Grow your Pinterest as a wedding creative!
Grow your Pinterest as a wedding creative
The Ultimate Pinterest Guide for wedding creatives!
The wedding market is arguably one of the most saturated out there, and with good reason. With every Bride approaching her wedding with her own ideas, creative preferences and inspiration, the opportunity for small creatives is huge – if only you can get your marketing right. That’s where Pinterest comes in, and it all starts with your wedding blog.
As a small business creative, you will probably already be aware of the power that visual Pinterest marketing has in the wedding world; with Bride’s Group boards and Inspirational Wedding boards popping up on feeds across the world every day. (If you’ve ever scrolled through Pinterest and stopped to appreciate the a really great room design or table layout, you will know what we mean!) Everything from floral bouquets to dress ideas; Placecards and even cake designs are flooding Pinterest constantly, meaning the target audience is primed and ready to be inspired by YOUR content.
In short, Pinterest is more accessible and popular than ever, and offers great potential for new customers and new sales, as long as you use it right. This is our guide to using Pinterest to grow your wedding blog and business.
WHAT WILL YOU LEARN:
Selecting your profile
Optimize your Pin Quality
Add relevant Hashtags and Keywords
Board Creation
Pinterest Group Boards
Use Pinterest Widgets
How to add Rich Pins
Advertise your Pins on your wedding blog and vice versa
Promote using a newsletter
Create a freebie and use Pinterest to market it
Don’t just read the numbers, understand them!
Selecting your profile
Making sure your profile is both accessible and useful from a business perspective is of paramount importance, and will guide your decision when it comes to setting up your profile. Ask yourself this – is this just a small wedding blog where I will share my own ideas and opinions, or am I going to one day turn this into my own wedding creative business? If your answer was the small wedding blog then a personal profile will serve you well, while a more business-focussed blog will benefit from the additional features offered by the business profile.
To briefly outline the differences, a personal profile is easy to manage and offers the bare essentials in terms of audience information and interaction, whereas the business profile offers you a far more detailed look into the analytics of your page; including the audience demographic, most popular Pins and extra advertising functions.
Pin Quality
This one is super important, especially in the wedding market where appearance is everything. After all, the wedding day is commonly viewed as one of the best days of someone’s life – everything should be perfect, and that starts with your wedding blog. If you’re hoping to attract Brides to visit your profile and even become potential customers, make sure your profile displays the very best of what you can do, whether it’s a product for the big day, creative service or even just great design inspiration.
With regards to Pinterest marketing specifically, the quality of your Pin is what will make your picture shareable – or not. It’s as simple as that, and more shares mean a bigger audience and a wider net of potential customers. The proof is in the numbers!
Hashtags and Keywords
Unfortunately, with beautiful images comes great background work – and we don’t just mean the photography shoot. Pinterest marketing employs a search engine style experience for users, allowing them to search using words and ideas linked with the results they want to see – whether that be “wedding flowers”, “rural wedding decorations” or even simply “natural décor”. The key here is understanding which keywords best define your wedding blog and its offering, and how you can ensure that your content is listed under those searches.
Top Tip from me: Choose some keywords that are niche and fit your blog perfectly, but also include some more generic terms that are commonly searched for on Pinterest. This will require some trial and error and research into your target customer, but the potential for success via this avenue is huge.
Hashtags are another common feature that are appearing all over social media, not just Pinterest. As such, making sure you use them to your advantage is a good way to reach the modern-day market; and one of the best ways to do this is by linking your posts together using one or two hashtags that match your profile.
Board Creation
This is where it gets exciting. Boards were created by the experts behind Pinterest marketing in order to align different Pins in an aesthetically pleasing and organised way. Work out which different groups your wedding blog can be broken down into, and then start to organise your Pins into those boards – soon enough you might just find that your Pins are being shared multiple times by users who are interested in the content posted on each of your boards.
Top Tip: Working in such a saturated market, focussing on niche areas within the wedding creative business is a great way to keep your content fresh and unique. Consider seasonal wedding boards, varying wedding themes and even weddings of different sizes, in order to attract those smaller but more engaged audience groups.
Group Boards
Using group boards to enhance your wedding blog has never been easier, with so many users either involved in the wedding business or else interested in it from a customer point of view. Group boards enable you to communicate with and share content with likeminded users, reaching out to and exposing your blog to users who may never have come across your content otherwise.
Use Pinterest Widgets
Pinterest marketing is a web of advertising options which can grow the reach of your blog exponentially, depending on how you use them. Widgets are essentially clever little buttons which enable you to link your Pinterest with your website or wedding blog, encouraging users to either Pin things found on your website to their own Pinterest profile, or else follow your Pinterest page directly from your website. Other options include embedding Pins to your site, either with a live feed update or selecting a group of your most popular Pins.
Rich Pins
No, this doesn’t mean they will make you loads of money – or at least not yet, anyway! Rich Pins are just like ordinary Pins but with more information, providing insight into where to find a product, how much it costs, and how best to purchase it or make contact with the seller. Essentially it answers all of a users’ questions without them having to ask, making for a smoother experience for both you as a wedding blogger and for your potential customers.
Advertise your Pins on your wedding blog and vice versa
Advertising works both ways, especially when you have both a wedding blog or website and a Pinterest profile that seek to add value for your users. Link the two together visually by replicating valuable content and promoting consistent messages, so that no matter where a potential customer comes across your content, they know that you are reliable.
Promote using a newsletter
Blog readers love great content – it’s why they follow your blogs! Newsletters are a great way to combine different types of content, from guest features to interviews, advertisements and more, all in one place – with the added ability to link your social pages as well. That includes Pinterest! Include one or two of your most popular or most useful Pins in each newsletter, to showcase your profile and its content.
Top Tip: To make your newsletter, wedding blog AND Pinterest marketing even more successful, take some time to promote your Pinterest profile as a great addition to your wedding blog. Rather than simply replicating exactly the same content on both, consider revealing one or two unique pieces of content of wedding creative advice on Pinterest only. By offering your readers the exclusivity of previously unseen content, they are more likely to search your profile out and follow you on Pinterest.
Create a freebie and use Pinterest to market it
Similar to the above, but everyone loves a freebie and this top tip uses that to your advantage. Whether it’s a free trial of your service, a free product, or even a different product donated by one of your collaborations, the chance to win a freebie often sees social media users sharing and commenting like crazy – achieving an increased following and engagement rate for the business, and the chance to win a prize for the user.
Advertise your freebie using Pinterest marketing only, or if you would prefer to engage your blog readers as well then use your wedding blog to point readers towards the prize – which can only be won through sharing one of your Pins! The opportunities are endless.
Don’t just read the numbers, understand them!
Analytics and backend information is all very well, but it means nothing if you can’t understand and use it. Take time to look at how traffic is arriving on your Pinterest profile and your website, and understand exactly how successful your Pinterest marketing actually is. Where are users coming from? Are they searching for your keywords and finding you organically, or are they arriving on your page through the recommendation of others? Once you start to realise how your audience works, what they like, and where they are going after they’ve read your wedding blog, you can design content tailored to that audience.
11 points is a lot of information, and can be a lot to take in all in one go. If you currently own a wedding blog and aren’t sure how to take the next step to creating a business, the blog you’ve just read outlines some of the most important things to consider and explore on your journey to becoming a business owner. Pinterest marketing is a goldmine if you use it right, and my job is to support people like you who perhaps don’t yet have the experience or the time to dedicate to making their Pinterest profile really great. Working alongside you according to your vision and existing strategy, my management packages devise and unpack the best ways to use Pinterest to grow your wedding business from the ground up. Get in touch today for more information.