Pinterest is a huge driver of website, leads, and sales. According to a report by Shopify and Pinterest, Pinterest is the second-largest driver of website traffic among social networks and shoppers there spend an average of $50 per order – more than any other socially-referred sales! So, if you’re pinning 50 pins a day and you’re not seeing results, what gives?
Pinterest and Website Traffic – The User Disconnect
Here’s a paraphrased conversation between me and one of the members of my private Facebook group for people in the wedding business. People there are looking to make Pinterest work to grow their wedding business, but they’re having varying levels of success. One business owner expressed some frustration at the lack of traffic coming in:
Me: Are you blogging?
Pinner: It’s all I can do to be pinning right now – I have no time!
So, what are those pins? They’re pretty wedding dresses, dreamy bouquets, fun photography ideas – all leading to someone else’s website. While there is a chance that someone could look at her profile, find her website, and contact her, she’s not sharing any of her own content, so there is very little incentive to do so. AND she’s leaving tons of website traffic on the table – for someone else.
Pinner: I need help growing my followers.
Me: Checks out blog and Pinterest account.
Ooooh, the blog images are beautiful! So Pinterest-y! Moving on to the Pinterest account – someone is pinning. But, those beautiful images – they’re simply uploaded to Pinterest with no link at all {GASP!}. So, as they spread, there is virtually zero chance that someone seeing her image could ever find her and her website, join a mailing list, and hire her or purchase her products. Sad!!
Back to Basics with Pinterest and Content Strategy
Pinterest is not a stand-alone cure-all for slumping sales and website traffic. You simply must have a content strategy that supports it. In fact, Pinterest can help you develop an incredibly powerful content strategy.
Assuming you have developed your buyer personas, you know what your ideal customer wants, you know her struggles, her questions. You also know how you can help. Now it’s time to start helping.
Pin Answers to Their Questions
Answering your customers’ questions is a great way to attract visitors to your site from social media and search engines. What questions do you or your sales team answer over and over again?
Write a blog post for each one of those questions – and include a stunning, pinnable image for each one (I use Canva). Use a plugin like Social Warfare (affiliate link) to make it easy for people to pin your images and you’ll find your Pinterest referral traffic grows and grows.
When you create your pins and descriptions, don’t actually include the full answer. You want to tease pinners to click through to read the entire answer.
Never Pin Without a Link
Pinning your own images without adding a link back to your website is a travesty! Even if you have an image that doesn’t have a corresponding blog post, you should link it to something relevant on your site. Better yet, just add it to a relevant blog post or page and give people the chance to find out more about you.
No more unlinked pins!
Curation – Pinning with Purpose
Sharing other people’s content on Pinterest is good practice for nearly every business. Unless you are a content-creating machine, there is no way you can make all the content your ideal buyer wants. If you’re a wedding florist, your time is best spent writing about floral arrangements, trends, and decorating ideas. Writing about wedding dresses 20 times a week is going to be a stretch for you and is probably not your best strategy. However, your customers are interested in wedding dresses – so you should have boards for wedding dresses!
When you have curated boards that appeal to your customers though it’s not exclusively your own content, you can often find a way to pin your own content there in a meaningful way. For example, do you have photographs of a bride in a wedding gown holding your floral arrangement? Assuming you have permission, add that image to the wedding dress board AND your other applicable boards. Help people find you.
To sum up, get inside your customers’ heads and figure out what they want. Then make that part of an overall content marketing strategy. Create images impossible to pass by, and you will see your Pinterest referral website traffic increase.
Pin me!
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