Vincent NG
After browsing through a few different brands on Pinterest I’ve noticed that many of them are making some basic mistakes on Pinterest.
This is why I came up with the Pintalysis Marketing Blueprint, a framework that helps guide marketers on what to consider and how to use Pinterest to maximize their brand exposure, and monetization.
The Pintalysis Marketing Blueprint consists of five different pillars for a comprehensive Pinterest marketing and business strategy. This blog article offers an introduction to Pintalysis.
All five pillars work together in harmony to provide an integrated approach to marketing. The first four pillars are listed in priority order, with the fifth pillar focusing on website development.
The First Pillar of Pintalysis: Business and Marketing Goals
Before jumping into Pinterest, a business needs to be clear about the types of business and marketing objectives they would like to achieve. This will depend on the nature of the business. For an e-commerce site it will be about driving traffic to the site and converting them into being online customers.
For a service business, a great business and marketing objective is to drive more web visitors to the website, and generate leads from Pinterest.
For business to business, the marketing goal may be to increase the brand’s awareness among the target demographic. General Electric does an amazing job of using their Pinterest board to bring awareness to their company with hilarious content, like the “Hey Girl” board featuring Thomas Edison.
These different types of goals will require metrics. If you are a large enterprise, analytic tools such as Curalate and Piquora are able to help track metrics such as repins, the most popular pins from your website, and so forth. Other tools such as Pinterest’s very own analytics tool can tell you who has been pinning and give you an idea of how many users are pinning from your site. While Google Analytics will offer insight into how long people are staying on the directed site that came from Pinterest.
The Second Pillar of Pintalysis: Visually Optimizing Your Pins
The second pillar of the Pintalysis is to ensure visual optimization of your pins. This means choosing images that are absolutely eye catching that will make people stop and take a look. Remember that your pins are competing with dozens of others every given second.
Ensure your pins are from 300-540 pixels wide, and no longer than 1900 pixels. Recently Pinterest added a “Expand Pin” at the bottom of pins that are longer than that, and that “Expand Pin” happens on both desktops and mobile.
When appropriate consider adding captioning in the picture to draw people in. This is your chance to be a print advertising specialist. Create big fonts that clearly state what the pin is about when clicked on such as, “Top Ten Ways to Protect Leather Shoes.” Sephora recently created a Mother’s Day board in which pins highlight gifts that are excellent to give away. As you can tell they created some text at the bottom of the pin to grab your attention.
Notice in the picture below – on the left Sephora uses an intriguing and customized pin to promote an item on their Mother’s Day board. On the right hand side is a picture of the actual product after the pin has been clicked on. This can be done by uploading your customized image and then selecting the specific url you want the pin to redirect to.
Notice how Sephora optimizes their Pinterest photos, but it redirects to to their site image after. This is a smart Pinterest marketing technique. 283Save
The Third Pillar of Pintalysis: Create Virality through Community
Creating virality takes work, especially for brands that are just starting off. But virality begins by increasing the number of followers. After all, you can have a great pin, but if nobody sees it, then nobody is going to share it. Virality can also be increased by participating in community boards on Pinterst.
Virality is about developing relationships with influencers in your industry. When you’re able to create relationships with those in your industry, consider a way of working with each other to cross promote each other’s pins. This is the same concept of guest blogging. If you’ve developed a really great relationship with an influencer consider creating a board together to make the most of each other’s followers.
Social sharing is one of the aspects of going viral. Ensure that you are letting your followers know about your Pinterest account. Share with your followers the most repinned content from Pinterest on Twitter. Have a Facebook tab/app for Pinterest on your Facebook page, Woobox offers one for free. Share your best pins from Pinterest onto Instagram. Ensure that you have a “Follow Us on Pinterest” button on your website.
The Fourth Pillar: Search Optimization
When I discuss about search optimization, I’m not just referring to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is very important, but I’m also referring how to optimize pins and boards within Pinterest’s search engine.
For example one of the aspects of getting pins to show up in search is through the use of keywords in the descriptions of pins and in boards. This holds true to for SEO of your Pinterst page. But the domain name that a pin originates from also plays a role in search within Pinterest’s search engine, this is why there are some pins that have no keywords in their description in the pin or board, and yet show up high for search terms in Pinterest.
Ensuring that all your pins, boards, and the page itself is search optimized for both engines will help maximize the online exposure of your page and drive more traffic to your website.
The Fifth Pillar: Optimize Your Pinterest Page for Sharing
The Fifth and last pillar is vitally important for e-commerce sites or sites that require visual content. Ensure that your website has been optimized to allow for Pinterest sharing. This means that your blog has a pin it button so that people can share articles on Pinterest (my biggest pet peeve are social media blogs that talk about Pinterest, and yet they don’t have a Pin It button available).
This also means having wonderful photos that are going to be visually optimized for your website. E-commerce sites are often able to show multiple photos of a product. Bottica.com, the online jewellery site, does an amazing job of showing their products being worn by people. And it goes through a gallery showing their jewellery from different perspectives. This not only increases purchase intent, it also increase the pinning intent.
Bottica does a great job of adding Pin It buttons to all their photos for social sharing. This is a simple Pinterest tactic that all e-commerce sites should focus on. 283Save
Traditionally many blogs added photos in a way that was more of a psychological tactic to stand out, but rarely did the photos have any real visual appeal to the reader. Now it’s all changed, the feature image on a blog or any website needs to be Pinterest worthy so that that pin can get repinned again and again. You have to treat the feature photos on blog posts as if you are creating a magazine ad.
Those are the five pillars of Pintalysis. Look back at your own Pinterest marketing strategy and see if there’s anything that’s missing. Sometimes it can be the most simple things such as not SEOing your Pinterest Board descriptions. Over the next few months, I will be sharing more details of the Pintalysis Marketing Blueprint in an upcoming e-book. Please note that Pintalysis is not officially associated with Pinterest.
