Competition for new online customers is more fierce than ever before. Global companies with seemingly unlimited budgets are raising PPC prices and other advertising channels to astronomical prices making it very difficult for smaller brands to compete. So can the playing field be leveled at all? The short answer is...sort of. The best opportunity is in organic social growth.
Most businesses these days have the so-called "required" social channels such as Facebook and Instagram. For B2B, you have LinkedIn and Twitter respectively. TikTok is quickly becoming the go-to channel for Gen Z acquisition. But what about Pinterest? How does it fit in? The answer is VERY WELL.
Why Should You Be On Pinterest?
If you are already marketing on Pinterest at full speed, this article should still be able to provide a couple of new insights that might help you grow even more. But many have not considered Pinterest as a priority platform for their business. For those of you who fall into the second category - keep reading to help reach your business goals.
Pinterest has over 433 million users, up from 320 million just 2 years ago; the vast majority are women, from the US, with a household income of over $50k. We should now have your full attention as you will not find many other platforms with such a high concentration of “buyer-intent” audience.
There is another differentiator that puts Pinterest above other platforms. Quick results. Pinterest is a visual search engine, and it works a bit differently than Google. Sure, there are similarities like keywords, description importance, and CTR titles. Still, Pinterest will deliver results much quicker, and you can also get customer feedback right on the platform in the commentary section.
The prerogative of Pinterest is “good pins on good boards.” If you nail this combination, you will receive results that will seem immediate compared to other search engines.
Here are 8 tips that will help you create a strong organic traffic stream that may outperform all the others.
1. Set Up Your Pinterest Profile
Gotta have a fully optimized and prepared Pinterest page, right? So let's start here if you don't have one.
Claim your domain. Go to Pinterest settings; in the left menu, click Claim, and verify your domain. Now your website is associated with Pinterest.
Validate Rich Pins. You want Pinterest to accept your images with metadata and other settings, so make sure that you validate the rich pins.
Use Keywords. For your page name and profile, make sure to use relevant keywords. Pinterest Trends can help you estimate the search volume.
2. Make Your Website Pinterest Ready
Depending on your website host, it will not require any significant rebuilds or coding knowledge so don't be nervous. It's usually just adding a no-code plugin to make it easier to share and repin your content.
Share buttons. If you are using WordPress, install an appropriate plugin and activate the share buttons on the side of your page and at the bottom. Make it easy for your visitors to share the content on Pinterest and other platforms.
Set Pin On Hover. This will allow your users to pin the picture when they hover over it. Re-sharing and repinning images and pins from your post count towards your engagement and results in more clicks.
Keep your images “Pinnable”. Make sure that the images on your post are ready to be pinned. That means that they have the correct size and descriptions that will be moved to Pinterest when a visitor decides to pin them.
Don’t Let Them Leave! Never hide the close button, but make sure that visitors have a chance to take action that will make them come back. If you are running a membership site, let them have a peek inside, possibly some sort of form (or another lead magnet).
3. Prepare Your Pins
You can pin pretty much anything on Pinterest, but the 1000 x 1500 pixel count with an aspect ratio of 2:3 is where you should aim. The vast majority of visitors browse Pinterest on their mobile phones, so all the images should consider that audience.
If you have no experience with design and have never used Photoshop or similar professional tools, no worries - services like Canva or Visme have you covered with a free tier.
Canva specializes in Pinterest designs and has many templates that will help you get started. It also provides you with a wide variety of settings and options to create the brand style you are looking for.
As for the images, you can use the ones that Canva provides you in its library or, of course, work with your own. If you have a product or something that you would like to showcase to your audience, you can use that. But if you are looking for stock images that do not look like stock images - sites like Unsplash.com, Pexels, and Pixabay will provide you with free images for commercial use.
4. Pick Your Niche Carefully
Due to audience composition, Pinterest will always be more of a B2C platform. Some topics just work better than others. DIY, fashion, travel, self-improvement, personal finance, cooking, and other fields related to “personal use” will do better and are dressed for success.
But don't be discouraged if your product or service does not match the most popular niches on Pinterest. You can find an appropriate angle for nearly any niche - it's just a matter of proper positioning.
For example, if you are selling saucepans, take the cooking or recipe angle. Selling life insurance? Create posts about important life events. And the list goes on.
