Do your research

Before you start anything, I recommend researching your keywords first as you will need to apply them everywhere - in your bio, your pin titles, board titles, board descriptions and pin descriptions.

Think about the services you offer and what content you have, this will help shape your keyword research.

But where do you start searching for relevant keywords? There are many places to find keywords including but not limited to:

·      In the Pinterest search bar

·      On pins themselves

·      In the pin titles

·      In the pin descriptions

·      In Pinterest trends

·      In google and amazon searches

Make your bio work for you

Next thing is to optimise your profile to make sure Pinners know who you are so when someone looks at your profile it should immediately tell them:

• Who you are
• What you do
• Who you help
• What problem you solve

This is where you can start to put your keyword research to good use. Make sure you include keywords everywhere, including your bio!

For example:

“Brand designer helping small businesses create standout visual identities • Tips, templates & brand strategy insights.”

Make sure you also include:

• A high-quality headshot or logo
• A link to your website or lead magnet
• Your main keywords in your display name e.g. “Copywriter | Email Marketing Expert”

What content should you be posting?

Next, think about the content you’re pinning.

Is it all relevant to the services you offer? Think about what kind of content you have and what you will be creating, and create boards to match those themes.

Your Pinterest boards are another fundamental place to use your keywords so make sure you name boards using terms your audience searches for.

With each board, include a detailed description with relevant keywords and organize them so your most important and relevant topics appear first.

To give a sense of brand unity to your profile you can create board covers in your brands font and colours.

Ultimately, you only want to drive traffic to your own website and not anyone else’s through re-pinning other people’s content. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t re-pin from other profiles for your own research.

The answer to this is creating secret boards

You can create a board and then make it secret so it’s not visible to anyone who visits your profile. You can even invite collaborators.

Create pins people will want to click on

Next step is to design pins that pinners will want to click on. To design the perfect pin there is a list of specifics you need to follow:

• Use vertical images (2:3 ratio works well).
• Add clear text overlays that explain the benefit.
• Use high-quality, visually consistent branding.
• Include a strong call to action when appropriate.
• Make Pin titles clear and concise
• Ensure landing pages match the Pin content

For more information on how to create the perfect pin, click here.

Pinterest loves consistency

Create a pin plan to ensure you post regularly and consistently. It’s better to pin daily rather than pinning several times in one day, every few weeks. Pinning daily isn’t as onerous as it may sound as you can create multiple pins for the same piece of content.

Click here to find out how to create multiple pins out of one piece of content.

If you’re a small business, you might not have a huge amount of content, so posting one pin per day is a good basis to start with.

Building your brand authority

It’s important to build your brand authority so remember the following advice when planning your pin strategy

• Make sure you stay within a clear niche.
• Create related content clusters across multiple boards.
• Publish content at least 2 months before peak demand e.g. start pinning for Halloween in August and Valentine’s Day in December
• Follow trends by monitoring seasonal searches and trending topics and planning your content accordingly.

Analyse your performance

And just like social media platforms, analyse and measure your metrics regularly. This way you can identify:

• Top-performing Pins
• Best-performing boards
• Audience interests

By keeping a close eye on your metrics, you will know which topics you should create more content around and how you can create better performing pins.

If you like to know more about incorporating Pinterest into your marketing strategy, drop me a line.

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