With over 70 million users and still going strong, your brand’s presence on Pinterest can be your Holy Grail to converting images into sales. Whether B2B or B2C, your business can really benefit from strategically marketing its products, services and brand image on Pinterest. Continue to read to find out how:
1. Convert Your Personal Pinterest Page into a Brand Page
Your pinning journey to commercial success really begins with establishing a business account. Pinterest exclusively offers some really useful business-friendly features like analytics and Rich Pins to its business account holders, which can be instrumental in making your social media marketing successful. Conversion takes only a few clicks through the ‘Businesses’ option in the main menu and some business-related information for account verification.
2. Optimize your Pinterest activities for SEO
Take this one as your secret weapon: In order to increase your brand pages visibility, generate traffic, and enhance your web presence, your pinned content and SEO need to go hand in hand. Optimize your business’s description in the ‘About’ section, add backlinks to your images, use descriptive titles and keywords, differentiate your boards, and get used to hashtags!
3. Experimenting is a smart strategy
Although the boards and pins on your brand page should reflect your business idea and industry, experiment with an assortment of popular topics to decipher which ones could translate into sales. Whether you are an interior decorator, an event planner, or a technology enthusiast; start thinking out of the box to make your posts ‘pinteresting’. Experiment with famous quotes, funny posts, DIY hacks, or even Disney-inspired pins to determine what resonates within your target audience and tailor your marketing strategies and product designs accordingly.
4. Invite pertinent pinners to form a Group Board
You can always find ways to collaborate with potential clients and related businesses on Pinterest, and creating a group board is certainly one of the easiest approaches.
Simply invite users, who you think will make good contributors, to pin to your boards. As the creator, you will be able to control the Board’s title, description and content, while enjoying increased visibility and Pinterest following without putting in a lot of effort.
5. Make your posts more ‘pinnable’ by using concise verbiage and vivid images
Let’s face it, we all love pictures, and simple language! Your pavlova recipe post is more likely to be pinned when explained in a beginner’s tone and topped with a scintillating picture of the end-product. In the same way, if you operate in the tourism industry, a breathtaking picture of the Eiffel Tower or Thai beaches will definitely be an effective player on your team to generate re-pins and direct referral traffic to your full website. Just remember to add an on-hover ‘Follow us on Pinterest’ or ‘Pin It’ button to the image to make it pinnable.
6. Make your brand page mobile-savvy
Pinterest reports around 70% of its visits generate through mobile devices. Once you choose Pinterest as your social media marketer, make sure to optimize your mobile site for increased traffic by minimizing its loading time and refurbishing its content.
7. Start Following Other Businesses on Pinterest
Be it an arch rival or a trusted content provider; connect with other businesses to keep yourself updated with their latest offerings, strategic positioning and Pinterest popularity. Who knows; your competitor may be offering a first glance of their newest product on their Pinterest brand page. If you follow any commercial blogs, find out if they have a Pinterest account by either searching for their brand name on Pinterest or running a Google search.
8. Keep pace with the seasonal trends to make your pins more engaging to the audience
Pinterest’s business page features Buzzfeed’s success story on how keeping pace with seasonal trends has really made it a celebrity on Pinterest:
“BuzzFeed is a news and entertainment website that features some of the most shareable, social content on the web. They use Pinterest to find trending topics, see what’s resonating with people and get ideas for their stories. Since joining Pinterest, they have seen exponential increase in Pinterest referral growth and traffic.”
Customize your pins to address the latest trends of 2015. Grab some attention by posting tantalizing recipes for the spring, DIY beauty and baking hacks, mouth-watering images of dishes from your restaurant’s revised menu for 2015, or what’s new in celebrity fashion.
9. Explore the power of Rich Pins
As an e-commerce business, you should be well-acquainted with customers’ tendencies to gather maximum product information before buying them. Pinterest acknowledges this dynamic of the corporate world, and thus offers a special feature called Rich Pins to its business account holders. Rich Pins enable you to add extra information to your pin to make it more relevant to your potential customers.
Pinterest currently offers five types of rich pins to choose from: Article pins, product pins, recipe pins, movie pins and place pins. Learn more about rich pins here. {Link to the rich pin article}
10. Build Relationships with Influencers
Influencers are Pinterest celebrities who stand out in their Pinterest marketing strategies within their industry. Relationships with ‘Pinfluencers’ can really benefit your brand image; and expose you to a completely new range of followers.
Locate powerful influencers who are already resonating within your target audience, start following them and repin their content. You can build a cordial business relationship by liking their pins, posting considerate comments and leaving them a private message through the Pinterest Messaging System appreciating their pinning activities. Collaborating with Influencers can really grab the attention that your brand may not be able to attain otherwise.
The power of Pinterest has experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years where this visual social media powerhouse has been accredited with driving the highest proportion of targeted traffic and sales, especially for vendors. Retailers beware! Pinterest has recently emerged a commercial winner out of its ‘recipes and bridal showers’ cocoon and demonstrated a whopping potential in augmenting the conversion rates for retail companies.
