Effective holiday marketing using Pinterest

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The best time to start was yesterday.

Yes indeed. If you’ve not yet begun exploring Pinterest and tapping it for marketing your products you should do it at the earliest. With the festive season just around the corner, it's time for you to up your game with holiday marketing using Pinterest. Don’t worry if you’re new to Pinterest, what could be a better time to begin.

It's an absolute amazement how the visual platform grew at such a rapid scale and is now amongst one of the top favourites of social media enthusiasts. Pinterest grew meticulously in the past few years and now proudly boasts of over 200 million monthly active users.

Not to forget Pinterest is among the largest social media traffic generators and is gradually coming at par with the likes of twitter, facebook and Instagram. Now the vast audience that you could showcase your products to can be easily comprehended.

Pinterest can prove to be a major sales booster for your eCommerce marketplace if utilized effectively since consumers’ purchase decisions are increasingly being driven by social media these days. People are turning to Facebook, Instagram, and the likes in large numbers and are allowing a plethora of brands directly to their news feeds.

The platform can boost your online sales otherwise and more so in the holiday season with a large number of people turning to Pinterest to get ideas for what to buy and how to celebrate. You must have come up with Cyber Monday deals, Thanksgiving offers and Halloween specials, gift cards why not begin holiday promotions on Pinterest already and lift the spirits of those that intend to shop online.

If you have checked Pinterest out you must have seen how B2C and B2B marketplaces continuously strive to produce good quality product images and content for sharing. Some might stand out whereas the others may not. It all eventually comes down to how effectively the marketing is being carried out. If not then you must begin doing so to make sense of the type of posts you will be required to share.

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 Pinterest-The Idea

Pinterest allows people to share images and videos by pinning them on specific boards which then is consumed by people researching for that content.

Ever since Business Pinterest came about it became so much more than just a simple image sharing site. Now business could have a dedicated channel which was business-specific instead of a conventional personal account. B2B and B2C businesses utilize Business Pinterest accounts to display their products and drive sales, more so in the holiday season. Aligning marketing campaigns based on holidays and festivals along with creative newsjacking is a formula for success.

In case you have not yet begun exploring Pinterest for promoting the products of your marketplace, the holiday season is the right time to begin. We bring you a guide that you can follow and start your effective holiday marketing using Pinterest:

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Above you can see an exceptional product image pinned by amazon. The image instantly conveys the spirit of the holiday season and establishes a connect. A compelling image can always go a long way in driving the audience to your marketplace and eventually leading to a sale.

2-Use Keywords in Pin Description

Curate an informative and detailed description for your products. The description if well written can even transform a basic product into something that a customer might end up craving for. Today’s buyer loves to take informed decisions while spending, therefore it becomes all the more important to carefully state all the important details about your product.

The importance of keywords can’t be denied for a platform like pinterest that has proved to hold huge SEO strength. Which means your pin description should include keywords which one might search for in the lookout for this product as well as other similar ones. The more relevant the keywords the more relatable your pins woud be to the theme you wish to connect with, for example phrases like gifts for mom, christmas gifts, holiday home decor make the customer identify the utility of the product in the first glance itself.

3-Rich Pins

Rich pins allow for adding extra context in a pin as compared to a regular one. Rich pins are available in different types:

• App- Allows for downloading apps (think, your marketplace’s app) directly from the pin. This reduces the probability of the reader to move away from the product’s pin.
• Product-These type of rich pins convey the relevant information associated with the product such as availability, specifications, pricing etc. right away along with the pin without the user having to navigate away.

The other two kinds are Recipe rich pins and Article rich pins.

When you want to make sure the information relevant to the pin is displayed along with it, rich pin is your go to option.

4-Name your boards wisely

Boards help in easy identification of the type of pins they might contain and help in setting the customer’s expectations right when they land to a particular board.

Put some serious thought in naming your pins, including long tail keywords is also a smart thing to do to ensure increased visibility of your boards.

People tend to use phrases while searching for products hence choosing those probable phrases as your board names will make your associated pins more discoverable.

