Now you have all the pieces, it’s time to put them together to form a plan that you can follow one step at a time in order to build your viewers and to gain mass influence.
Step 1: Build Your Brand
The first step is to build your brand. This means you need to make sure that you know ‘who you are’ as a business before you tackle Pinterest. This is something that should come before you begin on any social media site. You need to make sure you have a clear ‘mission statement’ that ties all your different products, blog posts and activities together.
This should then be expressed through a logo which should bleed through into your web design. Make sure you have a website set up that has a design language consistent with the rest of your branding and then bring that same color scheme and logo to each of the social media sites you sign up with.
It’s this consistency that will ultimately ensure that each interaction with a customer increases your brand visibility and helps to build your authority. This will also considerably help you to appear more professional as you maintain the same design sensibilities in everything you do, rather than appearing not to have any particular strategy.
The mantra of most businesses when it comes to social media marketing is to ‘be everywhere’ and consistency is key with that. Make sure your Pinterest account is a business account and link it with your website using the code that Pinterest gives you.
Step 2: Link Your Accounts
Now you should do a little prep work to make sure that your work flow is going to be as smooth as possible and to help yourself more easily add new content to your Pinterest boards/share users between your accounts. Make sure that you have a link to your Pinterest page right on your homepage then and even consider adding a widget in your sidebar so that your visitors can migrate to Pinterest from there.
Likewise, ensure that you Tweet about your Pinterest page and that you share your Instagram images on Pinterest. You can use IFTTT to set up some of these relationships and that will save you a lot of time. You should also install the Instagram app on your mobile device and the Instagram plugin for Chrome – both of which will make it easier for you to keep adding new content.
Use Shareaholic meanwhile to add social sharing buttons to your website, thereby allowing other people to share your content. This is also a good time to set-up rich article pins with your website so that the pins that do get shared from your website will have titles and information under them.
Step 3: Provide Value
Now begins the most important part of your Pinterest marketing strategy: delivering value. Make sure that you are posting content to Pinterest regularly and that you have come up with some kind of ‘angle’ for your boards that will really appeal to your audience. You might focus on inspirational images, beautiful images, or tips and ideas. Either way, your board should fulfill some kind of purpose and be useful to your followers.
It should be so valuable as to essentially stand as its own ‘product’ and attract viewers on its own merit. Only occasionally will you then link your images back to products you’re selling, or try to get people to sign up to your mailing list etc. Make sure to carefully choose the tags you add to your pins so that people can find your images and write comments underneath to provide context.
Good titles can also help a lot. If you’re still unsure of what works, then spend some time looking at the boards we recommended to get ideas. You should also make sure to keep posting great value content to your website that people can share through Pinterest. Use analytics to see which content is performing best and make sure that you feature attractive images that will grab attention and get people to pin and repin.
You should also spend some time interacting with the community and building relationships: that means repining the content you find from other users, posting comments and sending messages to your followers. This will help you to build more of a relationship with those users.
Step 4: Monetize
Monetization is the step that should come last, but of course it’s still very important. The best way to monetize your Pinterest account is to add your own products or to mention your services in the text below your posts. The great thing about selling products through Pinterest is that the new ‘Buy Now’ button will allow you to sell directly like an eCommerce store.
Otherwise, use the ‘Rich Product’ pins and use these to keep your viewers updated regarding the items you have in stock, the price and where they can get hold of them. More important than these direct sales though is just to build your audience and to gain their trust so that you can bring them to your website when they’re looking for services and products like yours. This is when social media is its most effective, so don’t get impatient and drive them away!
Final Words
There you have it: that’s everything you could possibly need to know to start succeeding on Pinterest! Really though, the most important learning will occur ‘on the job’ as you go through the act of posting content and using the tool. When you first sign up, it might seem like a complicated platform to begin with, but you’ll quickly find your footing and at that point it can be a lot of fun too.
