Top Pinterest Mistakes Your Business is Making
This article is spurred from a larger conversation with Pinterest Marketer Jess Coleman of Root & Bloom Social.
To the average business owner, marketing on Pinterest may seem like a breeze. Maybe you’ve already used the platform for saving design inspiration or healthy lunch ideas, and feel that sprinkling in a few pins of your own is a solid strategy. Jess Coleman of Root & Bloom Social is here to burst your bubble: you’re probably doing it wrong.
Here are the top mistakes she sees businesses making while trying to market on Pinterest.
Image courtesy of Root & Bloom Social
Top Pinterest Mistakes a Business Can Make
Mistake #1: Treating Pinterest like a social media platform.
Pinterest often gets lumped with other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram because you typically hire the same type of person to manage all three. But Pinterest is actually a visual search engine. Much like Google, Pinterest is a place for users to research and collect ideas and products in a visually organized way.
A user has an entirely different intent when scrolling through Pinterest than they do on social platforms, namely because they’re actively engaging in either a Planning Stage or an Execution Stage of a customer journey. Learn more about the Pinterest customer journey in this section of our “Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing in 2021” (jump to section).
A good Pinterest marketing manager understands that the key to success lies within your ability to assess keywords, leverage search history, and write SEO-laden copy that still seems human.
Mistake #2: Overly branding your pins with watermarks, logos, website URLs, and (yes) brand colors.
With literally thousands of pieces of content being consumed within minutes on a typical Pinterest home feed, it’s easy to feel pressured to “mark” your pins with a watermark, logo, or website URL. But the key to successfully marketing on Pinterest (and arguably on any marketing platform) is to blend in. Adding a brand mark to your pins sticks out like an eyesore to the average user, and labels your pin as an advertisement and therefore ill-intentioned.
If you’d like to create pins that still speak to your brand design, Jess recommends leaning moreso with your fonts rather than brand colors. It is much better practice to use colors that work well with the image you’re using rather than forcing your brand colors onto an image that may not be the most visually harmonious.
Jess’ Pin Design Rules of Thumb:
- Stick to the same 1-3 fonts.
- Cater the colors to the actual image, not your brand colors.
- Take design notes from the top performing pins in each category and follow suit.
Mistake #3: Not capitalizing on the Pinterest search bar autofill feature.
Being a search engine, typing any word or phrase into the search bar will produce a handful of search suggestions. These suggestions being autofilled are what most Pinterest users are searching for, and can be an incredible insight to businesses looking to create high-demand content.
If you’re a retail brand and you sell black leather shoes, typing “black leather shoes” into the search bar will show you what other users are searching for surrounding that topic. It could produce any number of phrases, such as:
Black leather shoes outfit
Black leather shoes women
Black leather shoes men formal
Black leather shoes women flats
If your retail brand offers any of the above, you now know to create content that includes those keywords into both your Board descriptions and your Pin descriptions when appropriate. These findings may even spur further content ideas to host on your website, like “10 Fall Outfits with Black Leather Shoes” or “5 Formal Black Leather Shoes for Men this Wedding Season”, etc.
If the keyword is broad enough, consider creating a board, such as “Fall Black Leather Shoes” and pinning a combination of product and lifestyle pins that speak to this category and drive traffic to your website.
Mistake #4: Not Knowing When to Use Text Overlay
In this section of our “Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing” we cover the different types of pins you can create on Pinterest. One of them is a static pin that features a “text overlay”, or an image with text on top of it that gives insight as to the context or purpose of your pin.
When to Use Text Overlay
- Product pins that show the product with a variety of other objects and may be unclear.
- Pins that lead to high-value content on your website like a blog post.
When NOT to Use Text Overlay
- Product pins that very clearly highlight the product.
- High-quality photography without natural negative space for text.
- Photography that acts as a style reference or inspiration (i.e. wedding photography).
- When a border or collage-type layout helps the photo stand out on its own.
Pro Tip: Did you know that Pinterest’s algorithm can read the flat text on your pins? That means highly legible pins (clear, clean fonts) will have a better chance of ranking as opposed to hard-to-read, heavily stylized fonts.
Mistake #5: Only Creating 1 Pin for Each Piece of Content
One of the biggest mistakes Jess sees businesses making when creating pins that link to a blog post or product is only creating a single pin for each of those pages and moving on.
Pinterest is a visual search engine, which means that there a multiple search phrases a user might type in when looking for your piece of content. Recognizing this and then creating multiple types of pins (static image, video, product pin, text overlay pin) that lead to the same piece of content not only helps cast a wider net, but gives you insight as to which types of pins perform best for certain types of content.
Photos courtesy of Root & Bloom Social
The key to optimizing your content on Pinterest is to frequently make note of both the popular content on your website as well as the popular content you’re producing on Pinterest. Then, carving out time every month or so to create Fresh Pins that continue to drive traffic to your website in new ways.
