While Facebook may be the all-star when it comes to using social media to generate traffic to your site, Pinterest is starting to hold its own in this respect too. We started looking at Pinterest for innovative ideas for graphic design; after all, they have a lot of cool artists constantly adding new material. However, this soon got the gears turning when it came to marketability.
After Facebook announced they would be releasing a new algorithm that would effectively reduce marketing opportunities by serving people fewer ads, we thought it would be best to take some of our social media eggs out of this basket and place them elsewhere.
So how do you start using Pinterest as an effective medium for your marketing?
The idea is simple. Think of Pinterest as less of a social media and more of a search engine for products. Facebook is under fire because of their use of data to market to people that wanted to use the platform for social reasons. Pinterest is seen much differently. People don’t want to connect with friends and family on this platform, they use it as a way to share their interests (usually products). The intent marketers are looking for is the main staple of Pinterest. You can sell with impunity because that’s why people are there (mostly).
Skepticism
Some blogs have seen staggering results, citing up to 15K visitors a day. But is this true? Well, yes and no. You really need to have the right niche if you want to do exceedingly well on Pinterest. If that’s vague, we apologize, because what we mean is having a mom blog. You know these types of sites that provide valuable information for mothers or people of “mom age.” However, you can extend the popularity to other, similar niches, as well.
Take, for example, products marketed to women who are 30 and above. That’s a huge audience! One of our clients, SilverTribe, sells jewelry targeted specifically to women in this age bracket. This translates to a couple hundred visitors to their main site through Pinterest and a couple conversions each month, totaling about a grand. Now, they typically have very low maintenance for their profile, but they still see over 208,000 viewers monthly, which is not bad for pinning something related to your business once a week.
Now, it does take a lot of work to get to this point and you might not do as well if you’re in the wrong niche, but it’s well worth the effort if you meet the above criteria for your business or blog.
Stats
The truth is that your exposure will slowly climb and the more active you are on Pinterest, the faster you will get rewarded.
Pinterest, like most other social media platforms, you can access a business account and look at your statistics.
What we found was that we actually got significantly better engagement than what we were seeing on Facebook, especially since they changed their algorithms. However, the reason we used Facebook more was that we were seeing more actual conversions overall. With the advent of Facebook’s algorithm shift, this ceased to be the case.
We started seeing steady improvement once we took the data they already had and started narrowing down which pins were doing the best and why. Typically, large images that took up more vertical space did better than their horizontal counterparts. After just a few months of working on this platform, we saw a 10% increase in traffic coming directly from Pinterest, which is extremely good for a free and simple platform like this. That might not sound like the amazing solution to all your problems that you wanted to hear in this article, but it’s realistic and a good start to something that’s looking more and more promising with each passing month.
How you can start to grow
The core idea, if you want to start using this for your business is to build a board that focuses on your store and the products you sell. The next step is to create more boards that are similar to your niche that you can link to as well.
After you set this up, follow these rules for each post:
- Crisp images
- Relevant content
- Product links or category links
- Consistent pinning
- Bold letters across images
- Compelling titles
- Collaborating with others in group boards
Remember not to only pin from your website. Some of the most popular accounts use a variety to keep their audience interested. If you don’t have an item that one of your competitors has, don’t be afraid to pin their stuff. It gives you the diversity you want and you don’t really lose anything, users just trust you more for it.
At the end of the day, Pinterest is not a quick fix that makes your website more viable. It takes a lot of hard work and creativity to make it work but it’s well worth it in our opinion.
