Why Should You Use Pinterest to Promote Your Craft Business?
There are several major websites that craft business owners use in order to promote their star-up and grow their customer base. A lot of people create Instagram accounts for their businesses or set up Facebook shops, some simply rely on the word of mouth… However, one of the most prosperous websites that are loved by all craft business owners for how effective it is for promotion is Pinterest!
Pinterest is actively gaining popularity among all age and gender groups, and is becoming more and more used internationally. The question is… Is it worth the hype and how exactly does one use Pinterest to promote a craft business?
On top of that, you should also take advantage of all the progressive features Pinterest offers for business accounts and use Product Pins for the stuff that can be bought from your business.
What Is Pinterest and How Does It Work?
It goes without saying that Pinterest is a rather popular image sharing and social media service. In fact, it can boast having over 400 million monthly active users from all around the world. While almost a third of all the Pinners, users of the platform in the question, are from the United States, the international user base is expanding rapidly. For instance, in 2019 alone, Pinterest gained as many as 51 million new users from outside of the US as opposed to only 5 million new users from America.
You might already have a personal or business Pinterest account yourself and are actually an avid pinner that already knows how things work from the inside. This would be a very useful knowledge to have if you are looking to exploit the benefit of Pinterest for your craft business and promote your goods and services to your target audience.
At the same time, however, it is often not enough to simply be a regular user of the platform if you want to use it to promote your craft business. In order to do that, you need to gain a thorough understanding of how business accounts survive in the competitive environment of Pinterest and successfully benefit from the numerous multipurpose features the platform has to offer.
Hence, the very first thing this article seeks to explain is what Pinterest is for business owners in general and craft enterprises in particular.
One of the most popular beliefs about Pinterest is that it is a social media platform. Technically, it is true. Pinterest, indeed, does have a lot of features such as communities, private messages, personal accounts, etc. that allow us to categorize it as social media. However, from a marketer’s perspective, and based on the prime way in which Pinners use the platform, it can be said that Pinterest is more of a niche search engine. While this classification is not a textbook one since people do not ask Pinterest all the questions they have on their minds, there is plenty of evidence to prove the point and show that the platform is, in fact, very similar to Google and Bing in terms of the things people do during their time online on Pinterest.
While you can, indeed, follow accounts and boards to get their updates imported directly to your feed, this is hardly the most popular way of exploring Pinterest. What people do way more often is use the search bar to look up whatever they are interested in at the moment. Hence, it can be claimed that Pinterest is a search engine that returns visual content. Users formulate their request in a couple of words depending on what they are looking for, type it in, and get access to a spread of the pins that match their request. From there, users may look through all the search results and click on the ones that they find the most interesting and relevant. Granted that everything is set up correctly, clicking on a pin will take the user to the website or a page that will have more information regarding the product, item, or idea that interested the user. This will generate leads and will likely boost conversion rates.
On average, users spend about 14 minutes on Pinterest daily, which means that they rarely scroll to the very bottom of the search results and engage with the first couple of pins that come up for their keywords. This is the first distinctive feature of Pinterest and how it works — most of the time it attracts people using high-quality visual content that catches their eye straightaway. This is exactly why the platform is very appropriate for promoting craft businesses in particular: when your entire business is built on selling something visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing, it is easy to market it using a website that focuses on those qualities before anything else.
Another feature that is descriptive of Pinterest is the fact that, according to Statista, as of July 2020, 76% of Pinterest users worldwide were females, a demographic group known to be stereotypically fond of crafts and handmade goods. Hence, regardless of what kind of craft business you own, there is a good chance that it will benefit from you setting up a Pinterest marketing campaign.
However, the factors mentioned above are not the only advantages that your craft business can experience if you decide to use Pinterest to promote it. There are a couple of major points that make Pinterest one of the best platforms for craft business marketing, which allow it to surpass such popular platforms as Instagram and even Facebook.
Also Read: Pinterest For Affiliate Marketing
The Benefits of Having a Pinterest Account to Promote Your Craft Business
The list of all the advantages Pinterest has when it comes to using it to promote your craft business is rather hefty. Therefore, this article will only delineate the most important ones that directly contribute towards the final goal of any business promotion — generating additional sales and as a result of it getting higher profits.
Using Pinterest Helps You to Increase Your Brand Awareness
One of the prime examples of the ways in which setting up a Pinterest account for your craft business can allow you to get higher sales is by spreading the word about your enterprise to the target audience. It doesn't really matter what niche you operate in since the Pinterest user base is very diverse and accepting of all kinds of crafts and content. Pinners are very generous when it comes to liking and repinning content they find useful or cool, which means it is fairly easy to grow your account and let more people find out about your craft business.
