What Is Pinterest Used For
Pinterest is not only for moms and brides! Pinterest is a visual search engine that attracts people looking to be inspired.
Searchers are also looking to buy! If you have a product to sell, you should absolutely be looking into using Pinterest in business.
With its large and growing user base of users all over the world, incorporating Pinterest in business for marketing, driving sales and website traffic should be a priority.
Should I Use Pinterest in business?
You might wonder if your business will perform well on Pinterest. There is a simple way to check what type of competition you’d be up against as well as if your industry is featured on the platform at all.
Search some of your business keywords in the Pinterest search. If you’re a home decor company that specializes in rustic decor, you could search ‘rustic living room’ or ‘rustic bedroom decor’.
As you can see, this search reveals high quality pins all about rustic home decor with plenty of additional related keyword suggestions.
As opposed to Google where a popular category might be difficult to break into and be featured, it’s still possible to appear right at the top of the feed in Pinterest with the proper keyword, board, and pinning strategy.
Another place to search would be in the All Pins menu. Click on ‘People’.
Look at the types of businesses that use Pinterest for their business (or simply for inspiration) and what type of following and reach they have on Pinterest.
Within the first line of the search, there are a number of businesses showcased that have a large number of followers. If you click on the business accounts, you’ll see how many monthly impressions they have. This can give you an indication of the type of reach your business could experience if using Pinterest for marketing.
What Type of Businesses Do Best on Pinterest?
Pinterest in business is perfect for bloggers and eCommerce businesses. If you search www.pinterest.com/ideas/ you will find 16 categories that are most popular on Pinterest. These include categories such as art, beauty, gardening, food, and fashion.
If your business is not included in one of these categories, your target audience might be smaller, but with the targeted marketing you’re capable of on Pinterest, you could still perform well.
What’s special about Pinterest for marketing is that it’s still possible to reach a large number of people for free. Organic reach on Pinterest is very much alive unlike on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
If you’re keen to capitalize on this, but don’t have the time to invest in Pinterest for marketing, let’s chat!
How to UsePinterest in business
Pinterest marketing strategies often need to be tailored for a specific business. There are some basic steps though that are the same! These tips will help you maximise the value of using Pinterest in business.
Set Up Your Pinterest Business Account
Setting up a Pinterest Business Account is vital in order for you to achieve the utmost benefit from using Pinterest for marketing.
By setting up your business account, claiming your website and enabling rich pins, you maximise your SEO and keyword effort and streamline your user experience.
Stick to Pinterest Best Practices
There are very helpful guidelines for using Pinterest in business written by Pinterest itself. These include things like pin size, incorporating your logo, optimizing your pin copy and more. Find all the Pinterest best practices here.
Create Clickworthy Pins
Creating pins for your audience is your way of being discovered. Your pins can include only images, images and text, only text or text and images.
Remember that pins should be vertical (not horizontal) and they can be static or video.
Pinterest encourages users to click through to a pin’s website, making it different from platforms built around encouraging users to stay on the platform (like Instagram). Things are changing somewhat on Pinterest with Idea Pins that have no clickable link, and the promotion of Pinterest shopping.
Your pins need to be attractive and scroll-stopping.
Keep in mind that if you’re wanting to promote your products, it’s important to have multiple high quality, vertical images of each product from different angles or in different settings.
You’d preferably take lifestyle shots of your products to further entice shoppers. For example, an image of a necklace on a model or against a beautiful backdrop will perform better than the same necklace on a white background.
Which of these two pins would you rather click on? And why?
If you are using images of your products for pins, your business branding, pin images and product images are extremely important in attracting clients.
If you are marketing content, the images, fonts, and colors you use in your pins will promote your business and help to establish brand identity. Use high quality stock images (some of my favourite sites are listed in this article) or take your own brand photos.
Pinterest prioritizes fresh content, so the more content/products you can get onto Pinterest, the more successful your use ofPinterest in business will be.
Pin Regularly
Pinterest favors daily pinning of up to 20-25 pins per day. If you’re using a scheduling tool like Tailwind (an official partner of Pinterest), they will help you stick to Pinterest guidelines by alerting you if you violate certain best practices.
Fill up your pinning schedule with a mix of your pins and high quality pins relevant to your industry. This ensures a constant flow of pins with relevant keywords that will help strengthen your account.
Pinterest For SEO
Using Pinterest in business is a fantastic marketing avenue to pursue. Any business owner will have come across or be familiar with the importance of working on their SEO.
Search engine optimization (see a complete guide on SEO here) is the art of optimizing your website, products, blogs, services in order for you to rank higher in Google and other search engines.
A properly optimized Pinterest account will boost your SEO as it provides further content for Google to search and categorize.
Keyword research is the foundation of good Pinterest SEO. Research keywords relevant to your business by using the Pinterest search bar. You can also use the “More Like This” suggestion box that pops up in the feed.
You can also find more keywords (along with search volumes) in the Pinterest ad manager.
Incorporate your keywords into your username, your profile description, your pin descriptions and all of your boards.
Pinterest SEO is a big topic, and one that you may need an expert to look into for you. Get in touch with us if you’d like help with this.
Selling On Pinterest with Pinterest Shops
Although that’s not the technical term, you can set up a Pinterest shop for your products. This involves Buyable Pins (rebranded not to be called Product pins).
Product pins contain information about the products such as size, price and reviews. They allow a user to easily click through to the product page on your website and purchase the item.
To apply for a Pinterest shop, you will need a Pinterest business account and to fulfil certain requirements. If accepted as part of the Verified Merchant Program, a ‘Shop’ tab will appear on your Pinterest profile which will contain all your products for purchase.
Pinterest has also launched Shop the Look ads and a general Shop tab. The Visual Search tool powered by Lens allows users to photograph an item of interest and search for similar items within Pinterest.
Pinterest is making interesting developments in the field of E-commerce, further making it an important platform for business marketing.
Pinterest for Marketing
Using Pinterest in business is clearly a valuable marketing tool to incorporate as part of a business marketing strategy.
As a summary, here are the important steps to incorporate within your Pinterest Marketing strategy:
- Set up a Pinterest business account
- Claim your website
- Enable rich pins
- Create branded and relevant industry boards
- Create clickworthy pins
- Create a pinning strategy of up to 20 pins per day
- Join group boards
- Do Keyword research
- Optimize your profile, pin descriptions and boards with these keywords
- Create regular fresh content to pin onto Pinterest
- Stick to Pinterest best practices
- Add a Pin button to your website
- Analyse your efforts and make changes to your pinning strategy
How A Pinterest Business Account Helps
For those wanting to use Pinterest in business, the Pinterest Business account has some helpful additional features for businesses. These include access to Pinterest analytics, Pinterest insights on individual pins and idea pins, and a verified website. Your business account will also get a beautiful header full of your pins.
Rich Pins
A Pinterest business account gives you access to Rich Pins, which pull information directly from your website, giving the pin far more information than a standard pin. These pins are more likely to attract users to your website.
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest analytics contains helpful information on your pins and boards. You can view pin impressions and views, outbound clicks, top-performing pins and top boards.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest business accounts also have access to Pinterest Ads Manager. You can run Promoted Pin campaigns and Pinterest ads at a very reasonable rate.
Conclusion
With all these features, potential for growth and reach, Pinterest is a dream platform to use for business.
If you’re interested in using Pinterest for business or wondering if you and Pinterest would be a good fit, get in touch! We love to see businesses grow and succeed on this powerful platform.
We can help!
