Still ridiculed as a housewife and DIY platform, Pinterest has long since developed into a giant of social networks. And in 2022 the platform will become a real traffic machine. In the following tips, you can find out how to boost it for your start-up and what’s new this year. What is the role of Pinterest marketing Tips for B2C Business?
# 1 Are you in B2C? Register quickly on Pinterest
Pinterest is of particular interest to entrepreneurs from the B2C sector: Over 322 million people worldwide use the network to get tips for furnishing and living, as well as cooking recipes and gift ideas.
Also interesting: The users are predominantly female, have an above-average income, and two-thirds of the pins represent brands and products.
Do you see overlaps with your target group? Then Pinterest is the ideal address for you! Even if you address other target groups from the B2C area, Pinterest marketing can be worthwhile. Explore the platform and take a look at the pins and accounts of the competitors. Then you will quickly find out whether and with which designs your industry is popular on the platform.
If you work in the B2B sector, Pinterest marketing will tend to be of little interest to you. There are always exceptions, of course, but in principle, it can be said that business contacts can be addressed more effectively via platforms such as LinkedIn and Xing.
# 2 Millennials love Pinterest
According to an in-house analysis by Pinterest Business, 86 percent of Millennial Pinners – as the platform calls them – use Pinterest affiliate marketing to plan small and large moments in life. The use of Pinterest is therefore strongly linked to positive emotions.
According to the study, 63 percent said that Pinterest affiliate marketing helped them discover new products and brands. By the way, the most popular categories are food, style, and home furnishings.
# 3 Find out about the Pinterest trends 2020
Every year Pinterest publishes its own trend guide. Using statistics provides you with valuable information about which topics are particularly trendy in the new year. Take a look at the guide right away and pick out the hot topics for your brand.
# 4 Pinterest is and will remain a search engine, not a network
A closer look reveals that Pinterest is not a classic social network. You can communicate with other members via an InMail function and rate and comment on pins from other users. Pinterest is not primarily about direct communication, but about designing visually appealing pins and uploading or repining them on the platform.
“The great thing about it: unlike tweets or Facebook postings, your pins don’t disappear into digital nirvana after a short time.”
No, they stay in the Pinterest cosmos for months and years. If a user is now looking for a topic for which you have uploaded one or more pins, these pins will appear again and again in the results.
In order for this to work, you should use a meaningful pin description and topic-relevant hashtags. The result is a constant flow of traffic without having to constantly invest energy on Pinterest. The pins do the work for you. Which doesn’t mean that marketing on Pinterest is a once-and-never-again action, but more on that in a moment.
# 5 Create pins with Canva
Canva is a powerful tool with which you can create fancy graphics without any design knowledge. Since success on Pinterest stands and falls with the look of your pins, you should use the numerous templates there.
Create multiple pins for a product, blog post, or landing page. Share it at regular intervals, but avoid spamming. Take enough time at Canva to make handsome pins with legible font and appealing colors. This increases the likelihood of repins.
# 6 Create Pinterest Stories
You already know them from Instagram and Snapchat: Stories. Pinterest also launched its story format in late summer 2019. Since then you can make these. But hardly any company uses this opportunity!
You can create up to 20 story pins and define an individual link target for each individual pin. You can even add videos to the story. Think of the whole thing as a magazine that you can create with pure graphics or in combination with videos. And none of this cost you a cent, but with high-quality implementation, it is rewarded with reach and clicks.
When creating stories, be sure to pay attention to the different presentations: the pins look different on smartphones than on the desktop. The only thing that helps here: Gather design experience through trial & error.
# 7 Join group boards
People with the same interests gather in group boards: dog owners, hobbyists, bookworms – the number of boards and communities are limitless. And now imagine that you publish pins with your products on these group boards that are already of interest to the members. It’s a match!
Find out which group boards there is that fit together with your company or your products. Politely ask the administrator for a recording and – most importantly – adhere strictly to the rules of the boards. So, you are usually asked to pin only one pin per day and also to repin pins of other members. If you do not respect this rule, you will be thrown off the group boards. Also, that would be a genuine disgrace.
# 8 Use the Pinterest Ads
Users in Germany have been able to use Pinterest Ads since February. Be sure to check out this exciting form of advertising, because so far only very few companies have seen it. If you step in now and promote your pins, you will gain a competitive advantage. The ads can be played with just a few clicks and are billed in a classic way with cost-per-click.
# 9 Regularity and patience decide
As in any other social network, success depends on your regular commitment. Gradually expand your account, create your own exciting boards, and collect third-party pins.
The ideal ratio is 1: 4.
So pins at least one own pin and four external pins every day. In this way, you demonstrate the network idea, make other influential pinners aware of you, and thus increase the likelihood that your pins will repeat and you generate more reach. Of course, success will be even faster if you pin more pins per day. Always take the 1: 4 ratio into account. So, 100 external pins should follow 25 of your own pins.
If you do this for a while and ideally become active every day, the point will come at some point that Pinterest expert Alexandra Polunin considers bam! denotes: The traffic on your website will increase massively as more and more people come to you from Pinterest. That can boost business noticeably, and that’s ultimately what it’s all about.
# 10 Keep an eye on the try-on function
At the beginning of the year, a revolutionary Pinterest marketing feature made headlines: Try On in conjunction with Augmented Reality. Select a pin on your smartphone, activate the camera and you can try out different lipstick colors directly on yourself. So, the path is clearly heading in the direction of the beauty industry, but Pinterest’s innovative spirit will certainly not end there.
The feature is currently only available in the USA, but like other Pinterest developments, it will only be a matter of time before the feature is also available in this country. If you lead your start-up in this area, you should be well prepared for it.
Extra tip: Link Pinterest with Instagram, YouTube, and Etsy
You can recently link your Instagram, Etsy, and/or YouTube account to Pinterest. This makes it possible to pin your pictures from Instagram on Pinterest. This saves time and increases the reach of your postings.
We, therefore, recommend that you use this efficient connection. However, make sure to pin meaningful postings. A fancy photo may work on Instagram, but Pinterest needs more context or text in the picture so that users are addressed. Both platforms just work differently.
Take advantage of the fact that Pinterest is still flying under the radar
Antonia Wille from LEAD Digital hits the nail on the head: Pinterest is the underdog in online marketing. Very few marketers have the power of this platform fully on their radar. This is good for you! Use this phase of a lack of insight for your strategic marketing. Because other times will come when the power will be recognized across the board and other companies will flood the network.
Then Pinterest may no longer work as effectively, and private users may even be pissed off by the wave of advertising pins. The good news, however, is that you now have the chance to pick up your target group there and get it on your online shop, a landing page, and so on.
Since this is a highly dynamic platform, you should always keep an eye on the latest developments. We are constantly working on the algorithm, and the recommended formats for the height and width of the pins change from time to time. So, stay fit when it comes to Pinterest and you will be rewarded with traffic and ultimately with increasing sales. We wish you all the best!