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3 Pinterest marketing mistakes you need to avoid


Does your business have a Pinterest account? Have you thought about making one? Pinterest is often seen as niche or specific to certain industries, but the reality is that the platform has become a huge sales channel for thousands of businesses who have found success on the site.

So what separates the successful accounts from the bandwagoners? We pin it (pun intended) down to three major Pinterest marketing mistakes we see small businesses make, often without realising it. We’ll go through them all below, so you can be caught up to speed on what to do and what not to do when you make your Pinterest debut (or return!).

Common Pinterest Mistake 1: Posting low quality content 

Let’s start with the basics - posting low-res, grainy or unprofessional images won’t get you far anywhere on the internet, let alone on Pinterest. As an image-first platform, you’re competing with the best of the best, so its important to think about how the content you pin makes the viewer feel and how you can resonate with users. Aspirational content does well on Pinterest for this reason - it gives users something to feel inspired or motivated by, and gives them a reason to re-pin the content on their own boards, exposing it to more eyeballs. Of course, having good content doesn’t necessarily mean spending thousands every month on photographers, studio hire, graphic designers and the like - you can browse affordable social video and social photography content creation packages with avails right here.

You will want to, at least at some point, centre your content around what will encourage engagement. Sometimes this might look like running contests and promotions, like the popular “Pin it to Win it” competitions that often go viral on the platform. The key is to ensure the content remains relevant and on-brand for your business. Pinterest as a platform provides a unique opportunity for you to experiment with how you showcase your brand’s products and/or services, as well as conveying your brand values and key messages through inspirational and informative posts.

Common Pinterest Mistake 2: Not posting consistently or frequently 

If you want your Pinterest efforts to result in meaningful ROI for your business, it’s important to treat it with the same seriousness as you would posting on Instagram or TikTok - that means feeding consistent content to your account and building an oeuvre of work that gives users plenty of touchpoints to trace back to your offering. To do so you’ll need to ensure all of your boards (at least the public ones) are brimming with content, to show that you’re active and engaged with - or at least invested in being a part of - the Pinterest community. If you have boards that haven’t been updated in months, this is a dead giveaway that your brand is only looking at Pinterest as a box to tick rather than a meaningful way to build brand awareness and a potential sales funnel. Some Pinterest gurus recommend pinning content an average of 5 times per day - which may seem like a lot! This is where we would suggest looking into post scheduling and automation tools to ease this process.

However, it’s important to remember that when batch-creating or batch-scheduling content, you should ensure that each post is able to stand on it’s own in terms of the value it brings to the viewer. It can be easy to slip into a quantity-over-quality mentality when batching content, but if the content itself is low quality, repetitive or spammy, you will likely be doing more harm than good to your brand’s Pinterest presence. Having a variety of content that can inform, interest, excite or inspire the viewer in a way that entices them to engage with each post should always be front of mind.

Too many brands will fall into the trap of creating a Pinterest account, posting consistently within the first few weeks or months, and then after failing to see immediate engagement or results will let the platform slip away as an afterthought. Many start with the best of intentions, but lack the staying power or discipline to stay committed. It means that one of the most common Pinterest mistakes becomes simply pinning when you remember to or when you feel like it. Much like any other social media, the Pinterest algorithm will reward consistency, so even if you haven’t been treating your account seriously up until now - it’s never too late to start.

Remember; quality, consistent content will be shown to more users, which will help you to build a larger follower base, which will funnel more traffic to your website, which will drive higher sales numbers. It’s all about cause and effect!

Common Pinterest Mistake 3: Not optimising your pins

Optimisation is a broad term that covers a lot of different actions you can take, but overall it refers to the small tweaks and changes you make to your content and strategy to see better results. Oftentimes, optimisation is reactive and based on data from past posts and this data is used to help inform better practices with future posts. This all being said, it makes sense to start on this topic by looking at your analytics dashboard. Like most social media sites and marketing platforms, Pinterest has a great (and free) analytics dashboard you can use to better understand your audience and what type of content resonates most with them. The specificity of these insights are known as one of the more valuable tools digital marketing can provide, especially over traditional marketing. The Pinterest analytics dashboard allows you to monitor metrics for both boards and individual pins as well as repins, including impressions and clicks.

So, how do we optimise once we take on board insights from the analytics dashboard? A lot of the time it simply comes down to ensuring you are filling out every field accurately and comprehensively. Each pin has a description, and leaving the description field blank or with a couple hasty words means you erase a huge amount of opportunity for your pin to reach other users. Think of this as indispensable SEO; your pin will need a description in order to show up in peoples’ search results. Your description should be thorough and use a good chunk of keywords related to your business, product or service. If your offering is location-specific, make sure you mention the location. If you specialise in a certain field, name that field. For bonus points, include hashtags here as well.

If you’re struggling to come up with effective keywords for your description, there’s an easy way to find them without even leaving the Pinterest platform; simply search in the search bar a topic that you imagine your ideal customer would search to find you with and see what the other suggested search results are. These are collated by Pinterest’s AI based on the other searches users have made when searching the same topic you entered, and as such are great starting points for better understanding what your customer is looking for on the site.

The same ethos for writing your pin descriptions should also extend to your board descriptions - an oft-forgotten but still hugely important section to fill out. These have space for up to 500 characters, so keep your best keyword and SEO practices in mind when writing them. Your ‘category’ section should also be accurately filled out to give your pins the best chance of showing up in relevant search results. If you’re struggling to find 500 words to describe your board, try to summarise not only what your board is about with the right keywords, but also incorporate a call to action and tell the user why they should follow the board or what they can expect from following the board. This is an opportunity to showcase your brand and win over some new customers, so why not take it?

Perhaps the most obvious and straightforward way to drive sales from your Pinterest channel is to ensure that you link back to your products or services. Especially if you have pins that directly showcase a product, you should always be including the link to shop that product in the relevant section of the pin when posting. This means that no matter how many times it gets repinned across the website, users will always be able to shop your product directly from your storefront.

Optimisation is incredibly important, not just for making your Pinterest presence as polished as possible, but also to better enhance your brand’s overall online presence. A well-maintained Pinterest account can be fantastic for your overall web SEO and can be the reason your product is shown to people on Google search results as well as Pinterest search results. This is something you can do yourself or outsource to social media companies for a helping hand.

Ready to showcase engaging content on your socials? Well, we can help! At avails, we create onsite social video and social photography content made to enhance your brand presence and increase your engagement on Instagram?

Take a look at our content creation packages here to book a shoot!

avails Social - content creation agency Melbourne.

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