What You Need To Be Doing On Pinterest in 2021
We had a whirlwind of a year in 2020 in both our daily lives and with big algorithm changes on the Pinterest platform. If you saw big drops in your monthly viewers, website traffic falls and you found yourself wanting to throw out Pinterest altogether - you are not alone!
Thankfully, things are finally starting to look up again and I am seeing my accounts beginning to stabilize again. Here is my current Pinterest Marketing strategy that has delivered over 500k click-throughs monthly, allowed multiple clients to reach 10+ million monthly viewers and targets ideal customers who actually want to purchase what you are selling.
How To Write Descriptions Correctly
While “keyword stacking” is widely known as a strategy to avoid, I’ve been incorporating it into my board and pin descriptions to make sure I get the most out of the limited characters allowed.
What does this look like? I’ll write a normal keyword-rich description to introduce or entice the reader and end off with placing relevant keywords and hashtags one after the other.
While we’ve wanted to avoid simply placing only keywords without the sentence format in a description so that it provides a better user experience, I’m pretty sure users aren’t reading the descriptions at all. Why not use it to reach more of our ideal clients?
I’ve placed discount codes in descriptions on multiple accounts and Pinterest users simply don’t use them! Either they aren’t reading the description or are happy to pay the full price.
Here’s an example of my keyword-rich pin description using the keyword stacking strategy:
Pro Tip: When writing the titles for a pin, I like to insert the main keyword after the post or product title as well!
Incorporating Variety
I’ve noticed a big difference after including a mixture of static image pins, story pins and video pins into the weekly pin schedule. I was hesitant to make use of story pins initially as you aren’t able to attach a link to them (they simply stay on Pinterest). I didn’t see much value in this as my main goal is to get ideal users to your website so we can convert them to paying customers - story pins essentially defeated the purpose, right?
What I’ve now noticed is that by adding story pins to your weekly pin creation, you automatically boost your static pins and overall profile as well. Pinterest sees you as a quality content creator and shows ALL of your content to users so it benefits you all round. I’ve also started adding a call-to-action in the descriptions of my story pins with a link.
Create New Content Regularly
While Pinterest has been telling us this forever, I’ll be honest and say that in the past simply creating fresh designs for old links over and over actually worked without any repercussions. I’ve noticed that the accounts I’ve been doing this for took a BIG hit a few months ago and were only able to recover recently after incorporating new links on their website every week into our strategy.
Online shops and product-based business may find this challenging as you probably aren’t adding new products or links to your website weekly so I’d suggest getting creative and adding a blog or gallery section to your website, which can also serve as a space to convert potential customers.
Original Images Is Where It’s At
While you might still get away with using free stock images from Canva, Pexels and Unsplash remember that there are thousands of others using these same images (which Pinterest can pick up on). It immediately devalues your pin. Paid stock imagery is significantly better, but you still have a chance of others picking the same photo.
Investing in quality imagery for your business where you can is the ideal. I notice that these pins and images perform significantly better simply because they are 100% new to the platform. You’ll still want to make sure you produce quality images so that users actually want to click on them though!
While there have been lots of changes to the Pinterest platform over the past few months, the most recent changes seem to be affecting us positively for once. I cannot wait to see what 2021 has in store for us on this powerhouse of a platform.
Hello, I'm Megan!
An introvert at heart, Pinterest is the perfect platform for me. Simply posting your content using the right marketing strategies gets you an abundance of website traffic? No engagement or ‘showing up’ needed?
Who wouldn’t want to use this powerhouse of a platform …
