Why You Should be Using Pinterest for Business

If you’re not using Pinterest for business you could be missing out on a valuable marketing opportunity.

But isn’t Pinterest just for interior design and wardrobe inspiration? My target audience isn’t on there!

We can see why you might think so, but we invite you to dig a little deeper. Pinterest isn’t often the first platform marketers and business owners think to adopt in their marketing strategy. In fact, only 28% of marketers are already using Pinterest, which gives you the edge if you use it well. As for your target clients? Pinterest has 320 million monthly users, so there are bound to be leads you are missing if you’re not harnessing the opportunity to use Pinterest for marketing. Establishing a Pinterest marketing strategy can unlock huge brand awareness potential as well as an unexpected source of revenue.

We’d love to share our Pinterest for business tips with you! Pinterest is more than a mood-board of pretty pictures; it’s also a search engine. That’s right, we said it, and so did Neil Patel. Just like other search engines, Pinterest has been built with an algorithm that allows users to search for a specific topic and see relevant content. The difference is that users can also follow different accounts and post themselves, just like on social media platforms. It’s this combination of search engine and social media that makes Pinterest such a vital platform for your business. Let’s dive into this in more detail.

71% of Pinterest users are female, and 85% of them use it to plan life moments, while 58% say it helps them make shopping and purchasing decisions. This makes it an excellent platform for positioning your brand as an option in the awareness and consideration stage of the marketing funnel and directing users to your website to make a purchase or other conversion.

Pinterest doesn’t get hung up on the vanity metrics in the same way Instagram and Twitter do Although followers are still important and beneficial in terms of followers getting updates of the posts you are pinning, they are not the be-all and end-all. The Pinterest feed not only displays content that users follow but also content that Pinterest knows a user is interested in. And due to the search engine function, this means that your content can still have a lot of reach without having many followers.

Great, so how do I make sure that my brand’s content is in front of the right people?

Although Pinterest is an extremely visual platform, uploading images and re-pinning photos with no aim or direction are not going to work for your brand. Before uploading your own pins, make sure the content is:

• Branded
• Intentional
• Relevant and relatable
• Shareable
• Optimised

Because so many of Pinterest’s users are there with the intention to find new products and tips, your content must rise to the occasion by reaching the right people and offering an irresistible call-to-action (CTA).

Many digital marketers will be able to put their SEO knowledge into practice on Pinterest as it’s all about optimisation. To ensure that your profile, boards, and pins are found, the right keywords need to be incorporated into them. Users can then type in a phrase or topic, and Pinterest will pull up the content that they think is most relevant.

Here are three ways to implement solid optimisation when using Pinterest for business:

• Brand name and profile– many brand names don’t contain the keywords that people are searching for. It can, therefore, be good practice to tailor your Pinterest profile name to the topics incorporated into your page. For example, the name of your brand + a few keywords. For example, ‘Rug Traders (Interior Design Tips + Inspiration). This account is then more likely to pop up when someone searches for ‘Interior Design Tips’ on Pinterest.
• It’s extremely important to keep your Pinterest boards specific so that Pinterest can better match them to users’ search terms. For example, having a board named ‘Interior Design’ is too general. Instead, creating boards for specific rooms or styles is better. It’s good to have a few boards that are specific to your business, as well as boards that will be of interest to your target audience.
• When pinning, it’s important to add a description to expand on the post and explain a little bit about it, using relevant but natural keywords. All pins can have a URL attached too, which is great for driving traffic back to your website.

You may be wondering if Pinterest is right for you if you don’t sell a physical product. While it may not generate revenue directly through eCommerce, service businesses should take advantage of using the platform to gain brand awareness and position your authority and expertise in front of users as you would on Google.

Using Pinterest for business is a great way to share your website’s content. If your brand posts blog posts, guides, or other types of written articles, these can all be shared and promoted on Pinterest. A great way of doing this is by transforming the content of the blog or guide into an infographic or a simple and persuasive graphic. If this infographic is informative, designed well, and is relatable, this also makes it shareable. And as Pinterest allows you to insert a URL with each post, you can insert a link to the blog itself which people can then click onto if they would like to find out more.

There’s no rule that says you can’t have more than one pin per URL. Create a handful of graphics targeting different angles of a post in different but consistent designs to increase the chances of directing users to the same linked URL.

As well as being able to incorporate Pinterest into your content marketing strategy, it is also a great platform for showcasing and promoting the products and/or services you offer. This is easier for certain brands that have lifestyle photos featuring their products, as these are particularly popular on Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest converts more users into buyers than any other social media platform.

Original vs Shared Pins

As well as making sure you are uploading the right pins, Pinterest is also the platform to get share-happy on. You can build up your Pinterest boards by re-pinning relevant pins from other users. This is a way of building up content on your profile as well as engaging with other users. Any engagement is a way of increasing brand awareness! But, bear in mind that the Pinterest algorithm favours fresh content so while re-pinning other people’s content can increase your visibility, uploading your own pins is what really drives your reach on Pinterest.

Consistency is Key

If you pin consistently, you’ll see your stats and figures soar. An easy way to take control of this process is to bulk create graphics with your favourite design software and schedule them using a tool like Tailwind. Tailwind chooses optimal times to share your pins automatically so that you don’t have to manually pin every day. Although, we would recommend spending some time each day re-pinning other people’s content (if it’s relevant) to boost your visibility.

A Pinterest business account will help you to assess your brand’s views, reach, and engagement on a daily and monthly basis, as well as seeing which pins are getting the most engagement. This can help you to develop your Pinterest strategy accordingly.

And there you have it, a whistle-stop tour of Pinterest! If you would like some help developing a Pinterest that is tailored to your target audience, get in touch, and see how we can help.