Pinterest For Small Business: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide
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I have been using Pinterest for the past 3 years without knowing how powerful this social platform could be. I just used it to save ideas or inspirational travel posts for my next travel destinations. Other than that, I just knew this was mostly used by women to share their DIY or recipe ideas.
So cliche right?
Well, it is only after following a training focused on Advanced Pinterest marketing in the mastermind community I belong to, that I started realising how great this platform is for business and what I have been missing out this whole time!
You see Online Marketers will encourage you to use advertising to get results quickly. But unless you have a brand authority with a strong online presence, or a very good sales funnel to generate leads, you will just waste your money.
Now on the contrary, if you want to generate traffic to your website in the long run, build a strong brand authority and be seen as an expert in your field, then Pinterest is the answer and I will tell you why.
Overview of Pinterest
Let’s start with some quick facts:
Pinterest is not a social media platform but a search engine on steroids
79% of users are female
58% of users use Pinterest on a tablet
88% of users purchase a product they pinned
49% of users purchased 5 or more products they pinned
It is the fastest growing website with 57% growth while Facebook’s member base grew by 6% by overall member growth
Pins or content live longer than any other social media platforms. The average useful lifespan of a Tweet is measured in minutes. Facebook posts exist in newsfeeds for a few hours. Want to take a guess on how long an average pin can remain relevant? Not minutes, not hours, and not even days. An average pin can come up in search months after it was posted. How great is that?
Pins have huge potential to go viral and potentially drive consumer purchasing behaviour. For its users, Pinterest is product review, shopping catalogue, tester, and advice column all in one. About 25% of consumers reported buying a product or service after discovering it on Pinterest.
Pinterest pins are worth more than Facebook likes. Consumers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to actually purchase than those referred by Facebook; Also Pinterest grabs around 41% of e-commerce traffic compared to other social media sites. (ref. 10 Amazing facts about Pinterest)
You start getting a better picture of how powerful this platform can be for your business now?
I was shocked when I heard about those stats. I have been using this platform for years and focused all my efforts as a blogger on the “wrong” platforms. I say wrong because of the longevity of the content I post on Facebook and Instagram compared to Pinterest.
So now that we know more about Pinterest potential for our business. What’s next?
I won’t be able to go through everything I learned because the length of this post would be waaaay too long and you will certainly get bored. So I will be focusing on the main actions you will need to take to leverage this platform to boost your website traffic and potentially your sales.
Step 1: Create a business account
Once you convert your Pinterest account to a business account you will be able to gain some insights on
How well your blog posts are performing in terms of traffic and engagement
Who are the people interested in your content
Track your website traffic and the best performing referral blog posts
This will help you tailor your content to your audience according to their preferences and potentially get a viral blog post that will help you gain more visibility online.
Don’t forget to verify your website to gain full advantage of Pinterest analytics.
Step 2: Optimize your Pinterest Profile
In order to reach the right audience, you will also need to optimise your profile. If you are using several social media platforms, make sure that your profile picture is the same, looks bright enough and use keywords to describe your niche and you so that people can have an idea of who you are and what you do in just a few seconds landing on your profile.
Step 3: Create Board Covers relevant to your content
Board covers help with categorising your content and help the viewer know what to expect before clicking to see more. Try to keep a consistent theme using the same font and same formating. You can use Canva, PicMonkey or even Adobe Spark Post to design your boards.
Step 4: Create Pinable images
Create multiple images for your blog posts to save and share on Pinterest. Make sure they are all vertical pins . Pinterest says 600 x 900 pixels is optimal – or any 2:3 size. Make sure to use this format or your pins won’t be accepted or re-shared once you will post them in group boards.
Also try to make your Pins look the same so that your readers can easily recognise your content. I created my own template using Adobe Spark Post and just change the title and image for every new blog post.
Step 5: Add a “Pin It” Button
Add a plugin “Pinterest pin it button” on your website so that readers can pin your images to their accounts. Just check the help section of your host website to know how to do it.