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 Above you may see how etsy carefully chooses its board names that end up informing just very clearly what a customer might expect in any of these boards. Note how popularly searched words while looking for gifts have been chosen as board names to make them easy to find.

5-Build relationships with Influencers

The influencing power popular social media personalities have over their fans and followers is no new information. Traditionally influencers would be renowned celebrities such as actors/ actresses, sports personalities and likewise but in the present day and age and influencer could be simply anyone.

Any ordinary person with an extraordinary follower count simply due to their social media activity is termed as an influencer.

It could be a great decision to build relationships with influencers in your niche who can share their pins on your boards in return for a fee. This way your product visibility will expand to the audiences that you might not have been reaching previously. In order to begin you should start with looking for people who are already sharing the kind of products or content that you would want to pitch. Influencers these days often share lookbooks directly lifted from a certain ecommerce website. Your fresh line of products for holiday season could be well represented by one who works in your niche.

Once you zero in on a few boards that are receiving considerable engagement you may begin to reach out to them and discuss the possibility of them promoting your products as well.

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6-Rearrange Boards

The product demand changes drastically throughout the year, depending on the season, the festivals, prevalent trends and what not. Therefore, you may need to rearrange the boards according to the popular demand. The best, hot selling product pinboards can be placed such so as to increase its visibility and draw viewers to it. Old Boards need not be deleted, instead, they can be shifted lower in the page and brought to the forefront when the need be.

7-Allow website visitors to pin

Including the pin option in your website would allow the viewers to pin the products they like directly from the marketplace. It would be similar to getting a customer thumbs up and help winning the credibility of new audiences.

8-Get a hang of Pinterest Advocacy 

If you are just starting out on pinterest you might as well need to spend time understanding where you might find the right audiences for your marketplace and what works and what not for your niche. Conversions might take time to happen but it will surely help you capture new audiences for your business whom you can nurture over time to bring in sales.

9-Engage with the community

Pinterest like Instagram, twitter etc. is a social media platform and no social media can be a one-way street. It is crucial to connect and engage with your followers by liking and repinning the content they share and also replying to them when they return the favour. This effort that would go into building a community around your page will eventually result in collecting audiences that would be advocating and promoting your brand for you.

10-Convey CTA with clarity

Your CTAs is undeniably a very important part of your pin. A hint of direction to your viewers as to what needs to be done next after they have arrived at your product pin is crucial.

A well thought of and strategically placed Call to Action can push the audience to take the next step.

11-Cleverly cross-link

You might not have utilised Pinterest a lot for marketing your products but if you are leveraging your followership on any other social media platform as well then you can provide those links in destination URL. If your marketplace has the loyal audience that engages with you over other platforms and reviews positively, it could have a great impact on your new audiences as well. The indirect advocacy can work wonders for your product marketing.

12-Check Pinterest analytics

If you own a business profile on Pinterest you would be able to check Pinterest Analytics for activities on your pins. The Pinterest analytics page lets you have a view of metrics such as:

• Daily impressions
• Daily viewers
• Monthly engagement, and
• Monthly viewers

An in-depth analysis of the activity can lead you to have a better understanding of what products and content is working best for your strategy. The likeability of certain types of pins or product types may give insights on the kind of products that need to be promoted more, the offers that need to go with them and the best method to pitch the same.

Audience analytics might also help make better sense of the audience that follows your profile. Understanding the audience would help in curating more targeted content that gains appreciation from your loyal follower base.

Final Thoughts:

Pinterest is different from other social media platforms in ways more than one. Therefore the marketing strategies that are working wonders on any other media may not necessarily work for Pinterest. Keeping in mind the differences the marketing strategy needs to be tailored to suit the interest of the audience during different times of the year.

Although there could be no hard and fast scheme for a successful approach little effort in terms of ensuring quality images, compelling product descriptions and effective call for action can help you build an attractive Pinterest profile which has the potential to contribute immensely to the conversions on your marketplace this holiday season.