15 Apr 5 Tips for Perfecting Your Business Strategy on Pinterest
Last month, Pinterest hosted the first-ever Pinterest Presents summit for advertisers that included some promising news for the platform’s future, such as seeing a global audience growth of 40% year-over-year in 2020 for two unexpected demographics, Gen Z and men. Even more exciting, the platform announced a new enhanced conversion analysis dashboard coming later this year.
While these announcements are exciting, it’ll still be a few months until you can leverage the new dashboard and other upcoming features. In the meantime, our expert strategist at Ignite Social Media has broken down five tactics you can leverage right now to enhance your business strategy on Pinterest.
1. Optimize for Mobile
Pinterest has shared that 85% of Pinners are actively saving pins on the mobile app, so it’s important that your creative team is developing Pinterest visuals with a mobile-first mindset. That means tailoring your font sizes and styles to make sure they are legible on small screens and testing graphics and videos to ensure they’re not blurry or cut off by a vertical aspect ratio. This doesn’t just apply to organic pins that your brand is publishing but your advertising strategy as well. Make sure your Pinterest Ads are targeting mobile devices so you’re not missing audiences.
Also, channel specs change all the time (much to our dismay), but it’s important to keep up with these changes. Here’s a shortcut to the latest and greatest Pinterest specs your teams should be utilizing.
2. Leverage Shoppable Features
It’s no secret that online shopping increased last year as consumers were home-ridden during the pandemic. That said, Pinterest shopping specifically grew 50% in the first half of 2020. What’s more, if you’re targeting a U.S. audience, half of U.S. Pinterest users are shopping on the platform. So, if you’re not taking advantage of the shoppable features this platform provides, it’s time to start.
Here’s a cheat-sheet of current shoppable features on Pinterest:
- Product Pins: This asset leads people directly to your website where they can purchase the product. The pin itself features price, availability, and product title and description.
- Product Tagging: A recently improved tool that allows merchants the ability to tag exact products within an image, and more than one product in a single Pin.
- Catalogs: An aggregate of shoppable Product Pins where audiences can see more than just one product at a time. See if Catalogs are right for your brand here.
- Storefronts: A new way for audiences to discover your brand and easily shop your products, as recommended merchant profiles are served to audiences when they’re searching for shopping-related content. Storefronts are presented through the “shop” tab on your brands profile that features in-stock products organized by category.
- Shoppable Ads: Through either Shopping Ads or Personalized Collections Ads, you can promote your product groups through the catalog sales objective in Pinterest’s Ads Manager.
3. Utilize Keywords Properly
Keyword optimizations are a bigger part of your Pinterest business strategy than you know, especially since Google also indexes Pinterest and serves up relevant Pins within a user’s search. What’s more, 97% of top-searched pins are unbranded, meaning searchers aren’t using brand names in search queries. So there’s a big opportunity available to brands who do the right research and program their Pins properly.
For assistance with this type of optimization, we recommend using guided search, Pinterest Predicts, or Keyword Pin Buying. Later this year Pinterest will also be rolling out an interactive trends tool, but until then the aforementioned tactics can be extremely helpful.
4. Use the Right Ad Units
We’ve mentioned a few different ways you can leverage ads on Pinterest already, but as the paid media landscape gets more and more competitive, ads are going to become more expensive. Ensuring you’re spending your media dollars wisely and on the most effective ad units is important.
While there are five different ad formats currently available on Pinterest, it’s worth noting that video content continues to be on the rise (both organically and via paid). Recent research shows pinners are 2.6X more likely to make a purchase after viewing brand video content, and Pinterest plans to release Pinterest Premiere later this year, which will enable advertisers to purchase exclusive video placement in the home feed for a specific demographic, interest, or category for a designated time frame.
5. Ensure Content is Inspirational, Attainable, and Positive
It’s important that the visuals and content you’re publishing on Pinterest follow all three principles outlined above. Users are searching for inspiration on how to do something (how to decorate a room, cook a certain meal, prepare for an event, etc.), and they’re most interested in content that they believe they can realistically achieve. Because of that, leveraging User Generated Content (UGC) or Influencer Content can be a great tactic to ensure you’re not promoting content that may be interpreted as unfeasible.
Additionally, after this past year, many social media platforms have been making efforts to ensure their platforms create a positive experience for their users. Pinterest naturally fits into this category as 8 out of 10 people who use Pinterest says it makes them feel positive. So, make sure your content is designed similarly and meshes well with other positive content on the platform.
BONUS: Make Sure Content is Inclusive and Accessible
While this is our final piece of advice within this post, it shouldn’t be the last thing your teams think about. As you know, Pinterest is primarily a visual app, yet 2.2B people worldwide have a vision impairment or experience blindness. Because of this, it’s important your content is accessible to all audiences and leverage native tools that enable your content to be experienced properly by all.
I hope the above recommendations help get your business strategy on track for 2021, and that the upcoming additions to the platform prove to be even more beneficial. However, if your social media team is looking for assistance with optimizing your Pinterest business strategy, contact us for assistance. Our team is Pinterest Certified and happy to assist.
Additionally, keep yourself up-to-date on new Pinterest tools and features, as well as other trends in the social media marketing space by subscribing to our e-newsletter below.
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