Start Your Pinterest Business Marketing Strategy In 2022
Have you ever asked the question, ok so how many Pins do I need to create per day? How many Instagram posts do I need to post per day? What is the best time to post? And then have people tell you that this is the strategy?
There is a huge difference between your strategy incorporating a particular platform, like Pinterest or Instagram, in your marketing strategy and the actual tactics used to support your strategy.
What is a Pinterest Strategy?
If I’m saying a Pinterest Strategy is NOT how many Pins per day, and pinning at the best times. Then what is it? What is a Pinterest Strategy? A Pinterest Strategy starts with WHY you want to use Pinterest. To figure out your Pinterest Strategy, you need to answer the question
“why would using Pinterest help you to grow your business”?
How To Use Pinterest as a Business
I’m sure you’re thinking, OK, but in order to know why I need to use it for my business, I need to know what the Platform can do for me. I totally agree!
That’s where a Pinterest Strategist comes in. We are here to support you in knowing the ins and outs of the platform to best guide you in how it can help you in your business goals. Let me give you some examples.
Grow Your Service Based Businesses With Pinterest
Pinterest has long been a platform for bloggers and DIY’ers to find inspiration. And you might be wondering as someone who wants to SELL a service like Instagram Marketing, Financial Consults, Podcast Management, how exactly does that work for people on Pinterest?
For these types of businesses, Pinterest is often used as a place to grow Brand Awareness. This might be where your ideal audience is searching on Pinterest for information about [[insert your service here]]. For the audience that finds your Pins AND clicks off of Pinterest we hope for a few things:
The Pinner chooses to follow you and browse more of your content
The Pinner chooses to download a freebie and opt-in to your email list
Your strategy is to create brand awareness and grow your email list. To fulfill these goals, we want the Pinner to see how you can help them and that you are an authority in your space.
So as much as it’s important for your ideal audience to find your content on Pinterest, it’s also important to consider the experience you are providing OFF of Pinterest. This is where conversions and audience growth happens.
Case Study For Using Pinterest for Your Service Based Business
I almost couldn’t believe it when I was approached by a client and she told me that she was on Pinterest searching for ways to repurpose social media content on Pinterest. She is a heavy Instagram user and wanted to start expanding her platforms, but also use the content she was already creating to do it.
This client, while searching on Pinterest, saw one of my blog posts about how to repurpose your social media content on Pinterest, and thought that’s EXACTLY what I need. So she reached out to me on Instagram to work with me.
It CAN happen that fast. This is EXACTLY what I wanted to happen for my business on Pinterest. This aligned with my strategy, and now I had evidence that it works.
Since I am a service based business, providing Pinterest Strategy Services, my goal with Pinterest was to provide my free resources like blogs and any educational content that I have around Pinterest and Content Marketing.
Once the Pinner navigates from Pinterest to my website or my free resources, they would see how I can support them and that I am someone to follow if they have considered to use Pinterest for their business.
Grow Your Product Based Business on Pinterest
Pinterest in 2022 is quickly becoming a go-to shopping platform. You have capabilities to integrate your shop so that Pinners can see your product inspiration and choose to purchase right from the platform.
With the evolution of Pinterest Story Pins, now Pinterest Idea Pins, product-based businesses and affiliate marketers now have more options than ever to quickly convert a consumer into a customer. Pinterest has the capability to tag your Pins with your products or affiliate products, and when a Pinner is viewing your Pin, they have the option to click on the tag and navigate directly to your product for purchase.
Although you can leverage Pinterest in a very similar way as a Service Based business in growing your Brand Awareness, being a product business, you also have the opportunity to shorten the sales cycle and have your audience choose to purchase your products right from Pinterest itself.
To do this, most product based businesses are showing inspirational video content that shows their ideal customer how to use the product and the product in real life.
For example, if you are selling a makeup product, you would be showing in real time your makeup product and different ways to wear the makeup throughout the year in different seasons or for different occasions.
In this case where you are showing in real time your product we hope for:
The Pinner to be inspired and to start asking themselves, where can I buy this?
The Pinner chooses to follow you and browse more of your content
You can also create long-form blog, video, or podcast content that can dive into other topics around makeup and fashion. If you choose to take this approach, you’ll have similar challenges and goals as a service based business, in that you should consider the experience for your customer once they are OFF Pinterest and have landed on your website.
For the audience that finds your Pins AND clicks off of Pinterest we hope for a few things:
The Pinner chooses to follow you and browse more of your content
The Pinner chooses to download a freebie and opt-in to your email list (for example a coupon code or free shipping)
Your strategy is to make more product sales and create brand awareness. So in both cases, we want the Pinner to see how your product fulfills a desire or provides a solution and that you are an authority in your space.
5 Easy Steps to Build Your Pinterest Strategy
Have you noticed that we have not yet talked about how many Pins per day or what time of day we should be Pinning?! Those are definitely important things to consider, however, they ARE NOT your strategy.
So now that you have some examples of how Pinterest has been used for different types of business models, I have an outline here of 5 Easy Steps to Build Your Pinterest Strategy. Answering these questions will guide you in knowing if Pinterest is right for your business and will provide you the right framework in knowing how to build your content strategy for Pinterest.
Your Next Steps: Build Your Pinterest Content Strategy
Once you decide what purpose Pinterest will serve for your business, you can start looking at what content you have that can support that strategy.
You might have more online content than you think! Take a look at emails, text messages, Instagram / TikTok content, blog, podcast, or even areas where you have been a guest on someone else's platform. All this can be used as content on Pinterest, and if you find gaps in your content this will give you a plan moving forward to know what content to create.
The easiest way to start if you already have a lot of short-form video content on TikTok or Instagram is to repurpose these videos into Pinterest Idea Pins.
