Pinterest is the perfect place to market your unique physical goods — those one-of-a-kind items that make the ultimate gifts even for those people who have everything. We all have at least one person like that to shop for each season.
There are about 150 million Pinterest users, 2 million of whom save shopping pins on the platform every day. Nearly 93% of active pinners plan for purchases using Pinterest and 87 percent have bought something because of the platform. Customers love Pinterest, because its visual, and it offers low-pressure browsing at each person's own pace. This holiday season, put this power to work for your small business.
1. Create Stunning, Share-able Images
Get your images 100 percent right. Pinterest is a visual platform; that's its appeal.
- Your images for pinning must be sharp, colorful when possible and of the highest quality.
- Never scrimp on lighting, which is key to taking gorgeous images of a product.
- Use longer, narrower images for higher visual impact.
- Images should be at least 700-800 pixels wide and 1,000-1,100 pixels deep.
- Make certain your images are crisp enough to be seen; small images don't get pinned, and can actually catch your potential customer's eye, only to have them pin someone else's better image of a similar product.
- If your budget allows, consider hiring a professional photographer.
2. Offer Detailed Descriptions of Pins
Make sure that no one can see your pins and come away without knowing what they've been looking at.
- Ditch the sales-y tone, but give them all of the information they need to make a holiday buying decision.
- You don't want too many logos or any pushy pitches, but do include the right holiday and product keywords in product descriptions while keeping them easy and fun to read.
- Pin a wide range of products that are relevant and timely for holiday shoppers, like keepsakes and hand-crafted specialty items you can't get anywhere else.
- Include a call-to-pin in your descriptions; ask people to pin your best products so more people see them.
3. Create Unique Holiday Boards for a Unique Holiday Shopping Experience
Create useful holiday shopping boards and label them. Boards with unusual, interesting names get more visits, as do boards with names that clearly describe their contents. Boards with keywords also get more traffic, so use Pinterest's powerful searchability and whatever your holiday selling point is to draw shoppers.
4. Remember that Timing is Key
The most successful business Pinterest users pin frequently, up to 30 times daily. Schedule this out, because it works best to pin in steady streams, not in feast or famine spurts and droughts. Pin at the right times; generally, the best times to pin are from 2:00pm to 4:00pm and from 8:00pm to 11:00 pm Eastern Standard Time during the week. Add in Saturday morning, for those slow browsing with coffee mornings, and include peak times for your particular target audience.
5. Use Collaborative Boards to Build Community
Find a holiday board and join it. These collaborative boards allow users to pool great content and engage with each other, giving your pins more mileage. If you can't find a board you like, create one!
6. Keep an Eye on Strategic Repinning
No matter how carefully you time your pins, people will miss some of them. No problem: get more mileage from every pin by repinning your best pins from past months. This also shows your newer followers what they've missed. Repinning triggers sales, because recycled pins remind shoppers of things they wanted to buy, but forgot about.
7. Consider Buyable Pins
If you become a retailer on Pinterest, you can use Buyable Pins which let visitors buy through your pins right there on the platform. Only Rich Pins with lots of information on them can grab the buy button on Pinterest, so strive for those kinds of pins. This is Pinterest's answer to Amazon's instant shopping experience, and it is an asset to a small business. You can even search for Buyable Pins and filter your results using color, price, and other criteria.
Conclusion
People are curious and visually-inspired, so it's hardly a surprise that we love Pinterest and its countless boards of pinned dreams, ideas, solutions and possibilities. For small business owners with unique, hand-crafted, customized and other one-of-a-kind physical goods, there's no better way to share impactful images of your products and turn those views into sales. Keep these 7 Pinterest marketing tips for the holiday season in mind, and help your customers find ideal gifts for their loved ones.
Karla Lant Karla is a professional freelance writer and journalist who focuses on science, technology, marketing, business, politics, education, and technical writing.
