Pinterest Social Media Marketing: What is it and How to Get Started

Why bother with a Pinterest marketing strategy?

As a widely overlooked platform, it’s natural that you’ll be wondering why you should bother looking into Pinterest as a social media marketing tool. Well, the stats around the marketing power it has might just convince you otherwise.

• Pinterest’s advertising reach is 226 million 
• Shopping engagement is growing quarter on quarter 
• Three quarters of users are continuously shopping 

These stats from Hootsuite show that Pinterest is a profitable marketing platform, and it’s only getting bigger, so depending on the type of product or service you sell, it could be lucrative for you. Women between the ages of 25 and 34 make up the bulk of the platform’s user demographic (though men are the fastest growing demographic on the site). If you have a product that appeals to women, specifically those in the 25-34 age bracket, Pinterest could provide a new revenue stream for you.

How does Pinterest marketing work for businesses?

The premise of Pinterest is that it can be used as a sort of online scrapbook or mood board of ideas. Users ‘pin’ things they like to a board, and each board has a theme. For example, one user might be interested in cooking vegetarian meals. They can search Pinterest for vegetarian recipes that other people have uploaded, and when they find one they like, they can pin it to their very own vegetarian recipe board. They can also upload their own recipes and keep them on the board, too.

It’s a niche concept that is miles away from the other large social media sites, but it’s one that is hugely popular within the cooking, home decor, parenting, crafts, and fashion communities online. But, how does this relate to businesses?

If you have a collection of similar-themed products to sell, a Pinterest board is a great way to showcase what you’ve got. As an example, you might have a wedding dress business. Lots of brides-to-be will look at Pinterest to find inspiration for wedding themes and ideas that they like. You might decide to make boards for different types of dresses, such as long sleeve, strapless, mermaid, lace, bohemian, and princess. Users can look through your boards and find the styles they like. If they’re in your area, they might even choose to pay you a visit.

Pinterest is a highly visual platform that offers businesses a unique chance to share knowledge with users, making it a particularly useful platform for content-driven businesses.

How to do Pinterest marketing

You can achieve anything on Pinterest that you can achieve on other social media sites, so in many ways, getting started with this form of marketing is relatively easy. 

Outline your goals 

The first step in any marketing strategy is to define your goals. Perhaps you want to increase your brand awareness through gaining more followers, or maybe you want to push more traffic to your website through social forums. Whatever it is, make sure your goal is SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound.

Know your audience

The next step is to pinpoint your target audience. We’ve briefly covered the types of people who use Pinterest, but the platform is seeing growth across all demographics, so there’s a high chance the people you want to reach are on the platform already.

Once you drill down your audience, look at what they’re interacting with, pinning, and re-sharing. Also look at competitors and see what they’re doing and what their engagement rate is – you can take heed from them on what sort of content resonates with your shared audience.

Focus on visuals 

A core element of Pinterest marketing is producing excellent visuals. It’s a little like Instagram in that sense, but it provides an excellent opportunity to enhance your SEO while you’re at it. Ideally, you want high quality, high resolution images and videos that are in a 2:3 ratio.

Make sure your branding is clear so that your posts are always traceable to you, and don’t be afraid to mix images and videos.  The one thing to keep in mind is that you need to keep your boards consistent. Group your content by boards based on common themes and colours. For example, if you sell baby products, you could group boards by age group and milestones, such as a ‘newborn’ board, a ‘six-month-old’ board, or a ‘one-year-old’ board. You could also have a ‘bringing baby home’ board and a ‘teething’ board. 

Mix up your posts 

Pinterest offers a lot of room for creativity; you can make carousel posts, how-to tutorials, and static posts or videos to drive engagement. Mixing up how you present information is a good way to keep your audience interested in your brand without coming off as too salesy – even if that is your final KPI. 

Lots of users discover new brands via Pinterest – but unlike other platforms, it gives your creative team the opportunity to shine. 

Optimise pins 

As mentioned, Pinterest offers ample opportunity for SEO, so make sure you’re leveraging this. This means incorporating things like rich pins (new content from your website), adding keywords, using hashtags, using working links, and adding descriptive copy where possible. 

Consider ads

You can advertise on Pinterest just like you can on any other platform using things like age, location, and keywords for targeting – but you can also target a more specific audience. This is done through the likes of people who have engaged with your posts and pins or visited your website, or even people who subscribe to your newsletter.

You can make video ads or promoted pins, among other things depending on your direct needs and your audience. Look at what other competitors are doing and determine your actions based on that.

Final thoughts

Pinterest is, for a lot of businesses, a new platform that will take some getting used to. It will no doubt take a bit of time before you get to grips with what resonates with users, what works best for your profile, and what sort of metrics you need to be looking at – but it really is worth it. 

With such a high potential ad reach, there’s a lot to be gained from Pinterest. Whether you promote specific products and ranges or how-to videos that feature your product, you have a lot of creative freedom on this platform, and your strategy needs to reflect that.

As a leading SEO agency, we offer a myriad of SEO services to help you across all your channels, including Pinterest. If you’d like advice on getting started with ads, or if you need help with your overall social media marketing strategy, speak to our social media Brains today.