Grow Your Business One Image at a Time – With Pinterest!
Are left pondering how to get more Pinterest followers? Are you looking to double your Pinterest engagement and drive tons of traffic to your website or blog?
Well, you’re in luck, this article takes an in-depth look into creating the perfect Pinterest marketing campaign. This advice is not coming from your average social media bloggers, this is coming from the Pinterest experts at Vizified who have amassed over 2 million followers on the platform.
We want to help you gain more Pinterest followers as it means more engagement for your brands in the form of likes, repins, comments, clicks and impressions. This can WILL help you drive traffic, increase sales and build your Pinterest brand.
We’re ‘Pinterest famous’ and we want to share our wealth of knowledge to teach your how to get more Pinterest Followers. Fast.

Pinterest Introduction For Marketers

To truly develop the type of customer engagement you need to be successful in both the offline and online business world, you need to also learn how to effectively use every social media platform out there. You might think you do that already, especially if you have a strong website and blog, and post regularly to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The content you post across that network of marketing channels is vital, of course, but those words only scratch the surface of the customer engagement potential offered by the internet.

It should come as no surprise to you that many of the people you most want to communicate with are visually-oriented. It’s important to know that content with images gets 94% more views and images are processed 60,000 times faster than text. Fortunately, there’s a social network out there that is ideal for such image-focused customers: Pinterest!
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, chances are you are either living under a rock, or well…no actually you’ve been living under a rock. Even if you didn’t have internet, chances are you would have heard someone mention Pinterest. Every day millions of consumers scour Pinterest looking for new products and ideas that inspire them. Today Pinterest is the second largest source of social media traffic to online stores, and has the highest average order value of all of them.
While many other social networks offer means for posting visual content, none of them offer the type of focus on images that Pinterest provides. As a result, this social media platform offers boundless messaging opportunities for those companies that are creative enough to combine compelling images and the written word into content that can effectively engage the potential customers you need.

Why You Need Pinterest

If you’ve been consistently involved in your other social media activities, chances are you might be wondering how an image-based site could benefit you. After all, doesn’t everyone use Facebook and Twitter? And if they do, surely you’re reaching them through those avenues, right?
Wrong.
According to some recent reports, Pinterest is now the single biggest social media driver of internet traffic! Moreover, it is also the most active social network in the universe of mobile users – with 3/4 of all Pinterest users accessing content from their mobile devices. And if you don’t think that statistic is a big deal, just consider the ubiquitous nature of mobile technology these days. It sometimes seems as though everyone around us is accessing one mobile device or another.
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These users are doing more than just looking at random images too. From 2013 to 2014, the volume of orders for real products and services that were placed through Pinterest jumped by almost 80%. That demonstrates one clear fact: using Pinterest can offer your business an opportunity to reach buyers who might otherwise never encounter your marketing.

Pinterest Key Facts Marketers Can’t Ignore

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Some other facts you might find enlightening as you ponder your absence from this part of the social media landscape:

  • There are over 70 million Pinterest users and counting. 79% of them are based in the US. Pinterest is a referral powerhouse and is responsible for 41% of ALL e-commerce traffic.

  • 93% of users have used Pinterest to plan a purchase and 80% of purchases through Pinterest are made via mobile with an average order value higher than Facebook and Twitter at $80 .

  • When people log into their Pinterest accounts, they tend to remain engaged for roughly fifteen minutes straight. That commitment to the platform offers a tremendous opportunity for you to catch their attention.

  • Did you know that 75% of Pinterest usage takes place on mobile phones? It is vital that your site is mobile-friendly. This stat is even more important now with the announcement of Buyable Pins for Pinterest app Users. It allows you go from pin to product without ever leaving the app. See: Buyable Pins: All You Need To Know

  • Pinterest pins tend to remain relevant for much longer than posts on Facebook, or even Twitter. By some estimates, a pin can remain in the public eye 1600x times longer than content on other social media sites.