Pinterest actively encourages the cooperation of business and niche influencers as well as businesses and regular people. Therefore, it is extremely easy to make your content, your pins, go viral. That would instantly create a framework for your business and make it recognizable for both your target audience and even people outside of that group. All you need to do in order to achieve that is to ensure that the content you pin and re-pin is relevant and relatable!
On top of that, getting a Pinterest account for your craft business is a great way to enhance your online presence and create an even stronger bond with both your existing customers and your potential customers.
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Pinterest Is Known to Be a Great Place to Interact with Your Target Audience
As it has been previously stated Pinterest is a true mecca for everyone interested in art and craft. Unlike a lot of other platforms including popular social media such as Facebook and Instagram that are, too, known to be craft business owners’ favorite when it comes to promoting their enterprises, Pinterest is focused on craft and art specifically. The average craft business customer and the average Pinterest user have quite a lot in common and their interests often overlap. This means, if your perfect customer falls anywhere in the ‘regular craft shop customer’ framework, you are more than likely to be introduced to them when using Pinterest to promote your business.
Furthermore, Pinterest is quite different from the aforementioned social media in terms of the activities that people do when active on the website. While Instagram and Facebook are amazing for passive scrollers simply want to look at things and, if something really makes its way to their heart, even acknowledge its quality with a feeble like or share, Pinterest is calling for action. Practically all the content you see on the platform is there to be exploited by other users: either to borrow it for their own boards (and, subsequently, bring your business more exposure by sharing your pins to their followers) or to try out themselves. In fact, the very design of the platform shows how big of a role ‘taking action’ plays in its concept. The website provides its users a ‘tried it’ button they can press to mark the products or ideas they have found on Pinterest and used in real life.
According to statistics, a large percentage of Pinterest users are hopping on the website in order to seek inspiration, get some styling ideas, or create a vision board for what they want to purchase.
Pinterest Provides Rather High Conversion Rates
Speaking of purchasing, Pinterest is believed to have the highest conversion rates among all social media. The reason for this is fairly simple: Pinners that go on the platform are already in the right mindset for shopping. Even if they are simply looking for possible ideas or checking out the platform in an attempt to find some inspiration, they are still prone to purchasing the items they like.
In fact, there are some interesting stats to prove the aforementioned point. First of all, it is only fair to notice that 47% of Pinners hop onto the platform specifically to shop. Therefore, once they see something they like, they have their credit card ready to be used. At the same time, almost 90% of US Pinterest users have also revealed that they use the platform to find inspiration on their path to the final purchase.
In fact, Pinterest understands its role in aiding purchases of crafty things and handmade items (along with other products). Hence, back in 2018, the platform introduced Product Pins. Those allow business accounts to post catalogs of shoppable items along with all the necessary additional info. Those will take every interested customer straight to the checkout page on the retailer’s website.
It Allows You to Drive More Traffic to Your Craft Store
As mentioned above, Pinterest can generate more leads for your business by boosting the interest for some certain products which you pin on the website. However, this is not the only way in which Pinterest can drive more traffic to your store’s page or website and, subsequently, improve your brand’s position.
By being an interactive platform, Pinterest constantly promotes small businesses. All you need to do in order to let people find out about your enterprise is to make sure you set up all the links to your website correctly and add them to all and every post.
Top 5 Most Useful Tips for Effective Pinterest Use in Order to Promote Your Craft Business
All of the aforementioned factors make Pinterest sound very promising and exciting for craft business owners. And it is true: you can definitely promote your business and generate a lot of profit through the platform. However, unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds.
While Pinterest is often described as a positive website with ‘good vibes’ and ‘nice energy’, it is still fairly competitive. Hence, if you approach the marketing process irresponsibly, you will end up being unsuccessful in your craft business promoting attempts.
This article, however, has you back! We have compiled the top five tips you should take into consideration when trying to grow your craft business online through Pinterest.
#1 Make Sure You Know How to Pinterest Algorithms Work
As it has been mentioned previously in this article, in order to be successful with your Pinterest marketing campaign, you need to understand what Pinterest essentially is and how it works. If you are an avid Pinterest user and already have some experience managing a personal account, you will be pleased to know that the algorithms are not too dissimilar when it comes to posting on Pinterest as a business. The only real difference is that you might want to put a bit more effort into making your pins discoverable and interesting for other Pinners.
Only Pin the Content of the Highest Quality
When trying to promote your craft business on Pinterest, you need to understand that the competition is very high. As mentioned previously, people do not spend awfully long on Pinterest, but rather go with the first couple of pins that catch their eyes. Therefore, you need to make sure that your content is genuinely eye-catching and will make the cut.
