The leaves are beginning to change, and you know what that means? It’s time to prepare your Pinterest boards for holiday selling! Say what? Yes! You’ll be glad you started early and are prepared to use the latest in social media to market your business.
by Cindy Hanauer, AFE Trustee; CEO of Grand Central Floral, LLC
Remember, Pinterest is one of the largest search engines and has the perfect audience for small businesses to stand out and promote their unique products. So how do you show up in your customers’ feeds, encourage them to pin your pins, follow your boards and buy from you when ready? It’s simple! Just use these tricks of the trade:
Pin as a business
If you haven’t already, you’ll want to convert your boards to a business account. This will provide needed tools such as Business Analytics to market your business professionally. Rich pins are free and allow you to add features to a pin such as pricing and purchasing information. If you have many Boards and wish to keep some of them personal – it’s simple – just make those boards “secret” and they will be visible only to you.
Create a list
Begin by creating a list in the way that customers search for products such as:
- Christmas Decorating
- Hanukkah Gifts
- Christmas Centerpieces
- Christmas Plants
- Holiday Entertaining, etc.
This is the way your boards and products should be organized in order to make it easy for users to find you. Also, be sure to pin helpful tips and product information that will encourage your pinners to follow your boards and share them!
Add hashtags
You can now search Pinterest using hashtags, so it’s a great idea to create product descriptions that include correlative hashtags. Use words that are relevant and describe the pin, optimally adding no more than 20 hashtags per pin. Pinterest will put the most recent pins with the correlating hashtag at the top of the feed, so you’ll certainly want to use this feature! Hashtags should be timeless and also reflect common terms by which a customer would use to search for a product.
Create a Holiday Gift Guide
Developing a Gift Guide on Pinterest is a great way to drive shoppers to your website, where they can look around and come back later to purchase. Some examples for a Gift Guide would be:
- Gifts for Her
- Gifts for Him
- Host/Hostess Gifts
- Gifts for the Home
- Gifts for Kids
Use Graphics, Videos and GIFs
Remember…..you can use more than just images on Pinterest! Keep your board exciting by adding interesting animation and educational videos!