  • Your image content can potentially still be generating engagement and web traffic for months after you first pin it! Long-tail search, Pinterest categories and auto-scroll contribute to a continuous cycle of sharing, meaning pins have the potential to drive traffic for several months longer than tweets or Facebook posts.

  • Pinterest reports that more than nine out of every ten users have made online purchases in the last nine months. One study even indicates that the network’s users are ten percent likelier to purchase something online than users of other social media platforms.

  • If you have heard of Pinterest, chances are that you’ve been told that it’s a site most frequented by women. While that was true just a couple of years ago, fully a third of current signups are male, and that number is growing.

  • Speaking of that growth in male demographics, you might be interested in knowing that the platform has more male American users each month than the number of men who read male-oriented magazines such as Sports Illustrated!

  • Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.

Obviously, the potential upside for your business is something that you can’t afford to miss out. Of course, to make effective use of the network’s potential, there are some things you’ll need to know. The good news is that there is no steep learning curve for businesses, so getting a Pinterest campaign up and running can be a fairly simple process.

Get Started with Pinterest

To get started on Pinterest, you’ll need your own Pinterest For Business account. The Pinterest site has a specific place for businesses to sign up, so that they can take advantage of features that are not available for standard personal accounts. But don’t worry; the business accounts are free too.
The signup process requires basic information such as your business name, email address, and a password. You can also choose to enter your business type if you so desire, and list your website address. That process creates your account. You then move on to set up your account profile as well.
On the profile page, you can choose a username. It is wise to choose one that identifies in some way with your business, since it shows up as part of your URL. Add your location, and details about the type of content you’ll be pinning. You can also include your own photo or company logo, and your website address if you didn’t list it on the account setup page.
There is also a biography area where you can tell the world about your business. Try to keep it creative, while using search keywords that will be found by those searching for the type of content you plan on including in your pins.
You’ll also be asked to verify your website address so that you can start to use Pinterest analytics. You’ll want to do this, because this analytical information can be very useful for you as you manage your Pinterest campaign efforts. The process is fairly simple, but you can have whoever handles your website do it for you if you’re unfamiliar with FTP or the CPanel interface.
You can verify your website in a few short steps. First, choose the option to edit your profile on your account page, and enter your website address at the bottom of the page. Select the verify option and wait for the popup. At this point, you’ll want to download the verification file.
Once you have that file, it will need to be uploaded into your website’s root directory. This can be done using either CPanel or FTP. Once that is done, just return to your profile page, and select the option to complete the process. At that point, your verification should be complete.

Be Sure to Use Rich Pins!

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Once the verification is done, you’ll probably want to use Rich Pins They’re valuable features that enable you to include vital information to your image pins. For instance, a picture of one of the products you offer could also include things like a Place Pin that provides a map showing where your store is located, or a product pin with important information about the item. All totaled, there are six rich pin choices that you can make, including the two mentioned above plus movie, article, and recipe pins.
1) Product Pins rich-pins-for-business
2) Article Pins rich-pins-for-business
3) Place Pins rich-pins-for-business
4) Recipe Pins rich-pins-for-business
5) Movie Pins rich-pins-for-business
6) App Pins rich-pins-for-business
Gaining access to Rich Pins can take a few weeks, however, and there is a slightly technical process that must be endured. However, it is a feature that you really should try to get if you want to maximize your Pinterest results! You can also simplify the process considerably by having a developer handle the process for you.
That process involves placing one of two types of markup code within your blog or company website. This code can be found on the Pinterest developers’ page under “Rich Pins.” This part is where having a site developer can be crucial. Just have him or her place the appropriate code for your desired rich pins onto your site.
Once that is done, you apply for the rich pins you want to use, and seek validation in their Rich Pin Validation area. You’ll have to enter the URL of the content you want tagged, and then click the validate button. Anywhere from a week to three weeks later, Pinterest will provide notification of approval.
Keep in mind that there is no need to wait for approval to start pinning! The system is set up to ensure that it adds the appropriate rich pins to your pinned content once the approval comes in. So, anything you pin today will still be retroactively tagged with the right rich pin as long as it links to the right page.

