Social media is a powerful tool for marketing, advertising, and dealing with your consumer base. It’s not a good idea to spread yourself too thin over the plethora of social media platforms, so choose one or two that are the most relevant to your audience.
For instance, Facebook is deemed to be a platform for the older generations, with Instagram and Snapchat being the preferred options for younger generations. Your choice of social media should also depend on the kind of product or service you’re providing. If it requires more of a visual aid rather than text, Instagram might be a better way to go than Facebook.
Pinterest is an especially useful social media platform that has helped many businesses take off and develop an effective online presence. In the year 2017, this platform contained around 250 million users from all over the world. The number of users will only rise along with the features of this platform, so it’s high time all business owners started familiarizing themselves with Pinterest.
The main appeal of Pinterest is its mainly visual content, with the option to set up boards according to the user’s interests. Features like ‘Promoted Pins’ can also greatly help businesses with their web marketing efforts. We’ll discuss this feature and other ways in which you can utilize the Pinterest platform for your business endeavors below:
About Pinterest
Before you start your web marketing activities on Pinterest, get updated on what it offers. This social media website basically uses images or video as content instead of text You can add titles, descriptions, and captions, but images and videos are what usually grab a customer’s attention.
Users of Pinterest pin any content they like to their own virtual bulletin board. They may then share the pin on their profile, where their friends can like or re-pin it. This way, the images on one company can get wider exposure quickly with just one or two clicks.
However, make sure that your business is going to benefit from the images or videos you place on Pinterest. Some business might not have a concept you can represent visually, so putting in any effort on Pinterest wouldn’t benefit them.
About Promoted Pins
These work like the regular pinning feature on Pinterest, where you a user can pin their interests and come back to them later. However, here the platform has decided to capitalize on this service and enhance its potential as a marketing tool. They’ve done this by allowing companies to promote their own pins.
When certain businesses pay for the service, their pins get featured to users who are likely to be interested in what they have to offer. As Pinterest users conduct searches on what they like, it’s not difficult to gauge what businesses they might buy from. The Promoted Pins have their own ‘promoted’ label so that users know it’s a form of advertising.
DIY Promoted Pins
The feature of Promoted Pins is usually targeted at corporations and large established companies. However, there are now many startups in almost every industry one can think of, so there was bound to be something for small business entities. This is where DIY Promoted Pins come in. These allow any size of businesses to promote their own Pins and hence get more traffic to their respective websites.
This service also allows companies and customers to develop a closer connection. It does so by enabling businesses to get in touch with the most relevant audience through the latter’s searches plus category feeds. This is an especially useful tool for small startups that may otherwise have no idea of which users to target. Sponsored pins would also earn a business profit through the cost-per-click offer.
Rich Pins
The Pins features also include Rich Pins, which come from business accounts. A business can create such accounts from scratch or a business manager can convert their own personal account to a business one.
When you have a business account on Pinterest, the Rich Pins will allow you to add more detailed information to your sponsored pins. This enhances the customers’ experience when they’re browsing the platform. The feature hence helps businesses become more visible. This increases the chances of attracting leads, and hence increasing sales volume. Higher profits and lasting success would hopefully be the results of this activity.
An Advertising Tool
The advertising concept of Pinterest is very well thought out. Usually, internet users don’t like advertisements popping up throughout their browsing experience. With Pinterest, you can advertise without being too obvious about it, resulting in more consumer trust.
When you promote your product through the pin system of Pinterest, the advertising is in a subtle, almost tasteful manner. You’re not using pop-up ads or banners in vying for the consumers’ attention. You simply promote your pins based on their interests, which internet users are looking for anyway. Potential customers would hence want to clock on pins more than convention web ads.
Guidelines for Pinterest Advertising
Now that Pinterest is very much open to business advertising, below are some ways in which to make the most of this platform. It’s a highly popular form of social media, so you want to reach as many relevant people as possible:
The Audience:
Before you launch your business on Pinterest, know that most of the users o this platform are female. More specifically, the age group is around 15 to 29. This statistic might change over the years, so stay up to date on the demographics of Pinterest and how it relates to your company.
If the products or services you’re offering are mostly male-oriented, you might want to keep Pinterest as a secondary means of web marketing. However, you could also change up your marketing strategy to target females who might want to buy your products as gifts for males. This way, your Pinterest efforts could bear fruition very easily.
Engaging Instead of Advertising:
As with all kind of activities online, your potential customers are looking for quality content. This means that you should focus more on creating engaging content rather than getting the maximum amount of advertisement out there.
According to studies, more than half of interest users clock on the Pins that get them to pictures, articles, or long, detailed blog posts. A far lesser percentage click on pins that look like they will lead directly to shopping websites. This is why you want strong visual and text content to spark an interest before laying out the sales pitch.
One useful tip here could be to take your cue from the most popular topics on a certain board. This could be gardening, DIT, fashion, or travel. The topics that relate to your business in any way would be of great interest to you. See how the businesses in that area are promoting their pins and how they’re putting forward their content. Follow your competitors, and you’ll soon be a trailblazer yourself.
Your images could include pictures of the products, of people enjoying your services, or screenshots of customer reviews. Alternatively, you may work on infographics in order to create content that’s sure to grab attention.
Organizing Yourself:
Pinterest has the convenient feature of allowing you to categorize according to topics, interests, or a specific keyword. This is a far better option than Facebook, which mostly classifies everything in chronological order.
If you deal in home décor, for instance, you should categorize your offerings by keywords like ‘curtains’, ‘art deco’, or ‘vintage furniture’. This way, consumers searching for inspiration and possible purchases would eventually hit upon your boards.
Tracking Post Frequency:
With every social media platform, you have to hit that sweet spot between too-frequent posts and not frequent enough. Regulate your postings by making a posting schedule. Conduct some research in order to determine what the ideal number of pins should be.
Some studies show that business should have a minimum of 5 pins in one day, with 10 being the upper limit. For some types of businesses, such numbers could be very high. The best way to calculate your ideal pin number each day or week is through a trial and error basis. Start pinning at 5 times a day, then increase or decrease the number next week. The reaction from your audience should determine which way to go.
Conclusion
Considering certain factors before starting on your Pinterest web marketing is essential in order for you to gain success from this platform. Once you have your categories and pins sorted out, you’ll get more followers and hence more traffic to your site.
The full potential of Pinterest is not yet unleashed on the internet, however. This is the moment where you have to get in and make your mark right in the beginning. Pinterest will help you stay innovated and updated as a business, along with getting you in touch with your customers. It’s hence recommended that you make an account as soon as possible and start utilizing these services.