As the holiday season nears, many creative business owners are making plans for how they’ll reach their customers online. Pinterest is a great place to connect with customers and build brand awareness, and taking time to develop a seasonal pinning strategy could boost engagement during the busiest shopping season of the year. Here are seven tactics to reach your customers with seasonal pinning efforts.
Create seasonal DIYs, freebies, roundups, and tips.
Engaging your followers on Pinterest goes beyond just pinning your products to your pinboards. Creating inspiring content for your Pinterest followers helps them to remember your brand down the road when they’re ready to make a purchase. For example: a company that offers sewing patterns for children’s clothing could create a blog post on the theme of, “Building a back-to-school wardrobe for kids,” which could offer suggestions of different outfits created from their sewing patterns. Images from that post could be pinned to Pinterest, building brand recognition for their style of clothing. Create original content that links back to your website, where you can engage your new fans in an organic way.
Pin seasonal content early.
Pinterest’s algorithm disperses pins into the main feed slowly, and it can take time for content to be seeded throughout the site, and begin to gain momentum through repins. Plan to create and pin seasonal content, like Thanksgiving decor ideas or free printable gift tags, at least one month early (up to two months early), to give pinners time to discover your content before the season passes.
Use keywords tied to the season.
Adopt a fresh approach for captions and pinboard titles each season, even when sharing a product you’ve pinned before. A handmade blanket could be considered a “picnic blanket” in the summer, and a “cozy throw blanket” in the winter. Think creatively about how your product fits into your customer’s life during each season. According to Pinterest, “A search that starts with “Fourth of July,” might lead to “summer parties,” which could then lead to a search for “outdoor furniture.” This is how discovery works. Getting your business to show up online in unexpected, yet still relevant places, can increase the likelihood of people saving your Pin.” Make a list of the keywords your customers might search for in upcoming seasons, and use that list to inspire creative content for Pinterest.
Consider refreshing your featured boards.
With the ability to highlight five of your pinboards in a rotating slideshow near the top of your Pinterest profile, the “Featured Boards” section gives your followers quick insight into your style. This section is a great place to highlight relevant seasonal content or your most popular boards that fit in with the current month. Highlighting engaging seasonal content that suits your brand in this area may encourage your ideal customer to dig deeper to learn more about your brand.
Let Pinterest guide your pin design process.
Pinterest staff created the Studio Gallery, which offers their expert perspective on what type of content works best on Pinterest, with hundreds of examples to guide your design process. Browsing the pins found on their inspiration board can help you decode how to create eye-catching visual content for your pins.
Use Pincodes to bridge the gap between offline and online.
If you have a physical retail presence or are planning any in-person events this season, Pincodes could be a way to keep your customer engaged with your brand online. Pincodes are a unique scannable code, similar to a QR code, specially designed to help your customers find you and your products on Pinterest. Consider creating a sign with your Pincode to lead in-person shoppers to inspiring seasonal content in your Pinterest profile. For example a yarn shop could create a sign near the register with a Pincode that leads back to a pinboard of holiday sweaters and hats to knit with their yarn.
Sign up for a business profile.
Switching from a personal profile to a business account gives you access to tools and analytics to help you grow your following. Tracking your popular pins helps you learn what’s working in your pinning strategy, so you can create new content guided by what your audience is responding to. Set a date to audit and improve your pinning strategy with each new season.
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Erin Dollar is an artist, surface pattern designer, and founder of Cotton & Flax, a collection of boldly patterned textile home decor that is designed and manufactured in California. Her work has been sold in 100+ retail shops, from indie boutiques, to large mass-market retailers like West Elm, CB2, and Need Supply. By growing her ecommerce business to accommodate wholesale buyers, she has built a sustainable business that generates income year-round, and built a platform for long-term growth. See her webinar, Wholesale for Craft Business, in our archives.