Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media platforms on the internet. With hundreds of millions of users, and considering it's completely free, you would be crazy not to take advantage of it for your marketing.
The name of the game when it comes to Pinterest marketing is pictures. Everything on the internet these days seems to be dominated by pictures and videos. If you can get some to go viral on social media, you can really build you following much faster.
15 Pinterest Marketing Tips:
1. Have a good profile picture. Some top marketers get their profile picture professionally done, which is great, but not always necessary. You can just have a clear picture of yourself looking fairly nice and professional (usually smiling helps too).
You've probably heard a million times that first impressions are very important and this is no different. Make your Pinterest profile picture attract people, not repel them. Observe the other successful people in the same industry as you and look for patterns in how they present themselves in pictures. They know what they're doing.
2. It wouldn't do you much good to get a lot of traffic on Pinterest and not have a link now would it? Have your verified website displayed on your profile. I would recommend you make the link a content website like a blog, so that people don't think you're just trying to get their email or sell them something.
Make sure you verify it so that your Pinterest followers can actually go and click on the site while on Pinterest. You can verify your Pinterest website by following this tutorial.
3. Spread the social love to other platforms. The goal of social media is to build a massive following of people to help brand yourself and get more sales. You'll want to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Pinterest account, so your followers can all spread your brand through 3 of the top platforms on the internet.
For a step by step tutorial on how to connect you Facebook and Twitter accounts to your Pinterest account, read here.
4. Who the heck are you anyway? When you're using Pinterest (especially for businesss purposes), make sure you have a short and sweet profile bio that describes yourself. What do you want people to see you as or know about you. You may even want to add some humor to it to make a good first impression on people. Think about it, who doesn't love to laugh?
If you do make your bio humorous, also include your actual occupation or what you bring to the table to help people in your business. You don't want people to misunderstand what you're actually all about and why they should want to learn more about your business.
5. Be as specific as possible with your boards. Lowe's as over 3.6 million Pinterest followers for a very good reason. It's because their boards are so very specific. When you have very specific boards, it helps people find the pins easier and be able to find more specific pins they are looking for while the rest of the users are sticking to more broad categories.
Keep your boards laser targeted on one topic each and you will have groups of people that will love that and want to follow each board. For many people, your specific boards will be exactly what they were looking for. For more on keeping your boards fresh and relevant, read more here.
6. When in doubt, model after what works. Want to get off to a fast start in your Pinterest marketing or revive an account that gets little activity? Go find what the top Pinterest authorities are doing and find a way to implement a similar approach for yourself.
They may not be related to your industry, but you can still use the overall concepts and tweak them a little to get yourself similar results. Here are some top Pinterest authorities: Martha Stewart, Real Simple, Sephora, Whole Foods, Self Magazine, Today Show, Etsy, and Ellen DeGeneres.
7. Consistency is the key to achieving any goal. No matter what you want to accomplish, especially when it comes to developing a large social media following on a site like Pinterest, you need to consistently be active. Make it a goal to pin some new pictures on a daily basis.
While posting personal stuff, humor, etc. is fine and good for branding, you need to stress consistently posting pictures or even videos that are related to your business. After all, you're using Pinterest to help with branding, traffic, and sales, so pin things that will attract the target market you're looking to attract.
8. Use keywords in your pin description. Just like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Youtube, etc., Pinterest has an algorithm in place to help push certain pins to the top of results. This is where the real traffic is and if you can get there, your following will skyrocket. So how do you actually get it in the top results for your target keywords?
You can start by putting the exact keyword phrase in the description of the picture. It helps Pinterest know what the post is about and will be one of the steps to getting to rank very high in results.
9. Obviously, the more repins and likes your pin gets, the better. Just like anything else on the internet these days, likes and shares on social media really boost rankings. As you build your following and as you learn to rank pins as well as post pictures that people love, you will get a lot more likes and repins.
