Pinterest is becoming one of the most popular social media platforms among businesses that market online thanks to the connections it creates between brands and fans and its exceptional ability to turn fans into customers.
These goals can be accomplished the “old fashion” way by building boards, pinning content and waiting for fans to show up. There are, however, three tactics which you can use that will prove to be more effective and garner results quicker:
- Creating better Promoted Pins
- Using Pinterest Messaging for marketing
- Understanding the new Pinterest Analytics dashboard better
You can use this Pinterest article to get the basics on how to pin, repin, and engage. If you’re already up to speed on those points, then these are the three tools that are going to make your Pinterest marketing really take off.
Creating Better Promoted Pins
Promoted pins will likely be the backbone of your Pinterest strategy when you’re just starting out or when you have a new product you’re trying to push. The first few things to get out of the way are basics for the types of photos you’ll want to use:
- Make sure they’re high quality. Your iPhone 3 doesn’t cut it. People on Pinterest have plenty of options for content. If your content doesn’t look professional they will move on.
- The layout that is preferred is portrait (taller than it is wide) instead of landscape.
- Pins are 735 pixels wide in their expanded view. Make sure that they look good at that size.
Those are the technical things you need to think about. If you don’t, every tip below this will be worthless. Rich pins are the next most important aspect of Pinterest Promoted Pins. There are five types that you can use:
- Recipe Pins
- Product Pins
- Article Pins
- Movie Pins
- Location Pins
Each of these will be used for a different reason. Remember, it’s not just travel agents who will want to use Location Pins. You can use a Location Pin to promote the physical location of your business during a promotion. How’s that for social media getting people in your store?
The second important aspect of Rich Pins is how they work towards your sales goals. When you make a Rich Pin you associate a price with it. This price is an integral part of the information. Any time you change the price a notification is sent out to all who have pinned it to their board.
This is important because Facebook doesn’t tell people who like your post that you have put that product on sale for a lower price. This is how Pinterest can bring people back to your content again and again, and why Pinterest content marketing may be the most important on the Web for making sales.
Here’s a Rich Pin from the Nike Women board. They have the price, sizes and additional information all laid out for you:
Using Pinterest Messages for Marketing
Pinterest messages are new to the platform. They work much like any other messaging system, but their inclusion on Pinterest has opened up all new ways to communicate, promote, and work with other people.
To get started using Pinterest Messages for marketing you’ll need to know the basics:
- You can only send messages to someone who already follows one of your boards. You can’t get new fans directly, but you can engage with people who can help spread your brand message.
- You can message them with a combination of text and embedded pins. Be creative and use your visuals to get people’s attention
- You can message up to four people at one time. Can you say “group collaboration” five times fast?
The people that you will want to target will be your brand evangelists and other crowd influencers. These are the people who will help get the word out about a particular pin, product or website that you’re trying to push.
How you can do this is by having them work on content for you, or with you. You can send them content from other platforms that could interest them, like a fun youTube video about your brand. Or you can show them pictures of products they’ve pinned which wound up in other media, like when a dress they pinned is worn in Vogue.
Using and Understanding the New Pinterest Analytics Dashboard
Remember back in 1980s when you’d look at the Sears catalog to find all the stuff you wanted for Christmas or your birthday? I did that every single year until my teens. Pinterest is the new catalog, as people now use it for future purchases or wish lists.
When you start looking at your Pinterest Analytics Dashboard, you need to understand why people are pinning your stuff. The “future wish list” is a large aspect of this. Here are the major data points that Pinterest analytics tracks for you:
- Your overall impressions: This is the “big picture” data that you can view at a glance. You’ll know which pins are reaching people, and what content to make more of.
- Your most popular boards: This helps you quickly identify which boards are succeeding wildly. Keep adding more content to keep them fresh, and to keep people coming back for more!
- Search rankings and engagement for each pin: These two cross over as a well ranking pin with high engagement is a pin that is doing its job. A well ranking pin with engagement is not doing its job. Work on the well ranking ones, get people engaging with them, then get to work on the Pinterest product descriptions of those pesky poorly ranking ones!
The current Pinterest analytics dashboard is a vast improvement over the original. The information is now presented in a much more visual way with line charts, pin to pin comparisons, and pie charts.
We rely on review websites to find out what people have to say about us most of the time. But Pinterest is presenting you with information that can tell you more about how people feel about your content and products than ever before.
You can start learning right away about what type of content, and products, your fans like. Not only can you use Pinterest to better promote these products, but you can also take that information with you to your next product development meeting. This is yet another example of future purchases being mapped out by Pinterest – except you go out and make it for your Pinterest fans before they even know they want it!
Pinterest is Now an Even More Powerful Social Media Marketing Tool
Pinterest marketing has been a force to be reckoned with for some time now. With the recent addition of Pinterest messaging, and the all-new Pinterest dashboard, you can now see even better results and track them with more accuracy.
Add creating better Promoted Pins into this mix and you will find relevant fans even faster than before. Using well thought out Rich Pins, as part of your Promoted Pins plan, will give you a social media platform that helps your customers plan future purchases. Rich Pins then lets your fans know when the items they want are being offered at a better price.
With your fans coming back again and again thanks to your finding them through Promoted Pins, and bringing them back with Rich Pins, Pinterest may just be the social media marketing gift that keeps on giving!
Are you using Pinterest for marketing right now? What has been working well, and what have you learned? Let us know in the comments section below so we can all build a better understanding of this exciting social media platform!
Matthew Yeoman is the social media analyst over on the Devumi Social Media blog. You can find him there every Wednesday and Friday talking about the latest online tips and tricks in the social media world. If you need updates more often, check out the @Devumi Gorilla on Twitter or Pinterest!