One sure way to estimate what you can expect from Pinterest is to look for companies selling the same products as you are. Look for them on Pinterest and see how many monthly views they have. The click-through rate may differ a lot, but the number of views will give you a slight idea of what is possible in that niche.
5. Know Your Boards
Each pin has to be pinned somewhere. On Pinterest, you pin them to boards. There are two board types - personal boards and group boards.
Personal boards
Make sure to create around ten boards with keywords that are both relevant to your business and have sufficient search volume.
When starting out, there is no need to go into long-tail keywords just yet. There's plenty of time to learn more advanced stages of Pinterest growth.
Decide on your board names and create a fitting description that will have relevant keywords in it. Create a board cover, or just choose a pin that will take its place. After that, your board is complete.
To make your Pinterest profile look alive, start pinning your pins to the boards. If you do not have enough of yours - no problem, repin a couple from others. Aim for up to 10 pins for each of the boards before you may consider your profile filled.
Group Boards
These are the boards that have multiple pinners in them. They were very popular a couple of years ago as they helped you grow your audience very quickly.
Now they are frequently a topic of discussion. Pinterest is saying that it decreased their importance, as they felt that they are misused. Pinners say that they still work.
Make sure to join as many group boards as possible. You can search through the boards and send a message to admin (which is always the first account to show up when you check all the participants). Or, to make your life a bit easier go to Pingroupie and search for the relevant boards there.
6. Automate Your Pins
For your business to grow, you will have to stay very active and consistent with your pinning.
Right from the start, you can pin your picture to around ten boards. This is great as it increases your chance of being seen by your potential customers. You can pin the same pin to multiple boards, but that can be considered spam by Pinterest, so keep it to no more than ten.
So if you create five pins, you can repin them up to 50 times. But if you pin them all at once, there is a high probability that Pinterest will mark your account as spam, so DON'T DO THAT. For everything to run smoothly, you have to spread your pins out over time and have sufficient “resting” time between reposting them again.
Some stand by manual pinning. With social media content templates, it can be done, but imagine the time you need to get those numbers. You could manually pin maybe 10 times a day, but 20 or 30 and more? Very hard to do. Keep in mind that you must pin in times that are the best to capture your audience’s attention. Automation is inevitable.
In our case, you will have to consider tools like Tailwind. When starting, you may go with ten pins a day, then slowly increase it over time. Top users pin anywhere between 25-50 times a day. The upper range is discouraged by Tailwind, giving you various suggestions on how to improve your pinning strategy.
7. Leverage the Holidays and Seasonalities
Seasons matter a lot on Pinterest. Whether it be a holiday or just autumn. Seasons are super important to pinners worldwide. Whenever there is an upcoming holiday (or a beginning of a particular season), rest assured users will be changing their searches by adding that holiday adjective, and holiday/seasonal-related searches will skyrocket.
Make sure that your business takes full advantage of it. Think of every possible angle on how you can tie your product or service to a holiday/season.
Start pinning relevant pins at least a month to six weeks in advance. It will take time before all your pins are published, and may take additional time for the algorithm to start promoting them, so have a healthy content reserve before the actual holiday kicks in.
8. Paid Traffic
Organic traffic is terrific and scalable, but you may not always have as much time as that may take to see real growth. So we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Pinterest Ads. Here's a handy guide from Hootsuite.
Clicks can still come cheap on Pinterest. PPCs as low as .10 per click can be seen for campaigns that have proper positioning. Keep in mind these minimal prices are mainly achieved through popular niches we discussed earlier.
Another reason to consider Pinterest paid traffic is the level with which you can hyper-target. While you will find all the usual categories, age, interest, and device criteria, Pinterest allows you to target your audience based on location. Sometimes as precisely as choosing the PO box of the user. This is a great tool if your business is local and looking to attract only customers in your area.
Wrap Up
Pinterest is a fantastic platform to promote your business due to its algorithm. Since it's a visual search engine, the success of your pins will be measured by the engagement on the pin itself and the board that it is pinned to.
Compared to other organic traffic options, Pinterest can offer quick results while still providing sufficient volume.
But similar to other social platforms, it will still require dedicated consistency. With anything practice makes perfect, so give it a shot. Get your pins and boards set up and watch the traffic flood in!
