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8 Simple Strategies to a More “Pinteresting” Website

The recent rush of online retailers to Pinterest has opened up a whole new world of challenges for business owners – how to go visual and market their business in an entirely new platform. Of course, the sceptical business owners probably asked themselves first if it’s worthwhile to create yet another social media account when their Facebook Fanpages and Twitter accounts haven’t made any significant returns on investment yet. This begs the question - Is creating a presence in Pinterest worth it? Well, in short: yes. Creating an account in Pinterest is definitely worth your while. Especially if your product and

service marketing relies heavily on visuals. Pinterest is the first successful social media platform that is geared heavily towards visuals and so far has attracted a different and valuable kind of web demographic – the net based window shopper. According to Forbes magazine, with over 20 million members today from just over a million members back in July 2011, Pinterest has become one platform retailers can’t afford to ignore. In addition to becoming recognized as one of the best sources of high conversion referral traffic, as released in the recent survey of Shareaholic, Pinterest has also accomplished the fastest growth rate among social networks.

Making your Website More Pinteresting So how do you make your site more attractive to Pinterest users? And how do you get people on Pinterest to click through your visuals to your website?

1. Integrate Pinterest with your Website: Installing social media buttons and plugins is a must if you want to engage social media users and encourage them to share your content. As such, don’t forget to install the Pinterest button on your site if you want to urge Pinterest users to share your posts. An interesting case study on this is the Indigo Store which saw an increase of 56% pins and 218% referral traffic from social networks when they installed the pinning button.

2. Invest in Nifty Infographics and Tutorials: An Infographic/tutorial is like a short blog post that summarizes and presents data in visual form. The use of Infographics/tutorials is also a great way for businesses to position themselves as top authorities in their field. Better yet, according to Pinerly - the top Pinterest analytics tool, infographics and tutorials get 40% more clickthroughs than regular photos and pins.

3. Spice Up your Product Photos: Gaining Impressions and referral traffic from Pinterest is a lot different from

gaining traffic through Search Engine Optimization. Although you still have to take into consideration the text you are going to use to rank well on Pinterest Search, a significant chunk of your strategy will be focused on creating a great visual impression. So invest in a decent camera and a skilled graphics/layout artist to make your products stand out on this network.

4. Use your Visuals as a Lure: Remember that your Pinterest activities, how many followers you have and

how many repins your posts get, are all part of a bigger strategy – to drive consumer traffic from Pinterest to your website where you can get them to buy from you. As such, leave something out of your

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infographics and photos that will encourage your followers to visit your site and learn more.

5. Dont Forget your Call to Action: Dont forget to include a call to action on the visuals that you post on Pinterest. According to Pinerly, a good call to action can increase engagement of a particular post by as much as 80%. Some common examples are Click Here, Repin This, and Learn More.

6. Hold Pinterest Contests: One of the most common ways of driving traffic from social platforms to a

website is to hold a contest and Pinterest is no exception. Thankfully, Pinterest has none of the restrictions that Facebook imposes when it comes to holding contests on its platform. This means that you can integrate repins into the contest mechanics itself.

7. Repin and Build your Network: Repinning the right content that is highly relevant to your industry is a

great way to encourage others to follow you on Pinterest and repin your content in turn. This is much like the Follow me – I’ll follow back networking strategy in Twitter. Take the time to think about your long term strategy before clicking away though. Some marketers are comfortable repining things quite unrelated to their business while some maintain a laser focus on the photo topics they pin on their wall.

8. Make your Site Layout More Pinterest User Friendly: Design your site layout to be more “pinnable”. If

you want to increase the average pageviews per visit of your site, then you must make the transition from Pinterest to your website as seamless as possible for your followers. This way, your site visitors will be able to comfortably navigate and pin the items on your site for more referral traffic.

These strategies will get you started in directing traffic from this new network to your business. As with all social media marketing strategies, the best are still those that have been honed and personalized towards a specific business and industry. So take the time to experiment and test some weird ideas. Dip your toes in the water and see how your market behaves in this new medium. If you would like more information on our social media marketing strategies, please visit Dialed-In Local’s website or call us 615-200-7921.