How to Reach Potential Customers Via Pinterest
If you are a business looking for the best ways of reaching potential customers, have you thought about Pinterest?
With 300 million monthly active users, 81% of which are female, Pinterest is a must for any business offering lifestyle or creative type services, particularly those for women. Founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, the site went live in March 2010 and has continued to grow and grow.
It has a diverse amount of information in it: everything from food and recipes to lifestyle and wellbeing, weddings, fashion, history, crafts, hobby interests and much more! Plus you can link the posts through to your website. So, if you have something to sell, potential customers can find out more information.
Confession time: while I have had a personal Pinterest account for several years, it never occurred to me to use it as a business tool until I did a training course on it. I had thought it was a frivolous platform that was only for oohing and aahing over beautiful dresses and shoes.
How wrong I was. Since growing the number of Pins I personally put up, I have increased my following ten-fold.
I have two Pinterest accounts. The first one is for my social media business and on it I put up tips for social media, share some posts I’ve done for clients and generally try to link to potential clients. My author Pinterest account is full of information about my books (I pin inspiration pictures for each book), share with my fans the things I like away from writing and pass on inspirational quotes from the greats of literature.
For both of these, it’s not just about selling my products per se, although I do hope people will click through to my websites. It’s more about sharing information, making connections with other Pinterest users and getting to know new readers or potential clients at the same time they get to know me.
So, how do you use it? I like to think of Pinterest as a bit of an online scrap book. You see an image, pin it to your own pages and build from there. Image is key. You need to have the right images of your products or the concept of the post so that they’ll be eye-catching and interesting enough for the Pinterest user to click through. Use a site like Canva to personalise your image — adding a message or a quote — and save it as a jpg.
Now it’s time to upload it to your Pinterest site. I would suggest that you set up a business account with them as you get so much more. With a business account you not only gain access to Pinterest’s analytics dashboard and statistics which enables you to see which Pins are working best for your business. You can also advertise using promoted or buyable Pins. And Pinterest will also give you early access new features which you don’t get on personal accounts.
Okay, let’s get back to uploading your Pin. You’ve uploaded the image or video (more on videos in a minute), what next? Don’t forget to add your title, what your Pin is about (both are key for SEO) and your web address. Your followers see your pages, like your posts and they then pin it to their own boards. Their followers see it, like and it pin it to their boards and so on. Before you know it you have built up a huge following of people just waiting for your next Pin.
As a business, it’s great because if you use the right key words, your reach on Pinterest can grow organically without you having to splash out money on expensive adverts.
For people selling physical products such as beauty, fashion or other items, there are loads of things you can do to promote your shop. You can put images of your items up by themselves on shown on a model, you can do video tutorials on how to use your make-up or share techniques, and you can put up images of things that have inspired you to create your artwork.
I think the way forward for Pinterest is doing videos and that’s something I’m looking at for my businesses (author and social media). I have dabbled already by creating three book trailer videos for three of my novels. These were put up recently and have already garnered 5000 likes and shares. I made them up on Movie Maker (other programmes are available) and they’ve been my most successful posts yet.
So, to conclude: get yourself a Pinterest business account, create some Pins and get them uploaded. Do it on a regular basis, pin things your future clients or fans will find useful and watch the number of followers grow.