GET STARTED WITH RICH PINS

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Measure Your Campaign With Pinterest Business Analytics!

One of the most impressive features for businesses is the analytics that Pinterest provides. Known as Business Insights, this analytical tool provides insightful details about the popularity of the content you pin. This data includes things like how many comments a pin receives, how many times it has been liked, and how often it gets re-pinned by others.
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Beyond that, however, you can also compare how your Board is performing versus those of your business competitors, while also keeping a watchful eye on their Pinterest activities. As for your own business, you can see how your brand is faring on Pinterest, which Pins are delivering the results you need, and how your industry is doing overall.
How to get more followers on Pinterestfast?Quite simply Measure, Feedback, Implement & Measure Again…

12 Top Tips to Make Your Pinterest Campaign Successful

There are many different tips that can help you to establish your Pinterest foothold and the use that as a foundation on which to build a durable and long-lasting campaign. Here are just a few of the most important:
1) Learn The What Works
The important thing here is to recognize that, while there are a tremendous number of categories on Pinterest, there are only a limited number of exceedingly popular choices. On Pinterest, the most popular categories – and by that, we mean those that receive the most pins – are food and drink, home décor, DIY and crafts, and holiday and events
2) Post Original Content (Pins)
Did you know that 80% of the posts on Pinterest are repins? This not only demonstrates immense virality at work in the Pinterest community but the opportunity to produce fresh new original content that is more likely to be shared.
3) Vertical Images Double Your Engagement
Tall photos look better on Pinterest than wide ones due to its algorithm and the way it displays photos. Vertical images will take more screen space and gain 60% more repins than all other pins. Using photo editing tools like Pablo or PicMonkey is a great way of creating these desired vertical images.
4) Don’t Forget To Target Men
For men, those categories are somewhat different. While food and drink and do-it-yourself content remain popular with the guys, so too do technology, gardening, and humor. That last one is important, because it offers you a way to connect with those men on an almost universally-understood level.
5) Niche Topics Are Still Highly Pinnable
Just because your business is not directly involved with those top categories doesn’t mean that they have no applicability to your marketing efforts. Creative marketing and a playful approach to your pins can make it easier to avail yourself of the popularity of those top categories.
6) Pinterest Is Brand Friendly
Pinterest is not like other social media outlets. While personalities such as celebrities might rule other social media, studies on loyalty among Pinterest users show this platform to be somewhat of an outlier. More than two –thirds of Pinterest users report greater loyalty to brands than to celebrities, designers, or other personalities associated with those brands. That makes it much easier to build real engagement and lasting loyalty.
7) Pin more than x10 A Day To Get More Pinterest Followers
Studies have shown that the best way to maximize your Pinterest benefits is to have a goal of pinning at least ten times during each day. Remember, this is about engagement over the long-term. One pin is the equivalent of erecting a billboard on the side of a lonely stretch of highway. Ten or more is a real dialogue!
8) Keep The Description Short and Sweet
Since you can include text in your pins – and should do so every chance you get – you need to know how much text to use. There is a maximum character count of five hundred allowed by Pinterest, but the consensus is that about two-hundred to three-hundred is preferable.
9) Clear CTA’s Increase Engagement
A clear “call to action” increases the pin engagement by 80%? Don’t miss out on valuable referral traffic and make sure with that every Pin description to include a CTA with the desired action you want them to take. Experiment with different CTA’s in every pin description like “click here,” “watch here” or “click now.” Just like any other social media channel, you need to tell your followers what to do.
10) YouTube Videos Can Be Pinned
If your business has a YouTube channel (and if you don’t, why not?) then you should be aware that you can pin everything from podcast content to sound files on Pinterest too. That can help to ensure that your integrated marketing campaign remains consistent across your entire network of sites.
11) Include the Price ($) On product Pins
If you’re using Product Pins, be sure to include price information in the content. According to studies, those pins with prices receive likes 36% more often than those without.
12) Add The Pinterest Button To Your Site. Simples!
Don’t forget to promote your Pinterest activity on your other sites. There are “pin it” buttons that can be added to your sites, making it easy for any user to share your site content with the world.

