This article was contributed by Shashvat Vats.

Follow this Ultimate Pinterest Guide to help understand the importance of using Pinterest for marketing your business.

From how to get started with Pinterest to the optimization of pins, boards & content as well as more advanced campaigns, PSEO, analytics and rich pins.

Why Pinterest?

Well, that’s a fair question to be asked from a business owner’s point of view. Here are some some stats that will give you further clarity on the topic.

As per these statistics, Pinterest continues to grow at an astonishing rate (111%) and is only second in terms of growth percentage, SnapChat (120%) being the first.

This interest-based social media platform attracts users, who are into crafts and arts. Tutorial guides and DIY (do it yourself) pins have a greater likelihood to be clicked compared with other sort of images.

More important data reveals that shoppers influenced by Pinterest are likely to spend around $80 (average) on Shopify as compared to users ($40) who are influenced by Facebook.

The pins on Pinterest have more longevity than that of tweets and Facebook posts. On an average, a tweet lasts for few minutes, a Facebook post may long for few hours or couple of days in some cases. But in case of pins, the live period extends up to 3 months.

A huge chunk of online shoppers (around 25%), admit that they have bought at least a product/service after finding it on Pinterest.

The simplistic interface of Pinterest has made it possible for advertisers to use this platform as a medium to increase their customer reach. Pinterest ads are not even seen as advertisements but as a pin, which is promoting the particular product or service.

More and more users are joining this interest & image-based platform, owing the increase to its simple UI and UX. About 80% of users on Pinterest have admitted they’ve purchased using Pinterest as a referral medium.

These numbers clearly state it all.

Getting Started With Pinterest

There are two types of accounts: beginners & business.

First, you must set up your personal profile and then set up your business profile. See how to set up your business account on Pinterest.

Once your business account is successfully created, you will be directed to the dashboard of your Pinterest profile. Get familiar with the basics of Pinterest and then read on below to learn how to get traffic to your website. We will start with how to optimize your pins, boards, content, SEO and conclude at Pinterest analytics.

Optimization of Pins

It is quite possible that some of you might not have any idea about pin optimization on Pinterest. Worry not, below we give you each detail regarding how to make your pin more searchable, attractive and effective.

It is quite simple actually. You just post the image, which inspires you most and that’s it! Your work is done, right?

Wrong. There are different parameters to be taken in consideration, when deciding what to pin on Pinterest.

People just love to see imagery with an in-depth message and valuable information. As a business owner, you should have a crystal clear understanding of what & how to pin on Pinterest. Some simple but effective examples are shown below.

You can notice that CoolResumes has given an ideal example of how to optimize the pins, in order to grab more users’ attention. A bold headline, with the content inside the pin.

The basic idea is that you make your pin searchable first; which is done by adding an appropriate description to your pin.

Also, Pinterest adores tall images so design to the appropriate size.

Board Optimization

After your pins are set, it is now time to direct our efforts to boards. A board is a collection of different images arranged in a respective interest based topic.

If you have an online apparel store, you can make different boards to pull more customers’ attention towards your brand. You can create different boards such as ‘Vacation Special’, ‘Summer Fest’ or any similar topic so as to reach more relevant customers on Pinterest.

Coca Cola, being one of the most influential brands has created different boards such as ‘Thanksgiving’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Recipes’ and similar. This draws the attention of a large number of different consumers & target markets to its brand.

Making group boards and discussion boards provides you chance to involve multiple target audiences.

Content Optimization

Content is considered king in terms of online marketing.

Some of the major content optimization tips that will help brands increase their visibility and reach a larger customer-base are listed below:

• Write relevant content & keywords in the boards & pin description area
• Make it short & effective
• You can use text overlays in the images, as likeability of users clicking increases in case of images with text overlays.

Seeing how intelligently and creatively the above pin is created, you can see why The New York Times is one of the world’s eminent names in news industry. This pin creates curiosity and draws the user to click to read more, leading the user to their website.

Pinterest Campaigns & Contests

Since customer engagement is of utmost importance for any brand, users can use campaigns & contests to promote their business on Pinterest.

See here for 3 inspirational Pinterest marketing campaigns.

See the above “Pintermission” campaign by Honda. In this campaign, Honda chose 5 of its influencers and told them to take a break from Pinterest for 1 day and do what they have been pinning about.

Owing to this successful campaign, Honda was able to expose around 4.6 million users to their #Pintermission boards, which lead to around 5k pins and 2k likes.

People love it when brands ask for their opinion or start a contest. So keep your customers engaged by providing them a chance to share their opinion on certain trending topics and hot issues.

PSEO (Pinterest SEO)

One of the most important factors in increasing your brand visibility is that users should be able to find your pins, boards and profile with ease.

Pinterest also has on-site SEO implemented, which helps users to find the content of their interest, via the use of tags or keywords.

You can see that for the search result ‘weight loss’, all the relevant pins are shown. It means all the brands that have any product or service related to anywhere close to weight loss will show here.

This is the real power of PSEO. Here are some tips for better optimisation

• Use relevant keywords in your headline, description
• Use trending hashtags
• Add the backlink of your website on every image that is posted from outside websites. This will increase the traffic on your website effectively.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest has its own in-built analytical tool, which helps your business grow organically and maximize profits. Get to know the ins and outs of Pinterest Analytics as it will help maximize your efforts.

Rich Pins

Rich pins are the latest inclusion by Pinterest, in order to encourage all sorts of businesses to start using this amazing platform accordingly.

Introduced in the year 2016, there are 6 kinds of rich pins:

1.  Movie
2.  Product
3.  Article
4.  Recipe
5.  Place
6.  App

Each pin is meant for a separate purpose. eg. clicking on a Product Pin directs you to the stock (availability) and price of the product, and users can easily click to buy the product. You can also “Promote” pins to expand the visability.

Conclusion

Pinterest has been climbing steadily to reach the top place on social media platforms and because Pinterest’s users are mainly interested in purchasing products/services, this platform has been a real blessing for online businesses.

Different social media sites have different core uses, eg. Facebook users come on hoping to connect with friends and read news; Twitter users come for news updates and networking. What about Pinterest?

More than 70% of the users on Pinterest users come online with an intention of purchasing a product. Since Pinterest is a great place to refer, compare and choose products/services, customers love this unique platform when it comes to online shopping.

So use this ultimate Pinterest guide and tap into a market that’s ready to buy!

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Shashvat Vats loves to write about the latest trends and happenings in the marketing industry.