Fresh Pins are pins that have been posted to Pinterest for the first time ever. Pinterest favors Fresh Pins on the home feed as it keeps content new and engaging. If you have a pin that has been circulating a while and is performing well, Jess recommends creating a totally new pin with the same target URL and measuring its performance.
Pro Tip: When creating a text overlay pin that directs to a blog post, try rewording the blog title at least three ways.
Mistake #6: Creating Boards Without a Plan
The boards you create on Pinterest carry just as much weight as the keywords you use to title and describe your pins. As a general rule of thumb, you only want to create boards that will have a decent amount of pins. If there is a topic you want to cover that would only have 1-10 pins, it’s not strong enough yet to become a board.
Transversely, if you have a number of pins within a more broad Pinterest board that could warrant their own board, it’s a good idea to reorganize them so that they can show up in more niched down searches.
Need help knowing where to start when it comes to creating Pinterest boards for your business account? Jess talks us through the concept of Content Pillars and how they can inform your Pinterest account strategy in this section of “Complete Guide to Pinterest Marking in 2021” (jump to section).
Mistake #7: Not Optimizing Board and Profile Descriptions
There are two places most businesses fail to pack with SEO keywords: the Board Description and the Profile Description. The same strategy is used for both:
Step 1: Use the Pinterest search bar for keyword ideas.
Step 2: Make a list of those keywords to use for now and later (pin descriptions will need these!)
Step 3: Identify the most relevant keywords for either your business (Profile Description) or a particular category (Board Description)
Step 4: String the keywords together in a natural sentence. You do not want to pack keywords into a string separated by commas. Descriptions should seem natural.
Let’s look at the Board Description example below:
Salon Design Inspiration is a board where this business shared both lifestyle and product-based pins surrounding the topic of designing a salon. You’ll notice how some of these pins use text overlay to call out their products as to not confuse the user.
Because this particular board offers design ideas for salons of all types (beauty, hair, and nail) it’s important to call out each of these keywords in the description.
Example Board Description: “Interior design and decor ideas for beauty studios, nail bars, and hair salons”.
Direct Keywords Included:
Interior design
Decor Ideas
Beauty Studios
Nail Bars
Hair Salons
Implied Keywords Included:
Beauty Studio Decor Ideas
Nail Bar Interior Design
Hair Salon Ideas
Beauty Studio Design Ideas
When writing a Profile Description, we use the exact same method of letting search results inform the copy.
Example Profile Description: “Plan your next Savannah, Georgia vacation with our great Savannah vacation rentals! Stay in Savannah’s Historic District, Tybee Island, or Downtown Savannah”.
Direct Keywords Included:
Savannah, Georgia Vacation
Savannah Vacation Rentals
Savannah’s Historic District
Tybee Island
Downtown Savannah
Implied Keywords Included:
Tybee Island Vacation Rentals
Downtown Savannah Vacation Rentals
Savannah Historic District
Georgia Vacation
Savannah Vacation
Mistake #8: Not Using Tailwind “My Schedule” to Optimizing Pin Frequency
Red flag: if your Pinterest marketer isn’t using Tailwind to create and schedule pins to your account, you’re losing a ton of money. Tailwind is an official Pinterest Partner, which means it’s completely safe to use and works closely with Pinterest to create solutions for marketing on the platform.
Tailwind (among many other features) offers what’s called My Schedule, and it allows you to see what times throughout the day and week your audience is most active on Pinterest. Tailwind creates time slots for the month and will automatically publish or new pins or reshare your top performing pins (called a SmartLoop) during these times for optimal performance.
Here is what the My Schedule feature looks like within the Tailwind:
Pins shown with a red or green icon are currently using the SmartLoop feature, which means that Tailwind will automatically reshare these pins based on the frequency you set.
You can easily change your pin frequency using My Schedule in order to find the optimal number of pins your account should be pinning per day.
Pro Tip: For a business just getting started on Pinterest, pin a minimum of 4-5 pins per day for at least a month so you can gather insight as to what is performing well. Then, take those top performing pins and set them up with SmartLoop.
Mistake #9: Not Subscribing to the Pinterest Newsletter, “Newsroom”
Pinterest is arguably one of the fastest evolving platforms in the marketing world, with new features constantly being introduced with Beta testing almost weekly.
If you’re serious about marketing your business on Pinterest, you must subscribe to their newsletter, called Pinterest Newsroom.
Pinterest Newsroom covers a wide array of topics, like:
- Brand new Pinterest features
- Trend reports
- Account showcases
- Corporate changes
If anything, make sure you hit subscribe and then jump right into their latest Pinterest Predicts: The Soon-To-Be Trending Report for 2021.
Did you find this article helpful? Let us know by leaving us a comment below!
Jess Coleman with Root & Bloom Social can be contacted through her website or on her Instagram.