In recent years, Pinterest has been on a business-friendly spree and introduced several commercial features for its business account holders, the latest addition to which is ‘Pinterest Rich Pins’. Although Pinterest’s Rich Pins feature is only restricted to its business account holders, you can easily convert your personal Pinterest profile into a brand page by going to the Menu, clicking on the ‘Businesses’ option and then selecting ‘Convert Here’. The next window will ask you to fill out all the business-related information, accept the terms and require a verification of your account if you haven’t done it previously. That’s it; you can now start pinning your way to commercial success!
Once you get hold of a business account on Pinterest, you shouldn’t really have a reason to ignore Rich Pins. Read on to find out all about this amazing feature that can actually make a difference to your business.
Presenting Rich Pins!
You may know them as ‘Super Pins’, ‘Rich Pins’, ‘Enhanced Pins’, or not know them at all; but what sets Pinterest’s Rich Pins apart from regular pins is the extra information and direct links they display to viewers. From pricing details to locations and availability; and from product description to direct links to the product page; the extra information in enhanced pins makes them particularly more powerful for small businesses than regular pins, as they are more relevant and useful to pinners looking for a similar product.
Types of Rich Pins
Pinterest currently allows its commercial users to implement five types of rich pins, listed as follows:
Place Pins
Perfect for tourism and travel brands, Place Pins allow pinners to see the pins by location, by integrating information on places, addresses and phone numbers into an interactive map board. This type of rich pins is idyllic for businesses like restaurants and event planners that operate multiple branches and franchises, or even travel enthusiasts who can use them to highlight the best bars, romantic locations and adventure points.
Pinterest has partnered up with location discovery services like Foursquare, Citysearch and Airbnb to enable the automatic inclusion of location information on Place Pins.
Product Pins
Product Pins are a must-have for any ecommerce brand page on Pinterest as they allow you to highlight their pricing, location and availability information without being too salesy. An added advantage of using these pins is the free price notifications that your followers receive to alert them of your latest price drop or limited offers.
Article Pins
Bloggers, writers and authors; Pinterest’s article pins are your chance to keep your readers enlightened with essential information about your posts. Article Pins allow you to display the title, author’s name, descriptions, as well as URL, in addition to a catchy image for your content. And the best part? Pinterest adds an automatic “Read more on…”call-to-action to your Article Pin!
Recipe Pins
Whether you are a culinary expert maintaining a recipe blog, or have just started a restaurant on the high street, Recipe Pins can be your secret ingredient to commercial success. These rich pins include a tantalizing picture of your culinary product, and display recipe details, cooking time, ratings, servings, as well as related recipes within the same domain. Take your regular food pins to a whole new level by describing it with relevant information underneath and enjoy the additional traffic you receive on your food blog or restaurant’s website!
Movie Pins
If your latest venture is in the entertainment industry, then you will surely love the functionality of Pinterest’s Movie Pins! Movie Pins contain images shared from popular social movie sites like Netflix, Flixster, and Rotten Tomatoes, and include additional information on film ratings, release dates, the cast and directors.
The Rich Pinning Benefits
Still weighing their effectiveness for your business? Read on!
1. Automatic Updates
Pinterest Rich Pins have been designed to offer a synchronized system of information update between your website’s product page and your rich pins on Pinterest, So, for example, if you decide to add a twist to your basic vanilla cake recipe and alter its ingredients, or Netflix changes its ratings for a movie; the information will be automatically updated on the pin, without any need of manual changes!
2. Additional information makes pins more relevant and useful
Textual content along with visuals enhance a user’s understanding of your product and leads to more informed decisions. A picture is worth a thousand words, but by adding just a few more words, and numbers to your pin; you can make it more convenient for your followers to know your product and potentially make a purchase.
3. Rich Pins = Free Price Alerts
Definitely one of the best Pinterest features, free price alerts certainly make the pinning journey of your brand page worthwhile. Pinterest sends out automated emails to users who pinned your Rich Pins, in event of a price drop by more than 10% on the pinned products.
4. Traffic Boost
If yours is an e-commerce business, you can’t deny the importance of targeted traffic on your website and web storefronts! The retailing giant Target collaborated with Pinterest to run a trial on Rich Pins for their featured products, by pinning images with price and product availability information underneath. During the trial period, Target experienced a 70% increase in traffic on their website, generated from Pinterest.
5. Increase in Sales
Last, but definitely not the least, the free price alerts, additional information and increased traffic, have an overriding potential of translating into successful sales. After all, you can’t really imagine that having your product pinned by a hundred followers, and dropping the price by more than 10% to have free alerts flood your potential customer’s inbox; will result in a drop in sales!
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With over 70 million users and still going strong, your brand’s presence on Pinterest can be your Holy Grail to converting images into sales. Whether B2B or B2C, your business can really benefit from strategically marketing its products, services and brand image on Pinterest. Continue to read to find out how:
