Pinterest has received a lot of attention recently for becoming one of the fastest growing social media sites of all time.
Unlike the original version of Twitter, Pinterest focused heavily on visual content and presenting it in a way that makes it easy for users to discover new content targeted towards their interests.
Pinterest accounts for 25% of all referral traffic to retail sites and generates 4x more revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter. With numbers like these, Pinterest is hard to ignore for e-commerce marketing.
Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with Pinterest for My Baby Shower Favors, one of my e-commerce sites and I’m happy to say that we are the #1 or #2 Pinner for the term “baby shower”. Rankings can fluctuate over time but over the past several months, we’ve always been in the top ten.
Some of our boards are also ranked well for other related keywords, like “baby shower cupcakes” and “baby shower decorations”.
And so far, we achieved this without creating any original content…
How We Grew Our Presence on Pinterest
When we launched our Pinterest account, our sole focus was to create a resource that our target audience was interested in and grow our followers. Once we had a sizable following, we would then add more focus to promoting our brand and products.
I started by doing keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner and also looking up top Pinterest boards and seeing how big their following was.
Pinterest keyword suggestions also helped me to brainstorm ideas.
I then created the boards, wrote unique descriptions for each one and started pinning relevant items to each board.
Although we pinned more aggressively at the beginning, we later became more casual and focused on pinning at a more natural pace.
How We Beat Big Brands with More than 5x as Many Followers
No one knows the specifics of Pinterest’s ranking algorithm, but I believe that we were able to outrank larger competitors for a couple of reasons:
- Consistency – By pinning more consistently, we were able to generate ongoing traffic to our pins and boards.
Some of our competitors stopped pinning for months, which allowed us to surpass them. In fact, My Baby Shower Favors was #1 for several months because other more established pinners hadn’t pinned anything new in months.
I don’t think that pinning every day is required to rank well. In fact, Modern Baby Shower Ideas was still in the top 5 even though they didn’t pin anything for months, probably because they had a lot of pins that were still getting views and repins.
But Pinterest users are always looking for fresh new pins and ideas. Old pins will get repinned and viewed less as time goes on.
So simply being consistent and pinning regularly can increase activity on your Pinterest account and keep followers engaged.
- Quality – As we continued to pin images, we paid attention to what types of images were getting repinned.
People liked creative food and decoration ideas as well as resource lists. Our boards and pins have done well because we focused on pinning content that our target audience was interested in.
- Paying attention to seasonal trends – Our account picked up a ton of new followers from creating a Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas board.
I was initially unsure of whether creating these boards would be a good idea since the interest in them would decline sharply after the holiday was over.
However, creating a Halloween board and pinning creative Halloween food and party ideas to it proved be an excellent move. Our Pinterest pin views nearly tripled, while many competitors ignored Halloween.
Even after Halloween, our Pinterest views are up more than double. We do have Thanksgiving and Christmas boards that we are actively pinning to, so it should be interesting to see if views will remain strong or decline after the holidays.
Future Plans – How I Plan to Increase Traffic and Sales from Pinterest
To improve the results and traffic to My Baby Shower Favors, we will need to focus on a few things:
1) It’s clear from our analytics that we need to start creating content. Even without creating content, our activity on Pinterest has generated some brand awareness and even a few sales.
Creating content should increase our visibility on this channel and grow our blog following and sales further.
Tools like Canva and PicMonkey make Pinterest friendly image creation easy. I’ve been using these tools to create graphical header images for blog posts on this blog.
2) For most of the year, we didn’t pin any of our own content at all. Our boards were focused strictly on what the target audience would want to see.
More recently, we created a “My Baby Shower Favors” board around September and I also pinned some of our items onto other boards.
This activity has increased the visibility of pins related to our brand.
Thus, we will be pinning our own products in addition to content.
3) Another thing that I may play around with is Pinterest community boards, but I will try starting a community first on Google Plus or another channel first. Although commenting is allowed on Pinterest, Pinterest is not a channel where users are social.
So creating an offsite community may be a good way to encourage bloggers to network with each other.
This particular Pinterest account has been a lot of fun to manage and I’m looking forward to improving our results even further.
For more Pinterest related tips, be sure to check out these posts:
How to Promote Your Blog Content: 40+ Experts Share Marketing Tips – http://www.smallbusinessideasblog.com/how-to-promote-your-blog
How I Increased Social Sharing by 96% on a Post – http://www.smallbusinessideasblog.com/increase-blog-sharing
About Brian Liang
Hey Brian,
Not bad man. Good stuffs! I love your future plans and reminds me a lot of myself last time.
I wasn’t targeting Pinterest at all but when I started focusing on it, I noticed some insane traffic from it. Maybe insane is an overstatement but it is definitely a great stat to have.
Thanks for writing this and will reply your email shortly!
~Reginald
Thanks Reginald! Pinterest is definitely an interesting animal, but I think it has a lot of potential. I actually find it to be one of the more enjoyable social media channels.
Hi Brian,
We got started with Pinterest in September this year and there’s a lot of potential. I wanted to see if there’s opportunities to drive traffic back to our B2B blog. It’s been a little harder than I thought but I definitely think there’s something there. I see a growing audience of people looking for business related tips.
I know Pinterest published guidelines few months ago about SEO, I remember them saying that verifying your website is a must, using keywords in description as well but without being spammy. They advise to not use hashtags too much but rather a full sentence description.
I was also wondering. Are you using product rich pins (price and availability of product showed up in pins). Was wondering if that could also help with ranking / visibility. I know they have a gift section dedicated to product pins.
Hi Aurelie. I did have rich pins installed, but I think we need to update the code because at some point, it looked like the price stopped showing up. This article has some interesting info about rich pins and they say that it does tend to increase engagement and visibility. I know that Pinterest will also email people about price drops with e-commerce rich pins, so I’m sure that helps as well:
http://www.getelastic.com/the-point-of-using-rich-pins
I do think B2B usage marketing on Pinterest is possible. Hubspot, for example, has maintained an active board and accumulated quite a following.
I don’t use hash tags much either at the moment and if so, I usually put them at the end of the description. Most of my popular pins don’t even have hash tags in them and I noticed that most Pinterest experts don’t use them on Pinterest regularly. Following the Pinterest guidelines seems to be a good way to go.
I guess the best takeaway for me after reading this post is the application of consistency, quality, and paying attention to personal trends when doing pinterest marketing!
I am not really keen on how to go about Pinterest marketing successfully but I guess its ideal to borrow the lessons of this post. They just seem very practical and realistic!
I shared this comment in kingged.com as well
Thanks Sunday – consistency surely & quality surely is important for Pinterest as well as other online marketing channels.
Brian,
Just saw this via Twitter, and I’m passing it along to my team to get their thoughts. Have you seen a significant uptick in site traffic / conversions through these efforts? How much time + how many people were dedicated to the efforts here?
Either way, this post is bookmarked, and you have a new reader. Great article.
Thanks,
Mickie
http://www.ereleases.com/?a=76
Thanks Mickie! Originally, it was just me and one other person. Ultimately, I took over the project myself and I’d say that you probably wouldn’t need more than one person to manage Pinterest. I probably spend less than an hour a day on it now.
As far as traffic and conversion increases, I suspect we’ll see more as we integrate more pins from our own site into the mix and match it up with a good content marketing strategy.
An excellent outline of how Pinterest can be effectively used to promote a business. Consistency and quality are definitely key factors for success.
Thanks Vinci! That pretty much sums it up
Hi there. Thank you for your post. Now I am decided to start showing products on Pinterest. Hope it will work as it did for you. Congrats, Matija, Slovenia.
Welcome, Matija – hope it goes well for you also
I have a lot of activity on Pinterest such as likes, shares, and followers but no increase in sales just yet.
I have faith, but it just seems more difficult than I originally anticipated.
Thanks Kristi. It seems that creating your own original visual content is one of the keys to turning Pinterest into a sales generator. It can also depend on what you’re selling.
Hi Brian,
Very good article on how we can promote our business by pinterest .
I was optimisation on facebook,linkedin and twitter.Now will start using pinterest and will definitely follow the article
Shaswat
Thanks, Shaswat!
I figure the best takeaway for me in the wake of perusing this post is the utilization of consistency, quality, and focusing on individual patterns while doing advertising!
I am not so much enthused about how to go about Pinterest showcasing effectively however I figure its optimal to get the lessons of this post. They simply appear to be extremely viable and practical!
Thanks Digi! That’s a great way of looking at it, even if you don’t use Pinterest.
This is such an excellent resource on Pinterest, thanks for sharing this information.
Welcome, Navdeep!
Howdy Brian,
Good article on how we can advance our business by pinterest .
I was streamlining on facebook, linkedin and twitter.Now will begin utilizing pinterest and will take after the article
Regards
Thanks Karan! Glad you liked the article.
thanks for sharing this awesome guide on pinterest marketing.
Welcome Gokul! Glad you enjoyed it!
Wow! Great article, I am just searching and found your blog. I would like to thank you for the informative post also it will help the reader… Thanks again!
Welcome Angelina! Glad you stopped by to read my articles.
Pinterest is very famous with high domain authority and can be useful for the digital marketing. Well, you have explained that nicely. I must say you have enough knowledge of the topic.
Greets from India.
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Welcome Suhail! Glad you liked the article and have a good one!