Step 6: Join Group Boards
Group boards and Tailwind Tribes are a traffic Goldmine. Consider it like laser targeting your ideal audience. It requires some time to find the right ones, but once you do, you will be able to pin to multiple boards and loop your pins for maximum exposure. You can recognize group boards by their profile photos that gather several photos. In order to join them, just follow the instructions written in the description of the boards.
Rinse and repeat until you have found the boards that work for your business.
Step 7: Use Tailwind and join Tribes
Pining can be quite a long process if you decide to do it only manually. That is the reason why Tailwind App has been created, to help you automate your pining, set it and forget it! You just have to do schedule your content once, and you are done!
Having a tool to schedule your pins and pin them at different time of the day so that you can reach people in different time zones is one of the most important aspect of your Pinterest marketing strategy. This will help you grow your following and bring traffic to your website on automation.
One easy way to schedule your pin on the go while you browse Internet is to use the Tailwind app browser extension available via Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Just click on the icon when you want to schedule a pin, select the image you wish to schedule, click on Go Schedule and you are done! Simple!
You can also use it to pin several pins in one go, rather than doing it one at a time. When browsing Pinterest, just click on the button again
select the pins you wish to schedule
assign them to the boards you wish to publish them,
click on go schedule
and your job is done!
I just love how simple it is to use. And don’t be afraid of automating your account with Tailwind App, your account won’t be disabled and you won’t be banned from Pinterest because Tailwind is an official Pinterest Marketing Partner.
They offer different Plans & Pricing. I personally use the 15$/month and find it more than enough to meet with my business needs as a blogger.
I could talk about it for hours, but the best way to make your opinion is to try it yourself. Just click here to test it out for free for 30 days using my referral link and see if this would be a great addition to your online marketing tools.
Note: Your free trial includes a trial of 100 scheduled pins per month. If you try to schedule more, you will be asked to upgrade.
Step 8: Live Pin
Even though you schedule your pins in advance, being active on the platform and engaging with other’s content is still the best way to get notice and gain engagement. So when you have some free time, do not hesitate to pin relevant pins to your boards.
Step 9: Recycle your content
What I love about Pinterest is really the longevity of your posts. As mentioned earlier, they can last for months! By using Pinterest analytics you will be able to know which pins are popular and got you a lot of traffic and engagement.
Do not hesitate to recycle these posts and use them again! No need to change a winning strategy, test, test, test and focus only on what works for you.
If you’d like to know which Pinterest Group boards perform best to drive traffic to your website, Tailwind App can help you with that. I tend to review them once per month, keep the boards that work for me and get rid of the ones that do not.
Conclusion
Pinterest has been a real game changer in my blogging career. Before I used to spend hundreds of euros in ads to bring visitors to my website. Today, I spend 30 bucks per month with Tailwind to schedule my content in advance to be published on Pinterest and see visitors coming to my website!
I also do not need to create new content constantly to please any social media algorithms!
My pillar content are evergreen and can be recycled over and over again as long as they remain popular.
This allows me to set an advertising budget aside for promotional offers.
This is really how powerful this platform is.
And by using Tailwind App I can plan one month of content to be published on Pinterest in only 10 minutes and to the right audience rather than shooting in the dark or using advertising to test various audiences before finding the right one that might be interested in reading my blog post (no guarantee).
The power really resides in the group boards and Tailwind Tribes you will join and it requires some time to find the right one.
But once you do, you won’t need to invest too much time anymore on finding out how to drive traffic to your website and will finally be able to focus on what matters to you as a business: sales!
I now create 1-2 pieces of content per week related to the topics I talk about on my blog as I do not have to worry anymore about finding the right audience.
This was the best investment I have made since 2018. I still have some work to do to increase my reach and engagement but I know I am on the right track and Pinterest makes it effortless compared to my old marketing strategies.
What about you? Have you been using Pinterest? Did you find the success you needed using the platform? Feel free to share your best practices or tips in the comment.
This was my Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Pinterest. I hope that this will help you get your business discovered and gain more traffic and engagement.
If you need some help, do not hesitate to contact me, I offer Marketing Strategy Sessions.
And as always if you liked this blog post, make sure to like it, it actually makes a difference and feel free to share it with people you believe would benefit from it.
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