Welcome back to our series of Digital Toolkits, where we link up with members of CREOATE’s own marketing team to give you a whistle-stop tour of a digital marketing tool that you may have been putting off exploring.
Next up: Pinterest! Turns out it’s not just for mood-boarding your kitchen reno. In fact, Pinterest is a hugely underrated tool for small businesses.
In this post, our resident Pinterest Pro & Senior Growth Marketing Exec, Sinead, walks you through her key tips and learnings on using Pinterest for a business.
What's inside?
- Organic Posts: A Gift That Keeps on Giving
- Experiment with paid advertising
- Top 4 Tips for Building Pinterest Ads Marketing Strategy
- Our Favourite Feature
- To Summarise
If you’re keen to explore more visual channels for reaching your customers, Pinterest is a great option for your business.
This platform allows you to showcase your products to a wider audience through both organic and paid posts, and is a largely underrated (and very visual) social media platform.
Pinterest even offers some exciting features specific to retail businesses, which I’ll get into below.
Organic Posts: A Gift That Keeps on Giving
Like any other social media, you can create and share organic posts to remain front of mind with your customers. ‘Organic’ here just means content that you post for free, rather than an ad that you pay for.
What’s exciting about Pinterest as opposed to other social channels is that it works kind of like a search engine, with customers using the platform to search for products or seasonal inspiration. Make sure you improve your chances of being discovered in this way by adding relevant, descriptive keywords in your post descriptions and tags.
The best part of this is that, unlike a platform like Instagram where your content becomes old news within a couple of days, on Pinterest you can actually gain more traction over time as your customers and other users interact with your posts. So, just a little time spent on Pinterest can go a long way.
Experiment with paid advertising
Depending on your business goals, there are different paid options to experiment with, too. With its growing user base and advanced advertising features, Pinterest ads can help small businesses drive traffic, increase brand awareness and generate leads.
Top 4 Tips for Building Pinterest Ads Marketing Strategy
Here are our top tips for building Pinterest ads into your marketing strategy as a retailer:
1. Define your target audience
Before creating any ad, it's important to know who you want to reach. This is best known as defining your target audience. You could import a list of current customer email addresses and allow the platform to create what’s called an ‘Actalike’ list for your store. In this way, Pinterest will search for users it believes behave most similarly to your current customer base, and are therefore likely to be interested in your products.
If you feel like experimenting further, Pinterest's Audience Insights tool can help you dig deeper into your current audience's demographics, interests, and behaviours. From this, you can begin to test more targeted ads that appeal to your ideal customers.
2. Gather eye-catching visuals
Pinterest is a highly visual platform, so make your pins and ads stand out with eye-catching visuals. These could be posts that represent your brand, or clean imagery of your latest arrivals or customer favourites. High-quality images or videos, alongside catchy headlines, and clear calls-to-action will help grab the attention of potential customers and entice them to engage with your ad.
3. Use keywords, even on ads
Using relevant keywords in your ad titles, descriptions, and hashtags can help your ads to appear in search results when users are looking for similar products or services. This is particularly important if you’re yet to establish a list of customers.
4. Monitor & optimise
It’s important to get to know your audience by monitoring the performance of your pins over time. Identify your most popular organic pins with high engagement rates, and use these insights to guide your strategy by promoting them as ads. Promoted pins will reach a wider audience and increase overall engagement with your brand.
Finally, make testing and refining your ads a part of your weekly routine! By monitoring your ad performance regularly and evaluating any ongoing A/B tests, you can not only stay informed about what content resonates strongest with your audience, but ensure your business is maximising results to suit your budget. Adjustments can quickly and easily be made to your ads based on clear insights from the built-in reporting tools. This will help you to refine your targeting, visuals, and messaging for optimised results.
Our Favourite Feature
As mentioned above, Pinterest offers various different pin types to help your content stand out amidst the clutter, including images, videos, long pins, carousels, etc.
Among these is an ‘idea pin’ which lets you tag multiple areas within one post, linking directly to products on your site. We have tried this pin type ourselves and noticed a higher-than-average click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate, as our retailers could click on the relevant product(s) featured in the post and land on that exact page on our website without ever having to search.
To Summarise
While not everything may be applicable to your business, we always recommend exploring new platforms and testing which has the potential to bring the most value to your business.
The beauty of Pinterest is that you can put in a little bit of work, and this will continue to pay off, even if you never experiment with the paid side (although we recommend that you do!).
For more digital marketing tips and guides, and to learn about some of the other tools you can use to support and grow your business, look out for our other upcoming Digital Toolkit Guides, and explore the rest of our blog today.
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