Pinterest Marketing Strategy for 2015 – 11 Ways to Make Your Business a Success on Pinterest

Another year over, and what have you achieved in terms of your marketing efforts? Are you seeing more traffic and sales? Or have you reached stagnation point, and don’t know what to do in terms of a Marketing strategy?

Get the New Year off to a good start, by creating a great pinterest account, or improving the one you already have.

Pinterest is no longer the sweet scrap-booking site where bored housewives went to dream about re-decorating their house. It is now a very serious contender in terms of social media space, particularly when it comes to the eCommerce and retail sectors.

Pinterest is taking the lead in terms of eCommerce traffic from social media sites, and generates more sales than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Also, a recent study has shown that active users has increased by 111% in the last six months, making it the second fastest growing social platform, behind Tumblr.

If you aren’t already using Pinterest as part of your marketing strategy, now is the time to do it!

But, many people stumble into Pinterest marketing, without thinking through what their goals are. This may seem like the first thing you should consider, and formulate a plan around, but for many, they have already set-up their page, and have been posting a few months, before realising that their Pinterest account is not working for their business. This is because they have not formulated a cohesive plan, and asked themselves a few very important questions before jumping in head first!

1. Goals

What do you want Pinterest to do for your business? This may seem like an easy question, but there are many possibilities:

Sell your products or services
Acquire new customers
Interaction to collect feedback
Drive traffic to your website
Build relationships
Increase audience engagement
Build brand awareness

2. Research the market

You need to have a very clear idea of what is happening in your industry. What are people talking about, what are the industry “hot topics” at the moment, and what changes do you expect to see in the next 12 months.

3. Who is your target market?

It is extremely important to determine who your client base is, so you can appeal to them in your marketing.

Therefore, it is necessary to get a clear picture of your ideal customer. Build up a profile, by asking these questions:

Age
Gender
Status
Location
Hobbies
Needs
Problems

4. Your competitiors

Make a list of who your competitors are. Research what they are doing on pinterest, what they are doing well, or badly! What can you do to improve on what your competitors are doing, and how can you use pinterest marketing to get better results than them.

5. Human resources

What is the size of your budget? This will determine how much you can invest into pinterest marketing

Determine who will create your images, and pin your content. Do you have the knowledge of pinterest marketing, or does someone in your business? Do you have the time to commit to marketing, or would it be better to outsource?

6. Creating content

There are various aspects to content creation for pinterest. You should pin a mixture of your own images, and also re-pin other images onto your relevant boards.

But, the main question is, how do you monetize pinterest? Indirectly! Social media is just that. Social. The best way to encourage people to purchase your products or services is to encourage them to become a follower of your page. This then gives you the opportunity to create a direct and trusted relationship and notify them of products and services that they would be interested in.

7. Content strategy

The best way to get in front of your potential customers, to get their attention, and to build a relationship is through providing valuable content, on a regular basis.

To help you achieve this, you need to put in place a content strategy, which is simply a spreadsheet of what content you will release, and when.

For example, how often will you publish blog posts, and have a pin directed to the post. Do you plan on holding webinars, creating tutorial pins, or produce e-books. How often you do any of these is entirely up to you.

8. Access to images

Do you have plenty of images associated with your business that you can use for pinterest? If not, then it is necessary to either create or purchase images that you can use.

There are a number of ways to create images, which are dependent on your budget.

Hire a photographer or graphic artist
Buy copyright free images
Create your own images, using a service such as picmonkey or canva

9. Cross-platform promotion

Promote your pinterest page on your other social media platforms on a regular basis. Add your pins to Facebook, Twitter and Googleplus, and to your website. Add a link to your pinterest page from your website. This will get your pinterest page a lot more views, followers and traffic.

10. Create a calendar

It is vital that you regularly pin content to your pinterest page, to achieve your goals. Setup a pinterest schedule or calendar to help you organise what you are going to pin, and to better manage your time.

11. Measure

In order to determine whether your pinterest marketing efforts are working, it is vital to measure your results.

Before starting a pinterest campaign make sure that you have established metrics that are associated with your business goals. Decide how often you want to monitor the results, and decide on which analytics tools you will use.

So, get 2015 off to a good start for your business, and invest a little time in really thinking about what you want from Pinterest, create a strategy, and stick to it! Remember, it takes continued effort to see results from any social media platform, but Pinterest is seeing much more return for the Businesses that invest in it than the big players such as Facebook . Now is the time to take action, and make Pinterest work for you!