Is your business on Pinterest? If you have overlooked the opportunity to market your business on Pinterest, you are missing out significantly.
Spending time on Pinterest can be an enjoyable hobby for many people. And if your target market is composed of women, this can be a unique way to reach them.
While Pinterest isn’t exclusively for women, it’s a rich place to find new ideas, inspiration, or creative solutions. As users set up their feeds, they select from a variety of topics. Quotes, fitness, fashion, DIY, and recipes are just a few of the possibilities.
As a result, your business can attract the attention of new customers through this unique social media platform. Through its distinct visual format that focuses on images and ideas, Pinterest can appeal to customers who may not enjoy other forms of social media.
Many people think that the goals for Pinterest marketing should mirror those goals of broader social media marketing. While Pinterest is a platform with many of the same components as many social platforms, Pinterest is not a social media platform, it is a search engine. This fact is echoed by Pinterest’s founder Ben Silbermann when he sought out to develop an anti-social media platform. What he ended up creating was a hybrid platform that can do so much for businesses that leverage its potential.
So, if Pinterest is part of your marketing plan, what should your goals be? How can Pinterest be implemented into your attempt to reach new customers? Here are five simple steps.
Inspire Your Audience
Staying connected with your audience is a critical part of inspiring them. Companies that are out of touch with their customers are companies that don’t succeed.
So as you create your goals for marketing on Pinterest, consider: what are the broader trends in society? What are consumers as a whole feeling? What will your prospective customers need and want? Connect the dots between how your business can provide the needs and the experience, and meet your customers where they are right now.
An example of this is inflation. Many people are feeling the strain of this. Companies that respond to this by acknowledging it in their advertising may find customers are responsive to this empathetic style of advertising. An example of incorporating this on Pinterest might be creating a board for date nights on a budget or recipes on a budget, as many people will be searching for answers to these types of problems.
Another example of this is in trends. Self-care is a huge trend. On social media, you can inspire your audience by showing them step-by-step ways that your product can help them find the time for self-care. And, if you create a board full of self-care ideas, this can encourage the consumer to spend lots of time on your board, increasing the likelihood that he or she will purchase from your company.
Website Traffic
Pinterest can be a source for not only increasing awareness of your brand, but it can potentially convert leads into customers.
A major key to this goal is to be consistent with your Pinterest activity. Create a schedule for creating new pins. Don’t let your Pinterest boards become dead with no new activity. This can be an easy mistake to make, as Pinterest is a quieter kind of social media. People may not be “loud” and they may not comment. However, rest assured that your efforts here will pay off if you are consistent over time.
And, make sure that your pins aren’t just random, but make organized boards where it’s easy to go for inspiration. Make it a fun place for people to browse ideas and inspiration.
For example, if you’re a clothing business, you might make a board titled “Date Night Outfits” that will encourage inspiration around your product. In time, inspiration will convert into sales. If you’re in the food industry, you could create boards centered around each meal you serve. You may want to create new boards due to certain seasons, special events, or in line with specific trends.
Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash
Branding
What kind of pins can you create on Pinterest? The possibilities are limitless. Perhaps you’re a hotel creating images of beautiful beachside views. Or maybe you’re an event venue showing images of weddings and corporate events you’ve hosted. Regardless of what type of images you’re pinning, it’s important to consider if you should include your business logo in these images. This calls for careful consideration depending on your overall strategy.
Making sure that your links are functional is another crucial aspect of your Pinterest branding strategy. If someone browsing on Pinterest becomes more interested and wants to visit your site, it will become a problem when links are outdated. Branding should be a digital marketing goal for any business. In fact, it should also be an offline marketing goal.
Every business needs a good set of branding goals to pursue. For many businesses, using Pinterest can help them reach those goals.
Sales
Knowing your target market will help you identify what might sell well on Pinterest. Your business can get creative on how you want to present your product in ways that will fit into the most popular topics on Pinterest.
However, Pinterest can also do the work for you. The way this works is by taking advantage of a feature called Pinterest Shopping. This is especially helpful to your business when you implement the Pinterest Catalog feature. This is a feature where you can link your Pinterest account to your online store. Upon approval, Pinterest will then begin creating pins that will advertise your products for you.
The Pinterest Catalog is a feature that allows businesses to upload their entire product catalog onto Pinterest, turning their products into shoppable pins. This integration provides a seamless shopping experience. Your visitors can discover and purchase products directly from their Pinterest feed. For businesses, it’s an efficient way to expand their reach and connect with potential customers in a visually engaging environment.
This is a great way to automatically make sure that users always see the most current products. This setup allows users to explore items in a highly engaging, visual format, making it easier for them to find inspiration and products that match their interests and style. For businesses, Pinterest acts as a powerful marketing tool. By creating pins for their products, businesses can tap into Pinterest’s vast user base of individuals actively seeking ideas and products.
Lead Generation
There’s more than one way to generate leads on Pinterest. First, you can create your own boards full of great images. And, of course, the goal is to just make it enjoyable for people to spend time in this online place. Eventually, these efforts will tend to pay off, but for now, focus on the experience, not on making a sale.
And remember that while Pinterest isn’t Twitter – not by a longshot – you can still use hashtags here, wisely. If it makes sense, and only if it makes sense, pick one or two hashtags that go with the image, and you’ll find that visibility will increase. These hashtags are essential if you want to utilize Pinterest’s algorithms that help users find you. Just like keywords are important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), hashtags are important for Pinterest optimization.
Keep in mind that while Pinterest is a beautiful place to spend time, you can promote your pins on your website and other social media sites.
Conclusion
Marketing on Pinterest might not, at first, seem like one of your top goals as a business owner. However, this can be a highly rewarding place to market to customers online. With multiple payoffs awaiting in website traffic, branding, sales, and lead generation, marketing on Pinterest is a no-brainer for many business types.
Also read:
8 Important Content Marketing Goals
What Are Business Goals? Examples, Types, and Their Importance