In order to achieve that, you need to always remember that Pinterest is, first of all, a platform that values visuals above anything. Therefore, you need to ensure that everything you upload to your profile is visually pleasing and makes the viewers want to click on it.
There are plenty of guides on how to make your content look presentable and appealing online, but the main points, the overarching ideas of all those guides, can be boiled down to using high-quality images, aiding text posts with illustrations and abiding by the so-called ‘rules’ of Pinterest image measurements.
If you ever used Pinterest before, you may have noticed that most of the promotional or marketing-related pins include rather long vertical images to go with them. The explanation behind this tendency is fairly trivial: most users access Pinterest on their smartphones as opposed to laptops or PCs, so long posts make a lot of sense — they take longer to scroll past, hence capture the viewer’s attention for some extra time.
Master the Art of Using Keywords and Apply Some Basic SEO Knowledge to Your Pinterest Content
The next thing that you need to put extra work into is making your pins discoverable. As mentioned before, Pinterest is merely a search engine for people looking for crafty goods to purchase, ideas to get inspired by, etc. However, despite all its similarities to Google and Bing, there is one major difference that makes a huge difference for all the craft business owners who want to effectively market their store.
Unfortunately, Pinterest employs much less advanced mechanisms than actual search engines, which means people who optimize their content to get noticed by the target audience need to put in some extra work. Unlike Google that offers a number of related keywords to search by and analyzes the search request to match it with the possible best-fitting results automatically, Pinterest is not that developed. Therefore, you need to be completely positive about your SEO tactics when it comes to promoting your pins and, subsequently, promoting your craft business.
Ensure Your Pins Are Descriptive and Your Descriptions Are Eloquent
It can be tempting to post a beautiful picture of your amazing creation and caption it as ‘Gorgeous!’. Without a doubt, the item you are trying to put out there is great. However, it will be very hard for your potential customers to discover it if you do not specify what it is. You need to remember that users are searching by keywords, so you need to ensure that you use those in both your pin titles, descriptions, and hashtags.
In fact, if you rely on visual content as opposed to publishing extracts from your craft business blog, you may even spare yourself from having to integrate the keywords seamlessly into your pins, and simply use the practice often referred to as ‘keyword stuffing’. This means incorporating the needed keywords as an array of words without making appear as a part of a natural text. Unlike Google and other similar search engines, Pinterest does not condone such behavior and therefore there is no threat of being shadow-banned for doing this.
Do Not Forget to Optimize Your Boards
At the same time, you also need to remember that it is not only your pins that need to have a detailed and eloquent description so that Pinners could find it. Boards are your second most powerful tool to promote your craft business as people are equally as interested in discovering useful boards as they are in individual pins. Besides, boards allow you to post more generic content, which means attract a greater range of people who could potentially be interested in discovering it.
However, if you do want to get Pinners to find out about your Pinterest boards and follow them, you need to apply some basic SEO to those. First of all, all the tips in regards to optimizing your pins also apply to your boards. However, with boards, you can also arrange your pins in such a way that your top pins would be shown at the very top and immediately grasp the viewer’s attention.
#2 Join Pinterest Communities and Establish Relationships with People in Your Niche
The subject of letting other people promote your pins for you was briefly brushed on earlier in this article. Now it is time to get deeper into how exactly you may do that. The answer is short and simple: Group Boards!
Group boards are a unique Pinterest feature that the website offers to its users to build and strengthen the community. The concept itself is fairly straightforward: once you join one of the group boards, you may start posting pins there alongside other Pinners who, too, have access to the shared board. While all the pins are collected on one board, they still appear posted under the names of original Pinners who pinned the content there.
There are multiple benefits of joining one of such boards. The first one is significantly increasing your followers, which means making your craft business account more and more popular (which, in turn, creates a positive loop and brings you even more followers). One of the main reasons why this happens is that people can click the ‘Follow All’ button to automatically follow all the contributors to the group board.
Another benefit, naturally, is more traffic resulting from increased exposure. This is particularly important to take advantage of if you are only at the beginner stages of your Pinterest marketing strategy and your craft business account does not have that many followers. Respectable group boards have a lot of followers since they have rich content and post a lot of high-quality pins. Therefore, by joining a shared board you will get many more people to see your pins. Besides, it will prompt more re-pins, which will essentially result in other people promoting your craft business for you!
The only thing that you need to be wary of is damaging your reputation by joining the wrong group board. You need to approach the process of choosing the board to join with seriousness and make sure that not only it is relevant to your particular niche, but it is also successful. Remember, if you are a craft business trying to sell alternative necklaces, you will not get many interactions if you join a group board dedicated to sports cars and start posting there. If anything, you will likely get deleted from there. On top of that, once you do join a group, you need to be skimming the pins posted there on a regular basis in order to make sure that you are not associated with anything that could be detrimental for your business.
