11 Pinterest Strategies to Grow Your B2C Audience

In spite of Pinterest's popularity, some businesses have had a hard time jumping in with both feet. Somehow, these companies struggle to connect the usefulness of Pinterest with its practical impact for their business.

I’m sure you’ve heard from the raving fans of Pinterest marketing, claiming major traffic and sales upticks. Your actual experience with Pinterest may be much different.

You’re told, “Get on Pinterest!” But once you do, you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing. Where’s the tweet button? How do I post an update? Where is the news feed?

Pinterest works for any business, but is ideal for B2C. The very nature of the platform provides the kind of interactive, visual, immersive, and continual experience that customers crave.

The fact is, your approach on Pinterest should be similar to your approach to other social media platforms. You must learn it, grow it, and curate it. And that takes time.

In this article, you’ll discover non-gimmicky strategies that will improve the way that you as a B2C can grow and engage with your audience. The bottom line is not just engagement, but actual revenue improvement. Let’s hop in and figure out how Pinterest can grow your B2C audience.

1. Niche your audience through your boards.

One of the beauties of Pinterest is that you can create specific boards for specific audience types. In an effort to reach a specific demographic and psychographic target audience, you can customize the look and feel of a pin board that will be more appealing to that group in particular.

As it is, Pinterest holds appeal among a wide and diverse audience:

Source

Take Target as an example. They sell a wide variety of items online. It logically follows that they will want to refine their approach with their pin boards.

Target has 55 boards, allowing the customer to basically identify him or herself by following select boards. Back-to-school was their marketing push at the time I researched this article, which is why “dream dorm” and “back to school” are top-tier boards.

2. Interact with others.

Like a lot of other content marketing strategies, the best way to promote your B2C brand is by engaging with consumers. On Twitter, for example, you don’t just push your own products. When blogging, you don’t just link to your own articles. The same holds true on Pinterest.

In their top ten list of Pinterest strategies, Entrepreneur advises marketers to “build your brand by engaging with the community via repinning, commenting on and liking other pins.”

Pinterest is just as social of a network as Facebook or Twitter. Use its social components more, and you’ll discover the reward that comes.

3.  Get Pinterest analytics.

How can you turn Pinterest into more than just a black hole of marketing activity? How can you determine its ROI? How can you analyze its growth?

Enter Pinterest Analytics. Business accounts are eligible to sign up for an analytics account. You’ll have access to a dashboard with a full view of all the numbers that matter, including impressions, reach, clicks, and number of visitors.

Source

You can sign up at Analytics.Pinterest.com. Start tracking your metrics to give you the edge you need.

4. Show your prices.

It seems counterintuitive, but displaying product pricing on Pinterest makes sense. Think about it. Pinners are shoppers. 93% of Pinners have shopped online in the previous six months (source). They are looking for products and prices, not just pretty pins.

Research indicates that pins with prices receive 36% more likes than pins without prices (source). The ideal place to put prices is on rich pins. Rich pins include additional information on the pin. Currently, rich pins can be used for apps, movies, recipes, articles, products, and place.

Don’t back down from displaying pricing. Pinterest is for shoppers, and shoppers are asking the question, “how much does it cost?”

5. Verify your website.

As important as it is, not all the B2Cs on Pinterest have confirmed their website. Confirming your website is a simple way to grow your audience by adding your profile image to pins from your site, as well as gain insights via Pinterest analytics.

Verified users are recognized in Pinterest search results with a red checkmark.

To verify your website, all you need to do is get the meta tag or add an HTML file to your website. Get the complete instructions are here.

6. Roll your other content marketing efforts into Pinterest.

Pinterest is not a marketing island. If you’ve been nibbling at the edges of Pinterest for a while, it could be because you’re not making it a comprehensive part of your overall marketing strategy.

Here are three simple ways to integrate Pinterest in a broader way:

• Use the “Pin It” button on all your website images.
• Add Pinterest to your social sharing icons.
• If you have a brick-and-mortar location with physical products, point out top-pinned items in the store.

7. Be SEO Savvy.

Don’t ignore everything you’ve learned about SEO. Pinterest needs a little optimization in order to help your pins reach the right customers.

As a first order of business, make sure every pin has a description. Create a description of around 200 characters that matches the image, and include terms that a user would type to find such an image.

8. Hashtags aren’t a big deal.

Hashtags are part of every major social media platform including Pinterest.

Unlike the hashtag-driven world of Twitter and Instagram, hashtags on Pinterest aren’t that big of a deal.

For starters, you can only click on hashtags in a pin description, not in your board title or about section. Second, clicking through a hashtag simply gives you an unstructured set of results including non-hashtagged pins.

As clunky as hashtags are, you can still use them. As a best practice, limit your use of hashtags, and try to use only those that are specific to your brand.

9. Use a call to action.

Use call to action on Pinterest? Absolutely. The goal of Pinterest, just like any other social network is to encourage interaction. Add CTAs on your boards to encourage click-throughs, and on pins to encourage sharing.

10. Keep it clean.

One of the reasons why Pinterest is so appealing is because it’s so organized. Pinterest appeals to the planner, the saver, the shopper, and the organizer in all of us. The slick UI and well-structured columns make us feel organized (even if we’re not).

To keep up this appeal, do your best to maintain a clean and organized approach with your pins and boards. Start with the broad classification, creating boards that are relevant and structured. Add only the pins that make the most sense within a specific board.

11. Have better images than everyone else.

Pinterest is the quintessential visual social media platform. With all due respect to Instagram, Pinterest is about collecting, curating, and displaying visual content — not just your own, but everyone else’s.

The most powerful and appealing Pinterest accounts are those that have the best images. But what does “best images” mean on Pinterest? According to Curalate, here’s what makes a pinnable, likeable, shareable image:

• Lots of colors. Avoid monochromatic pins, and liven it up with multiple dominant colors.
• Bold and balanced. Curalate reports that “very light and very dark images are not repinned as often.” Images with a good balance of bold colors gain 8-20 times more repins than mostly black or mostly white images.
• Red wins. Pinners love the color red. Images with a lot of red and orange receive twice as many repins than blue images.
• Up-close images. If an image contains 40% or more negative space or background, it loses 2-4 times the amount of repins that an up-close image with less than 30% negative space or background.
• Smooth. Smooth images — i.e., those that don’t have a lot of contrasting texture — get 17 times more repins than rough images.

Conclusion

As with any nascent social media platform, there is plenty of room for innovation in Pinterest.

Pinterest is constantly adapting to the preferences and wishes of its audience. They recently launched the Marketing Developer Partners group (MDP), and are rolling out buy buttons for select products.

Obviously, Pinterest is a huge deal for any B2C wanting to better connect with its audience. There’s no better time to join the pinning party.

What are your favorite B2C Pinterest strategies?