If you think Facebook and Twitter are eating up the social media marketing space, then think again! Businesses have found a new best friend – Pinterest! Pinterest is unique with its special notes and best practices that help make it an exciting place to test, iterate and add value to your business.
Pins on Pinterest have a more significant reach than an average tweet. According to statistics, Pinterest pins are 100 times more spreadable than a tweet. And considering the life of a pin on the internet, it can last 1,600x longer than a Facebook post.
Pinterest is slowly evolving to be a hot place for business marketing. And it’s pretty evident as a significant amount of Fortune 500 companies have found their way into Pinterest. With around 250 million user base, Pinterest is the next big thing in digital marketing, and here’s what you need to do:
1) Pin often:
The best way to increase engagement in your Pinterest space will be to increase your pinning activity. Move on from pinning once or twice a day, pinning around ten times a day can garner a significant boost in significant engagement rate. Also, do not post the pins all at once, your audience wouldn’t want a bombardment of pins. Instead, space them out to make things infinitely more comfortable. Spacing pins out will help your audience out far better and avoid any bursts of content.
2) Use Rich Pins:
Rich pins are a great way to make your pins more dynamic. Rich pins are a free Pinterest feature that intends to add greater detail and information on the pins themselves. They are designed to make the pinning experience better for pinners. Rich pins are of 5 types:
(i) Article pins: Has the headline, author, story description and link
(ii) Product pins: Real-time pricing, availability and where to buy
(iii) Recipe pins: Ingredients, cooking times and serving info
(iv) Movie pins: Ratings, cast members and reviews
(v) Place pins: Address, phone number and map
Only business accounts can use rich pins, and you need to set them up separately and link them to your site. Rich pins help boosts sales by providing more information to the user than a standard pin. To enable rich pins, you’ll need to add metadata to your site, validate your site and then apply for rich pins.
3) Appropriate image sizes:
You can hit gold by creating Pinterest-perfect images. For those, you’ll need tools like Photoshop or Canva. With Canva, you get premade templates that are 735 pixels wide and 1,102 pixels tall. All pins on Pinterest have the same width, with an unlimited length, but the preferred size has always been 735×1102 pixels. By keeping the image width same, you can capitalize on the image length!
4) Make your pin stand out:
Your pins should be full of vibrant, high-quality, colourful images. Help your pins stand out by featuring multiple products. Multiple products in your pins can help garner more engagement as customers can see the amazing things your business has to offer, all in one go. Also, don’t miss out on text overlays. Images reign supreme on Pinterest, hence make sure your visuals have hard-hitting text. Text overlays can help catch the attention of users scrolling through feeds!
5) Keyword-rich Descriptions:
While the image remains the most vital part of the pin, the description still holds its weight. Descriptions help give out more information about the pin and help convince the users to click on your link. You can make these descriptions rich with keywords. While most of these descriptions are around 75-100 characters long – which can be seen on the grid view of Pinterest, you include up to 500 characters which can be viewed when people click to see the pin close-up. A detailed description is a lot more helpful for the audience and has more opportunities to show up in the search results. Also, keep your links as short as possible. Use tools to shorten those links and keep them tidy. Use Calls to Action in your description. Adding a call to action encourages users to take the desired action. You can also share price tags in your description, which can quickly grab the attention of a user scrolling by. If your business involves selling a product, always add a price tag in your description. Seeing the price of your product, your customers get one step closer to purchasing the product!
6) Product uses:
Sometimes, businesses focus so much on marketing their product that they miss out on mentioning the product’s uses. The audience of Pinterest is much more interest in the use cases of a product and how the product can fit into their lifestyle. So, when you design your pin, make sure you’re mentioning relevant use cases of your product with which your audience can relate to. Demonstrating different use cases is the best way to grab your audiences’ attention. You can also design infographics and instructographics for your business. The audience of Pinterest loves it when a lot of detail is available to them in a short space. Hence, you’ll see many companies flocking towards Pinterest with their infographics!
There are several tips and techniques involved in getting better results from marketing on Pinterest. In the end, it depends on your business, on how to proceed with your Pinterest marketing. From optimizing your pin’s images to stand out in the searches to writing a keyword-rich description, these tips will certainly come in handy in boosting your success on Pinterest. Build up a robust strategy that serves all of the pointers mentioned above. With this strategy, you will be able to garner more engagement, and your audience will be able to relate far more quickly!
Keep a keen eye on your analytics. Learn from it and keep creating popular images with bright, crips high-quality pictures. Using the analytics, learn about your audience and at what times they are active, and post accordingly. Respond to your follower comments and create engagement. Keep tracking your analytics to develop a better strategy to attract more of your target audience. Using all these, you will be able to build a solid Pinterest Marketing strategy in no time!
Abhijit Mandavkar is a Digital Marketing Manager. He plans and coordinates marketing activities of ValueHits, a full-service Digital Marketing Agency based in Mumbai, India. With his experience and expert knowledge in the field, he identifies potential customers and develops marketing campaigns. Also, he is efficient enough to meet the client’s requirements and well-organized in handling multiple tasks.