How to Market to the Pinterest Audience

Marketing to the Pinterest audience is something that just about everyone is seeing value in. Even the biggest companies in the world are marketing with Pinterest because they know they can get in front of a massive audience that way, and even more importantly, get in front of the right person, the one who is going to buy. But there is a fine line between being social on Pinterest and being pushy. Here are some of the ways that you can market to Pinterest viewers without seeming as if you are marketing at all.

Use the Holidays to Recommend Stuff

One of the ways that you can market to your Pinterest audience without them realizing that you’re trying to sell them something is by using the holidays to recommend products. Beefing up your marketing efforts during the holidays is not unusual. Many people are recommending products to their friends around Christmas time and even around the other holidays like Hanukkah Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Thanksgiving.

Halloween is an even bigger holiday that you can recommend stuff for because there is so much cool stuff that comes out of Halloween. How you do this is to create a board and then name it after the holiday that you are going to be posting for and make sure that you’re not too specific with the name, that you create a well-crafted description in the you choose the right category.

Make sure that during the holidays you have your holiday themed pin boards at the top of your page. Make sure you have good cover images for your pin boards.

Tell People What Your Popular Products Are

You can let people know about your popular products without making it seem like you are selling. Pins about incredibly popular products do really well, and if people think that everyone else is buying something they are going to want to have it as well. If you look at Amazon, you will notice ‘bestseller’ or ‘top selling’ lists all over the site and people check them regularly and often buy products because of their bestseller status.

How you want to do it is to create a pin board that is just for your most popular products. Deciding what “popular” means is up to you, but you really want to keep that board free for only the best-of-the-best. You can create descriptions for each product that you have listed there as well as product rank, which will offer your viewers validation. Make sure that you give the viewer as much information about the product as possible, including the price and then create a call-to-action so that they have a reason to go and do something – like buy the product.

Use Pinterest to Generate Sales Leads

What you are going to need to generate sales leads from your Pinterest page is quality content behind an opt-in form where the person has to enter their details, usually just their email address. Then they’ll get access to the eBook or article that you promised them for signing up. When someone signs up to get a free eBook, they pretty much know what they are signing up for, so when you send them a marketing email later on, it doesn’t exactly surprise them.

Build your Followers First Before you Market Anything

One thing that you definitely want to keep in mind is that you need to build up your followers before you market to them. That means that you should avoid any sort of sales-related posting or boards until you have a decent number of followers, but it doesn’t mean that you want to hide your status as a marketer completely, or people will be surprised and probably a little annoyed.

Before you start promoting your products, you need to add some value to the Pinterest community as a whole. While you might be able to get away with instant promotion on Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is different. You should wait until you are established before you begin promoting.

Also, you want to create a dedicated board for the items that you are selling. Then, you should never promote over and over like you do with Twitter and Facebook. Instead, you should just post a product one time, and it will be in your promotion folder from there on out. The benefit to this method is that every time you gain a new audience member, you can potentially get those past products in front of them, without having to repin them.

This all works with a cumulative snowball effect, meaning that the more things that you do, the easier it will be for you to do them in the future. For example, if you build an audience, you will get repins and likes when you post something and the more followers you attract, the more these followers will repin and like, so it gets bigger and bigger. That’s because repins and likes add social validation and people will want to like even more and repin even more if they know that others are doing the same thing.

Using Pinterest to Promote Your Business

There are many ways that you can use the social media behemoth Pinterest to promote your business. The best thing to do before you get deeply embroiled in the world of Pinterest is to check out some of the other businesses that are doing the same thing you are and find out what people are trying, what works and what doesn’t. That way, you can figure out what your audience wants and change your strategy to meet that demand.

Running a business takes a great deal of energy and dedication and using promotion channels like Twitter, Facebook and of course, Pinterest, can help you make that business a success. With everyone constantly on social media Pinterest is one of the best ways that you communicate your message to your potential customers. All you have to do is build up a following first.