A lot of people question whether Pinterest is worth it, or have never even given it a second thought. If that’s you, maybe you don’t know how to get the most out of Pinterest for your business? Because believe me there are plenty! Here’s to hoping I can make those doubters see the light.

It’s best to think of Pinterest as a visual search engine. People don’t go there to network or chat with their friends – it’s a platform for discovery. Whether it’s on a personal level, for your own business or for a client, if you’re not on the platform then you’re missing out on a huge audience of over 300 million active monthly users. Not only are they active, they’re already leisurely strolling through the sales funnel, simply waiting for your perfect Pin to catch their eye and make them realise they should go with you instead of your competitor.

So, what about the competition?

Everyone should be capitalising on Pinterest, if you’re thinking there’s not much point in it yourself – maybe your competition is too? You should be using that assumption to your advantage! If your business is in the following industries, I would be extremely concerned if you’re not making the most of having a Business Pinterest account: interiors/home, cooking, weddings, fashion, graphics, health and wellness or travel. Also, if your business has an eCommerce site you’re also missing the beat – you can directly link your products to your Pinterest pins! I’m going to include some statistics that should really ring some alarm bells for those of you who might be neglecting this platform…

• • 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of $100k+ (£77k+), that means you could be missing out on getting seen by 1.2 million people (per month) with some seriously strong spending power.
  • 84% use Pinterest when they’re trying to decide what to buy – that’s a huge potential audience that are already engaged and just need to see their options (your business/client being one of them). This is compared to only 60% on Instagram!
  • 80% of Pinterest users have bought products based on a brands content on Pinterest.

• 2 million pins are saved to shopping related boards every day!
• The average time spent on Pinterest per visit is 14.2 minutes.

5 things you need to remember to get the most out of Pinterest for your business:

1. Portrait, long & tall images work best: the Pinterest layout favours images in this format and is more likely to catch the eye of your audience. Try and stick to a ratio of 2:3 – ideally 600px x 900px.
2. Be consistent! With your branding, logo & photography style. Try to portray yourself/business as an authority that people will actively look for when making a decision, sticking to a template of sorts helps increase brand recognition and click throughs for those who already like what they see.
3. Remember that 85% of Pinners use the platform on mobile, if you’re adding text to images (rich pins), try and bare this in mind ensuring that it is still going to be readable. But only use text if it is enhancing your image and aiding you in telling a better story.
4. Optimise your boards! Put keywords in your board/pin names, descriptions and don’t forget to select a category!
5. Put a bit more time into the images you choose for a Pin, a quickly taken snap on your phone generally isn’t going to cut it as it would for an Instagram story. Think about the quality, background and general style – then be consistent.

Pinterest does need a lot of attention, and you’re unlikely to see results overnight. Especially when you should shy away from posting the same pictures used in a blog or Instagram post (try to stick to a the 2:3 ratio).

What you get to help get the most out of Pinterest for your business:

The in-built analytics tools work well on Pinterest (but they are only available for business profiles)! If you’re new to the platform you can look at “Pinterest total audience” in the Analytics tab and assess what works best within your industry and create content suit.

The Pinterest total audience are shown in purple, my client’s audience is in blue.

Once you’ve started to build up your business account, you can then compare your own audience against the total Pinterest audience. In order to really get the best out of Pinterest for your business, this should ideally be revised regularly so you know exactly what your audience wants to see and what they react best with.

You can test your audience against the wider Pinterest audience.

Proof is in the pudding…

If Pinterest was never something you planned to invest time and effort in. Or perhaps you didn’t realise the potential that awaits your business on the platform and that’s fair enough. I would hope that some of the statistics from reading this post may change your mind. If you genuinely don’t have the time to do it yourself, why not outsource it?

For reference, I knew a client of ours – in the interiors industry – needed to be taking advantage! I organically built up their presence on Pinterest and I’ll include some of their statistics. Bare in mind that they had an account for the sake of a username at the time and that was it. So, after not even 2 months here are the stats from zero on January 6th 2020:

My client is in pre-launch stages and this shows how their key stats have grown in such little time.

Insights like these are key for continuously creating engaging content for your audience. Sometimes you can be incredibly proud of a piece and it won’t get the results you expected. Other times something might not get all the attention it should’ve done but you just “get it out there” and it flies! An audience can be tricky to understand but continuously checking insights like engagement rate, can help you try and plan ahead on trends and then build content to suit.

Have you signed up yet?

As you can see from this image there is quite a difference in the number of total impressions. This would simply tell me to focus more on content similar to the first line, and to focus not so frequently on pins similar to the bottom line.

This helps you gain further insight into what your audience is connecting with the most.

Do you want to build traffic to your website? Do you want to capitalise on a platform that many businesses foolishly neglect? Don’t let the huge potential audience on Pinterest opt for a competitor because they have build up their Pinterest page and your business is no where to be seen! I’ve already mentioned how 80% of Pinners have converted to a sale based on a brands Pinterest content – I think that should be enough convincing…

Overall I hope this was helpful, if not a little eye-opening! There are lots of benefits to Pinterest for you, your business and/or client. The Marketing Optimist had never capitalised on Pinterest in the past, but when I joined the team in January there was a little push to build it up. Hopefully now you will have that push to sign up and start pinning too!

I hope to see you there!