If you want to have more control over what happens within the shared board that you pin to, you can actually start your own one! While it is definitely much more work than joining the one created by someone else and will probably not be that easy to do if you are a small craft business, it is worth giving a try. Not only will it give you more control over the quality of the content pinned, but could also allow you to establish better relationships with other Pinners in your niche. Perhaps, even start a collaboration with one of the businesses (or, alternatively, allow you to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and be one step ahead of them)!
One way or another, if you want to grow your following and get better exposure for what your craft business has to offer, you need to make sure that you remain active on Pinterest and follow a lot of people from your target audience. There is always hope they will follow you back.
#3 Create a Personal Connection with Your Existing and Potential Customers by Letting Them Get to Know Your Business Better
The group boards discussed previously are a great way to make connections and attract more people to follow your account. However, none of that will be helpful if your own boards that can be accessible on your business’ account are not that good. It is believed that a good number of boards for a business trying to use Pinterest for promotion are 15-20 boards. Naturally, the very first thing they should be dedicated to is the actual products you sell. There could be boards for each individual product or different types of products or even the whole range of products you offer. This depends entirely on you and the strategy you choose to pursue.
However, once you are done with pinning all your immediate products and are still left with several boards to create, things might get a little bit trickier. Unless you are a well-known craft brand that has an impressive fan base already, it is unlikely that you will instantly grow a large following thanks to your products alone. No matter how good they are, there is simply too much competition in the niche.
In order to stand out among the competitors and make Pinners pay attention to your account and re-pin your pins, you need to provide them with something useful, you need to create some value in order to build a personal connection with your customers and target audience. This could be blog entries from your website or page that would highlight some of the interesting problems in the industry. Or, alternatively, it could be some adjacent to your niche boards that could be useful for your followers.
After all, Pinterest is majorly about re-pinning, perhaps even more so than it is about pinning your own content. You need to create a board that would get followed, so it is your job to fill it with such content that would be useful to other Pinners.
At the same time, if you are interested in creating a bond with your customers and potential customers, you may share something personal about your business. This means you may create a board to share the process of creating your craft as well as gathering links to the stuff you use in the process.
However, when creating Pinterest boards, you need to still remember that the prime goal of your account is to draw attention to your craft business and stimulate sales. Therefore, you need to still be selective with the types of content that you share with your followers.
While it can be exciting for your customers to see the manufacturing process and get an insight into how you craft your goods, at the same time, there should remain a bit of a mystery in relation to your product. The last thing you want when trying to promote your craft business is sharing all your secrets with your potential customers and therefore losing them as they no longer would require your services. Think about it: if you create a board where you list all the resources you use and direct links for them revealing all your secrets, your customers may wonder why they should pay more if they can simply DIY the product.
#4 Do Not Hesitate to Recycle Your Pins
As it has been mentioned previously, in order to become a popular business account on Pinterest, you need to create and publish good visually pleasing content. This requires a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication. After all, if you want your profile to prosper and be of good use to your craft business, you need to ensure you present your brand in the best light possible. At the same time, you also want to be posting regularly and frequently, so that the followers that choose to stick with you did not have a reason to be second-guessing their choice. You want them to stay with you and often appear on their feed so that they would turn to you whenever they decide to shop.
All this may sound a little bit tricky as creating good content to pin, making sure all your boards are organized and relevant and you update them regularly takes up a lot of time. Especially if you have to combine it with other chores that come with running a craft business. Nonetheless, the last thing you want to do when it comes to promoting your craft enterprise on Pinterest is posting semi-good pins just to update your account.
People on Pinterest are all about being blessed with great content and as soon as they see something that does not live up to their aesthetical expectations, they unfollow you.
However, there is a good solution to this problem. There is absolutely nothing bad in taking pride in your most successful pins and recycling them across your boards! If a particular pin seems to be fitting for another board, do not hesitate to include it there. After all, some people do not follow your entire account but are only focused on a particular board. Hence, by adding the aforementioned pin there you give those people an opportunity to see your best creation and, subsequently, give your high-quality pins more exposure.
#5 Make Sure that It Is Easy for Your Customers to Shop
At last but not at least, you need to test everything out before you publish a pin or a board. Your primary goal on Pinterest is to garner sales. However, even with the audience as susceptible to shopping offers and willing to make purchases as the one intrinsic to Pinterest, you will not get much more sales if it is difficult to purchase the thing you are promoting.
Author Bio: Daniel Witman
Daniel Witman is a passionate journalist who has contributed to major media publications. He enjoys writing about eSports and other topics that bother modern men.
