How Your Business Can Benefit from Pinterest
By establishing an active presence on Pinterest, you can create your own community that will share your images and market your website for you. Let’s find out how.
Grow Your Audience
Pinterest can help expose your business to a much wider audience than your website could manage on its own. By Pinning images and interacting with the Pinterest community, you can increase your businesses visibility. This, in turn, can result in a wider range of people viewing your content. Viewers can also choose to repin your images, which helps further market your brand.
Use Pinterest for Market Research
Pinterest is a very important market research tool. See what content your target audience is drawn to, what the current trends are and what people are discussing and sharing. Use this information to influence your product choices, blog posts, and web presence. Pinterest is also a great way to check out the competition. How do other companies in the same area compare? Use this research to gain inspiration for your own business.
Establish Your Brand
Pinterest is the place for establishing your brand authority. It is here that you can really show you are a professional business to take seriously. Showcase your portfolio of work or the products you sell, in your own unique and eye-catching way. Also, add useful, informative information to your pins. This will help build a loyal following that trusts your knowledge and brand.
Drive More Traffic to Your Site
Ultimately, the aim of using Pinterest is to drive more traffic to your site. Done correctly, you can create a community that will become loyal followers, sharing and promoting your brand, and consequently driving traffic and potential customers to your site.
How to Start Using Pinterest For Business
You must think carefully about the pinboards you set up, the types of images you share and repin, and how you engage on Pinterest.
Get a Business Account
When you join Pinterest, choose a Business account. This enables you to use the Pinterest analytics tools as well as other benefits, all for free. If you have joined using a Personal account, don’t worry, you can convert it.
After you have joined, link your Pinterest account to your website. This is easy to do by copying and pasting a tag provided into your website’s index.html file. Once done, you can see what people are pinning from your site, and your logo will be added to all images pinned.
Create an Assortment of Pinboards
Next you need to set up your pinboards and start to pin images from your site. You want to create numerous boards, all related to your industry to attract the right audience. Your strategy with your pinboards should be to inspire. People don’t like obvious marketing, they want to see images that they are interested in or can aspire to.
You should divide your niche into sub-categories and create boards accordingly. If you have a gardening blog, you could title boards ‘spring flowers’, ‘home grown vegetables’, ‘winter plants’ etc, so people can follow the topic they are specifically interested in. However, you could also add boards related to gardening like ‘garden birds’, ‘homegrown food recipes’ and ‘tropical plants’ to help reach a wider audience.
If you sell products on your website, you should create boards that share information or help your customers. For example, if your website sells clothes, you could have boards showing ‘best items to take on a beach holiday’ or ‘festival outfits’. For pinboards that showcase your products, you could create boards showing your ‘favorite products’ or your ‘best-selling’ products. By being mindful of the type of content you post, you can create a strong community who will repin your pins and share your brand with a wider audience.
Add Images that Receive the Best Engagement
Once you have set up all your boards, you need to add images to them. Use high quality, compelling images from your website that that don’t look too much like adverts. If your images aren’t obvious in their message, add a text overlay to give more context.
Consider creating infographics, visual lists or images with multiple products, as these all lend themselves to being repinned more often. Vertical pins take up more space in the feed, so are also more likely to get noticed. Make sure you add a detailed description to every image, and your site logo and URL are clearly displayed.
Research shows that informative pins are 30% more likely to be repinned than any other type. Share some ‘how to’ images with advice or instructions, either in the image or in the description. When you want to specifically share your own content on Pinterest, you can send pins to others to show them you have something new to view.
Engage on Pinterest
As well as adding pictures from your own site, repin other people’s images too. Repin from different people and places on the internet to raise your visibility. Try and follow other people and other people’s boards, as well as like and comment on other people’s pins. This is a good way to gain followers in your industry, interact with the Pinterest community and raise your brand’s awareness. Joining to group boards or starting your own collaborations can also help.
Install a Pin-It Button plugin on your WordPress Site
Lastly, you need to add ‘Pin-It’ buttons to your website. These are buttons that appear on your images when you hover over them. Using these, viewers on your website can click and share your images on their Pinterest boards, sharing your content and website with all their friends, family and followers. The WordPress Pinterest ‘Pin It’ Plugin is a fantastic free plugin that takes a matter of minutes to install and set up. Once completed, your audience can pin away.
Final Thoughts
Social media can be time consuming and expensive. This isn’t the case with Pinterest. Used correctly, Pinterest can help market your business to grow its reach and reputation, driving traffic to your website and increasing sales. What are you waiting for?
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