As long as you have some kind of indication that shows Pinterest what your pin is actually about, the likes and repins alone could boost you to the top of the rankings for a keyword or two.
10. Something I recently found out about Pinterest rankings is the URL importance. No, I'm not talking about the URL that you put in the description of your photo or video; I'm talking about the location URL of where you pinned the photo from. If you have the right matching keywords in your pin location URL as in the description, you've just increased your chance of getting in the top search results.
11. Remember how I said specific board names are good for Pinterest marketing? The impact of your board name may also play a big part in search results, and not just in encouraging people to follow it. Some pictures that come up in the top results for certain keywords don't even have a description.
But, how could Pinterest know to rank a picture in the top results for certain keywords when there is no indication in the description of what the photo is about? Well after doing some digging, it was found that the board that the picture was originally pinned on has the same keywords in the name that the pin was ranking in top results for.
12. Follow, and they will follow back. One of the fastest and easiest ways to build your following on Pinterest is by following others. To become successful at Pinterest marketing, you must find your target market and get them to see your posts right? So how do you do that exactly? All you have to do is find your competing brands, leaders, companies, etc. and follow their followers.
So, instead of just following anyone on Pinterest, you find your target market that is most likely best suited to buy your products or services by finding other people or companies in the same niche as you and getting some of their followers. All you have to do is go to the search bar and type in your competitor, look at their followers, and hit the follow button on a lot of them. A certain percentage of them will usually follow you back.
If you follow at least 50 a day, that is a quick and easy way to grow your Pinterest audience consistently while you start posting your first pins.
13. Use pictures that are proven to work. If you're struggling to find pictures to put on Pinterest that actually get shares and likes, go find some that are getting a lot of activity already. Maybe on Facebook you'll notice a picture that someone shared of a quote and it's getting a lot of likes and shares. If it's something you think your target market would like, take the picture and pin it.
You'll see a lot of the same pictures on sites like Pinterest and Instagram because it would be impossible for everyone to always be taking the time to create original pictures all the time. Therefore, you can use any pictures you want on these sites, so why not use the popular ones here and there? Don't reinvent the wheel; do what works.
14. What sells is the lifestyle the products and services give your audience. The best way to take advantage of pictures on social media is by using pictures of what your business helps people create in their life. People don't buy stuff just to have it. They buy it because of what it will do for them in their life. If people join a network marketing company, it's because they want the lifestyle of an elite network marketer.
If people buy a smart phone, it's because they want to manage their lives easier and on the go, as well as entertain themselves. If they buy an information product, it's not because they want to just be able to say they have it, but because they want the results the information is supposed to teach them to get.
See how this works? Post pictures of people having fun and enjoying the benefits your business has gotten them.
15. Make sure your description is optimized completely. Pinterest marketing is pretty simple. You have a good picture that resonates with your target market and you have a description that is optimized to get eyeballs on that picture. I mentioned earlier in this post that you need to have the keywords in the picture description.
You also may want to make use of hashtags and a link to where you want viewers to go. With hashtags, like on Twitter, you can help people find your pins much easier for when people search for pictures in certain categories.
When doing this, obviously you want to make sure the hashtags are related to the picture and are also popular enough to give your pin a chance to get seen. I would say at least 3-5 hashtags would work for each photo you post. When it comes to links in the description, I would say put it to a website page or blog. I wouldn't do it straight to a capture page unless it is one that is full of content that might interest your audience.
People love to buy, but hate to be sold, so remember that when you link to anything from social media posts. Content that is full of value tends to earn better prospects than just general lead capture pages.
Conclusion
Pinterest is really on the rise and is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. It's actually going along with the future of media by leveraging pictures and now even videos which are starting to take over the internet on every social media site, not just Pinterest and Instagram.
One thing is for sure, even if you've had zero success with Pinterest marketing in the past, if you apply these 15 strategies, I guarantee you'll start seeing results very quickly. If you stay consistent, you will become a Pinterest marketing mogul.