This Is Your Sign to Start Pinning for Your Business
Written by Jen Siomacco and Brittinee Phillips. Meet Our Team.
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Have you ever asked yourself, “How can my business possibly be successful on Pinterest..what do I have worth pinning?” With so many social media platforms used to engage and build relationships with your audience, your brand is likely present on all of the main platforms but Pinterest.
VVITCH works with small businesses across a variety of industries — wedding photography, skincare, coaching and activism, brick and mortar retail, and more — we noticed our clients missed opportunities by not strategizing how to factor Pinterest into their social media marketing.
Hopefully, this is your sign to start pinning your business as we walk through understanding the benefits of Pinterest, how you can start using it to grow your business, and, most importantly, how to measure your success once you execute a Pinterest strategy.
Understanding Pinterest
First and foremost, it might shock you to learn that Pinterest is more of a search engine (i.e. Google Search) than a social media platform. This means with your brand, once you have a Pinterest account you can use it to create a visual index of the content on your website.
Pinterest relies on keywords instead of hashtags, this means you’re able to apply the same rules you have with optimizing your website for search engine optimization (SEO) to your Pinterest content. For example, writing pin descriptions that are concise and keyword rich. Unsure how best to do that? You can run searches on Pinterest and see what recommended terms come up that can help you determine the keywords people are commonly searching in relation to your brand’s product or services.
Keywords not your zone of genius? Hire VVITCH to conduct keyword research for your business!
Similar to Google, once you do the work to create high quality pins, your content can have a life on Pinterest for months or even years. This is in stark contrast to platforms like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, where your content has a brief period of time when it can make an impact on your audience
There are 3 key takeaways to process as you prepare to use Pinterest:
Pinterest is great for sharing evergreen, non-time-sensitive content, allowing all industries to find value in the platform through thoughtful content marketing
Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest is not often used by customers as a channel for asking questions or dealing with customer support type inquiries. This means Pinterest can be more of a “set it and forget it” solution for brands who don’t have a lot of energy to invest into a new platform.
Pinterest is very ideal for ecommerce brands because of their shoppable product pins feature
With so much of Pinterest being unbranded imagery, using it as a brand evens out the playing field so that not only products with high brand recognition get attention but creating visually branded pins is a great way to organically grow your brand awareness — without having to dump huge amounts into paid advertising.
Don’t have visual content to pin? This is why having branded templates for social media is so helpful. Allow VVITCH to help you create branded social media templates!
Grow Your Business with Pinterest
Every small business wants to grow and social media can impact your ability to do so with your brand. However, most small businesses make the mistake of relying solely on a single social media platform to help drive growth for their brand. And often, overlook the power of Pinterest.
In order to get the most of Pinterest, VVITCH suggests you start with creating an optimized website that clearly outlines who you are and the products or services you offer. Once you have an optimized website, create a Pinterest Business account and claim your website. This is necessary when you create boards that reflect the different categories of products and services that your business offers, and use descriptive keywords in the board names and descriptions.
Worried you won’t have time to manually pin content on Pinterest? You can use a scheduler, like Tailwind, to bulk create pins and schedule them to be pinned consistently — with a goal of pinning 2-3 images a day. Most importantly, make sure every pin you create links back to your website! You can pin portfolio images, or text based graphics to highlight your blog posts or site content.
Also, don’t be afraid to pin the same image to as many boards as are relevant to the content of the image! You can still use a scheduler to space out the images so that your content doesn’t appear too repetitive to users.
Measuring Success on Pinterest
You’ve taken the steps and tips shared above and now your Pinterest strategy is live. Now what?
By pinning consistently, your brand should start to see an increase in your number of monthly views, which is one of the biggest indicators of success on Pinterest.
Another indicator is how many clicks you have back to your website from your pins. Over time, as your audience grows and your pins are shown to more and more people, you will likely see a steady increase in traffic to your website.
Still need help getting started?
VVITCH has free resources at your fingertips! Our free guides are a great place to get started — check out our Mini Guide to Using Canva, Tailwind, and Pinterest.
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen put her skills to work as one of the owners of Catalyst Wedding Co.
After seeing both the corporate and entrepreneurial world, Jen is committed to helping feminist small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
