Lesson 7 – Putting it All Together: Your 4-Step Pinterest Marketing Plan

Now you have all the pieces, it’s time to put them together to form a plan that you can follow – one step at a time – in order to build your following and to gain mass influence.

Step 1: Build Your Brand

The first step is to build your brand. This means you need to make sure that you know ‘who you are’ as a business, before tackling Pinterest.

This is something that should come before you begin posting to any social media site. You need to make sure you have a clear ‘mission statement’ that ties all your different products, blog posts, and activities together.

Your mission statement should be expressed through a logo, first, and then should extend to your web design. Make sure you have a website set up that has a design consistent with the rest of your branding. Then, use that same color scheme and logo on each social media site you sign up with.

It’s this consistency that will ultimately ensure that each interaction with a customer increases your brand visibility and builds your authority. This will help you, considerably, to appear professional as you maintain the same design color, font, and style in everything you do, rather than appearing not to have any particular strategy. The mantra of most businesses when it comes to social media marketing is to ‘be everywhere’, and consistency is key with that.

Make sure your Pinterest account is a business account and link it with your website using the code that Pinterest provides.

Step 2: Link Your Accounts

Now you should do a little prep work to make sure that your work flow is as smooth as possible. This initial work will help you easily add new content to your Pinterest boards and share that content between all your social media accounts.

First, make sure that you have a link to your Pinterest page right on your homepage. Consider adding a widget in your sidebar so that visitors can migrate to your Pinterest page from there.

Second, ensure that you Tweet about your Pinterest page and that you share your Instagram images on Pinterest. You can use IFTTT (as explained in an earlier article), to set up relationships between your social media accounts. This will save you a lot of time.

Third, install the Instagram app on your mobile device and the Instagram plugin for Chrome – both of which will make it easier for you to keep adding fresh content.

Fourth, use ShareThis to add social sharing buttons to your website so that your visitors can share your content.

Finally, this is a good time to set up Rich Article Pins on your website so that the pins that do get shared from your website will have titles and information under them.

Step 3: Provide Value

Now begins the most important part of your Pinterest marketing strategy: delivering value.

Make sure that you are posting content to Pinterest regularly and that you have come up with some kind of ‘angle’ for each of your boards that will really appeal to your audience. You might focus on inspirational images, beautiful images, or tips and ideas.

Your board should fulfill a purpose and be useful to your followers. It should be so valuable as to essentially stand as its own ‘product’ and attract viewers on its own merit. Only occasionally will you link your images back to products you’re selling or encourage people to sign up to your mailing list, etc.

Make sure to carefully choose the hashtags that you add to your pins so that people can find your images and write comments underneath to provide context. Good titles help a lot! If you’re still unsure of what works, then spend some time looking at the boards I recommended to get ideas.

You should make sure to keep posting great value content to your website that people can share through Pinterest. Use Pinterest Analytics to see which content is performing best and make sure that you feature attractive images that will grab attention and get people to pin and re-pin.

Also important is to spend some time interacting with the community and building relationships: that means re-pinning the content you find from other users, posting comments, and sending messages to your followers. This will help you to build a relationship with those users.

Step 4: Monetize

Monetization is the step that should come last, but, of course, it’s very important. The best way to monetize your Pinterest account is to add your own products or to mention your services in the text below your posts.

The great thing about selling products through Pinterest is that ‘Buyable Pins‘ will allow you to sell directly, much like an eCommerce store.

You may also opt to use ‘Rich Product’ pins on your website so your pins automatically sync information from your website, keeping your viewers updated regarding the items you have in stock, the price, and where they can purchase them.

More important than direct sales, is to build your audience and to gain their trust so that you can bring them to your website when they’re looking for services and products like the ones you offer. This is when social media is its most effective, so don’t get impatient and drive them away. 😊

Set yourself up for success with our final lesson – 13 critical do’s and don’ts of Pinterest marketing.

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