“Your first step should be to research the available products in your niche. Pinterest has the ability to tell you the exact color, style, or even design-type that is trending recently.”
When it comes to influencer marketing, Pinterest is more than a social media platform, it’s a powerful search engine to help your brand reach an audience who may not have been searching for you. When included in influencer marketing programs, Pinterest can catapult the performance of even the most successful influencer marketing campaign to the next level.
In May 2020, the team at Find Your Influence put out a query to brands and influencers alike to understand how they have successfully harnessed the power of Pinterest. What follows are our five favorite Pinterest secrets for brands.
Lean in to Trends
Jessica Randhawa is the head chef, recipe creator, photographer and writer behind The Forked Spoon, creating delicious family-friendly recipes that anyone can make. Jessica has been active on Pinterest since it launched in 2010 and has more than 465,000 followers and more than 10 million monthly views. “One timely tip I have is that Pinterest recently rolled out the new ‘Trends’ dashboard (for Pinterest Business Accounts in the Analytics menu at the top),” Randhawa outlines. “Since it rolled out, I have been using this new ‘Trends’ section strategically to help me make informed decisions on what content I should be producing next.” Being able to effectively time a rising tide in searches on a trending topic on Pinterest, along with the ability to pair it with strategic content, can greatly enable traffic to websites and stores.
Know Your Niche
Pinterest, like many other social media platforms can be helpful in promoting your product or service. However, if you don’t know your niche, you aren’t setting yourself up for success. “This is probably the most important strategy that needs to be understood by every beginner,” outlines Jennifer Willy, Editor at Etia. “Your first step should be to research the available products in your niche. Pinterest has the ability to tell you the exact color, style, or even design-type that is trending recently.”
Willy also suggests using Pinterest for competitive research. “You can take advantage by researching your competitors and come up with original and new ideas from the already trending ones.”
Drive Traffic Away From Pinterest
“Our main goal with Pinterest is to build our brand and send traffic back to our website,” says Megan Marrs, founder of K9 of Mine. To do this most effectively, Marrs makes it a point to create Pinterest boards that will resonate with her target audience. “For boards where we do have a lot of pins that connect back to articles on our website, we’ll aim for more enticing pin titles and descriptions, plus a call to action (such as “Read the full article to see the details!”).
Optimize Everything
Richa Pathak is the founder and editor at SEM Updates and has used Pinterest to generate a strong subscriber base for her digital marketing blog. “My strategy to grow my brand on Pinterest was posting pins regularly, all the content of my site is completely optimized on Pinterest, pins, hashtags, links, summaries,” Pathak explains. “All these small efforts bring a great difference in your brand positioning. It drives pretty decent traffic, it helps me curate user-generated content pointing to my blog.”
Host Contests and/or Challenges
Consider hosting contests or challenges on Pinterest leading into a special event. Maybe it’s your company’s anniversary or a corporate milestone and you want to get your audience engaged to create content. Host a contest asking them to create a video using your product or service in the most unique way. Offering unique prizes may inspire more participation “Aside from getting more customer engagement, your audience’s followers will also be able to know about your brand, making you visible to more users,” said John Howard, founder and CEO with Coupon Lawn.
What Pinterest strategies have worked well for your brand? Comment below and let us know.