customers, but they’ll require specific content in order to do so. So, it’s a good idea to give yourself enough time to plan an effective campaign for these scenarios.
7. Optimize Your Pinterest Posts with SEO Tactics
Pinterest is unlike other social media platforms in that the user experience is largely based around its search engine. A large amount of content is discovered when someone searches for a specific topic on the platform. Because of this, a valuable strategy to employ in your pinteresting endeavors is search engine optimization (SEO).
This simply means making sure you optimize your content in a way that it can be easily discoverable by people searching for the topics it relates to. You can optimize several areas such as the post title, description and hashtags you include.
However, you shouldn’t use this to try and force yourself into topics that aren’t directly related to your post. Instead, choose a few primary, relevant topics and optimize every aspect of your post around that. For more advanced techniques, check out this guide on Pinterest SEO. We also go more in depth with into how you can utilize hashtags on social media in our guide The Importance of Hashtags.
8. Search for Trending Topics
Following trends is an awesome way to stay relevant on any social media platform and Pinterest is no exception. Popular topics change every day. So, staying current on the latest talking point in your niche and creating or engaging with relevant content can help encourage organic growth.
Pinterest has some useful tools, along with great advice for discovering trending topics in this guide.
9. Leverage Pinterest's Promotional & Analytics Tools
When you’re ready to take your pinteresting strategies to the next level, consider implementing some of the more professional tools that the platform offers.
The first of these tools you should incorporate is Pinterest’s Analytics platform. Looking at analytics will give you better insight into the types of customers your attracting, what campaigns have worked and where you can improve your efforts.
Paid promotion is a more costly marketing avenue, but when leveraged correctly it can increase your reach exponentially. Check out the advertising tools offered by Pinterest and once you’re comfortable with your organic marketing strategies, consider leveraging these paid tools to go even further.
Conclusion
Pinterest can be a powerful avenue for organic growth but there several things to keep in mind if you want to use the platform effectively. To recap, our top pinteresting strategies for every small business are:
We hope you found this guide useful in your marketing endeavors! If so, be sure to share it with your friends and let us know in the comments about your favorite pinteresting tactics. Don’t forget to follow us on all our social channels to stay in the loop on the latest news from Bloom Your Biz!
