21 Oct 5 Pinterest Tips for Retailers During the Holiday Season
Pinterest takes silver in terms of social media referral traffic, second only to Facebook. That traffic becomes integral to retailers and other brands during the Holiday Season. Here are five tips for how to ready and optimize your brand’s Pinterest presence for the upcoming retail season.
1. Use Guided Search for Content Planning
Guided search is one of Pinterest’s unsung heroes for content planning and social discovery. If you’re not sure what guided search is, they’re the suggested keywords that Pinterest provides when you search on their platform. Guided search essentially lets you know what Pinterest says is hot at the moment. The search terms are so easy for a user to add to narrow their search (just click the word and it’s added to your initial search) that creating content for the top categories means you may be found more frequently. Utilizing the keywords in your content and crafting your content to match some of the top search recommendations will assist in helping your brand be discovered. It should also lead your content strategy for board themes, titles and descriptions for the Holiday Season.
2. Promote Singular Products
Pinterest is typically all about collections and showing multiple products together to encourage purchase and discovery. For the holiday season, users move from using Pinterest as a collection of inspirational and aspirational content, to perusing for gifts and items for purchase. Be sure that your products stand-out when they come looking. Use specific product attributes and keywords in pin descriptions. This may mean even explicitly showcasing the problem the items solves, who it may be for, or even appearing as an alternate option to DIY gifts by including “DIY” in the product description.
3. Sign up for Promoted Pins
Promoted Pins have been released out into the wild and in one test campaign we executed we received a CPC of $0.56. You must have a Pinterest business account to access Promoted Pins, but if you still don’t have access, join the Promoted Pins waitlist here. Also, be sure to read our key learnings from being a part of the Pinterest Beta.
4. Consider Buyable Pins
If you’re not already signed up for Buyable Pins with your eCommerce platform, you may not be able to get access to them prior to the Holiday season, as some platforms are still limiting access until 2016. However, if you use Shopify, Demandware, Bigcommerce, IBM Commerce, or Magento it’s worth exploring whether you can have this feature activated prior to the Holiday rush. If you don’t use one of the partner eCommerce platforms, be sure to sign up for the Pinterest Buyable Pin waitlist as Pinterest is working directly with several large brands. Keep in mind that these only appear on mobile, but let’s be real, that’s when you really need the streamlined purchasing options anyways.
5. Temporarily Edit Board and Product Description
If Pinterest isn’t a huge priority for your brand during the majority of the year, this one tip may still help you to be found this Holiday Season. Adjusting and creating holiday-relevant content and boards just for the short-term can help your same content to appear in relevant holiday searches. After the holiday season is over, change your content back to evergreen optimized titles and descriptions.
Tell us what you think about our tips for Pinterest in the comments below!
