Pinterest now has well over 100 million users but the amount of users isn’t the most attractive part of Pinterest for brands, it’s who these users are. They on average make $100,000 and have a greater propensity to shop online. As an online retailer this is a platform you MUST be on to increase sales.
Especially if you are in any of the industries listed below you should consider Pinterest marketing to all the users looking at ‘pins’ related to your field.
If you’re a company and are not sure how to go about marketing on Pinterest there are now a number of marketing firms offering Pinterest marketing and some even built to exclusively offer Pinterest marketing. If you’re not familiar with the platform, Pinterest is an image based platform where you can search just about anything and it will pull up ‘pins’ (often hundreds) that people have uploaded of that search item. Most pins are images, some lead you to other sites but basically it’s like a search on Google images except the content is all posted by those on Pinterest and you can then ‘pin’ that post to your own board, like a digital scrapbook. As a brand you want pins of your product to come up and now with Pinterest for Business the user can buy your product straight from there.
It may seem like a leap to start marketing on ANOTHER platform when your social media department is already doing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and maybe also YouTube, LinkedIn and the many other smaller platforms out there that may appeal to your audience, however, for the reasons above it is worth it. Pinterest is the most profitable website for social media marketing with respect to ROI.
Some examples of brands doing an awesome job on Pinterest are Birchbox, Target, Whole Foods and Nordstrom to name a few.
For example, Whole Foods Pinterest board features a hundreds of healthy recipes with droolworthy photos to match. A key factor to Pinterest that they are doing well is not just blatantly advertising their products but appealing to the interests of their customers by posting healthy recipes.
Tips For Pinterest Marketing
Buffer, which now allows you to schedule, manage and measure your pins, has released a number of articles in the last year with some great tips to start and optimize your Pinterest strategy and I will summarize some of the top tips here.
- Aim for 5-30 pins per day, Buffer found that 1-2 pins were day was not getting them very good engagement but upon increasing to 10 pins per day engagement went up 150%. Buffer allows you to schedule your pins so if you don’t have time to spend time on Pinterest every day you can go on, find a bunch of pins and schedule them for the week.
- Buffer also found that the best times to pin are Saturdays, afternoons and evenings, specifically between 8-11pm is the time they recommend. However, timing matters less on Pinterest as pins are highly searchable. Also keep in mind, these are the top subjects by day:
3. Pinterest is highly searchable compared to other platforms so posts have a much longer lifetime. Piqora discovered that 40% of clicks on a pin happen within the first day and 70% happen wihtin the first 2 days. The remaining 30% of clicks happen all the way up to 30 days and beyond.
4. With respect to your actual pins you need to make sure you have high quality images with descriptive captions so they are highly searchable and Pinnable. You must also make sure your pins link to a useful and relevant website. This isn’t the place for hashtags, promotions or sales tactics like (“Buy Now!”)
5. Don’t get caught up in trying to get followers. Pinterest’s Smart Feed places Pins on users homepages according to an algorithm which doesn’t take into account followers. They do base the placement of pins on the quality of pins, related pins to what a user pins and interests the user is following. This means people are more likely to discover your pins from a search on Pinterest than just strictly from pins in their feed.
This should be enough to convince you and get you started on Pinterest. With the extremely high growth Pinterest has had there is increasingly more and more data coming out and tips on how to improve your presence on Pinterest so get started today!