Advertising on Pinterest

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While you can achieve your Pinterest goals organically over time, there is a quicker way to gain prominence on the site’s feeds and search results: Promoted Pins! This is a paid form of advertising that enables your pins to enjoy better placement in those results without waiting for others to find them and help build their popularity.
According to Pinterest, advertisers who used the Promoted Pins model were able to enjoy a significant increase in the number of times a pin was re-pinned – on average achieving 30% more free impressions due to the increased visibility. That’s a lot of extra people seeing your pin and choosing to place it on their boards too.
Moreover, those increases in pin activity also prove to last well beyond the end date of any paid campaign. In many instances, the number of free impressions resulting from that initial promotion continues to increase during the month after the advertiser’s campaign has ended – largely due to the increased rate of re-pinning during the campaign.
Since their initial beta testing, Pinterest has also gone to great lengths to improve their ad targeting, and provide new formats. As a result, the return on investment can be expected to increase over time, making the Promoted Pin model the best way to launch any serious Pinterest social media campaign.

Want Something EVEN MORE Effective?

Meet Vizified. We launch ambitious brands on Pinterest and the visual web. Our network of social influencers expose and pin your branded content to their own collective audience of over 2 million fans and followers. This will see your brand’s engagement levels, impressions and website hits go through the roof.

Here is what our clients, the e-commerce giants, eBay said:
“In April 2014 we engaged in a very successful pilot campaign with the Vizified team and Carhoots, one of their automotive influencers. The results saw them increase our Pinterest following by 255% to over 30,000 followers and generated over 150,000 social interactions with the eBay brand to a unique relevant audience. A year later and Carhoots consistently delivers eBay with over 13 million impressions per month!”
Vizified receive 500% more engagement on average than Pinterest promoted pins!
“500% more engagement on average than Pinterest promoted pins”
So if you want to maximize brand awareness through optimum pin engagement and in turn boost sales, Vizified is your #1 choice.

LAUNCH YOUR BRAND ON VIZIFIED TODAY!

Final Word: Pinterest Is About Brand Engagement

Above all else, make you content useful to those with whom you want to engage. No one searches Pinterest for useless content. Even humorous photos have a real purpose for those seeking them! Find a way to include informative pins as part of your posting routine. Remember, your business is not just some dumb entity mindlessly doling out pointless products and senseless services to the masses! Instead, it’s a vital part of your customers’ lives, offering them value in an endless number of ways.
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When you create your content, remember that fact. You have a story to tell. You have vital information and expertise that only you can share, because no one else possesses your exact set of skills, experiences, and knowledge. So, when you post content about a product, do it in a way that presents that offering not just as something for people to buy but as a creative solution for one of life’s common problems.
In the end, branding is all about storytelling. And nowhere is this more accurate than in the world of online marketing. Pinterest is not just an opportunity for expanded customer dialogue because of the type of user base it attracts. Its true potential rests in what those users are searching for when they sing into their accounts. Once you figure out how to tell your story in images and words that touch those users, then your business will be able to enjoy the great results Pinterest can offer.
A lot of content to digest? We’re here to help at Vizified and have condensed it in fun, simplified video.

How To Get More Pinterest Followers (Video)

Now it’s Your Turn

Over to you! If you follow this guide we’ll guarantee you’ll get more Pinterest followers. In return seeing a greater brand awareness, more website visits and in return increased sales and conversions.
Feel Free To Get In Touch – Vizified Will Amplify Your Brand On Pinterest. 100% Guaranteed.

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Do you know any other ways on how to get more Pinterest followers? Is Pinterest marketing your thing? Please leave any Pinterest tips, advice and best practices in the comments below.