Pinterest Marketing: Promoting Holiday Sales on Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the best visual platforms for promoting your holiday sales during the season. It is the platform where people come to get ideas and inspiration to find the best gift, best destination, or best menu to cook to celebrate their break from a busy life. Holidays are also one of the best times for brands and businesses to promote their products into sales. There are many social platforms to advertise and Pinterest is one of the most effective visual platforms in reaching your target audiences.

In this article, we will help you understand the reasons why Pinterest is one of the great ways to promote your products and how you can use it to leverage your reach to your target market. 

Why Use Pinterest for Promoting Holiday Sales?

Pinterest has become a popular shopping platform now and it’s also been a way for eCommerce brands to direct traffic to their sites. During holidays, creating Holiday-themed Pinterest pins and boards for your target market will be a great idea for them to see your brand on their Pinterest Home Feed.

Here are the reasons why using Pinterest is effective for promoting holiday sales:

1. Pinterest is The Source of Gift Ideas

During holidays, people would always think about presents and tokens for their loved ones so what they usually do is look for gift ideas and explore online for inspiration. Pinterest is the perfect place to promote your products, especially those that are perfect for the holiday seasons.

2. Pinterest Has Rich Pins

Pinterest has Rich Pins which are organic pins that automatically sync information from your website to your pins. Rich Pins tend to get more engagement and they can be applied in four categories: Product, Recipe, Article, and an App. 

For business purposes and eCommerce products, the Product Pin category is commonly used because it directly adds the product description, pricing, and details of the product. The benefit of Rich Pins is that it shows more context of what the product pin is about. Rich Pins can also be a deciding factor on whether a potential customer visits the website for purchase. 

3. Promotional & Buyable Pins

When you are going to market your products on Pinterest, always include Promotional and Buyable Pins. These will help increase sales and exceed needed customer acquisition goals.

Promoted Pins

Promoted Pins are just regular pins but generally, they are like paid advertisements on Pinterest. They work just like regular Pins that can be pinned to boards, shared, and commented on.

From the example above, you can see that every Promoted Pins has the label ‘Promoted’ on the Pin.

Buyable Pins

Buyable Pins on the other hand are special kinds of Pinterest pins. They make your audience shop easily right away when they are scrolling through their Pinterest feed.

Once you have set up this Pin, customers will be able to purchase the product directly on Pinterest without even leaving the site. 

How To Use Pinterest For Holiday Marketing

1. Utilize Pinterest Smart Feed

Pinterest Smart Feed refers to the feed that is ranked based on what a user searches on the search result bar. Below is an example of Smart Feed on Pinterest, as shown in the image the pins were organized and ranked according to the recent searches of the user. 

Here are the ways to maximize the use of Pinterest Smart Feed:

a. Explore Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest Analytics is a tool that allows you to see what people Pin from your profile and website. By exploring Pinterest Analytics you will understand your overall presence on Pinterest and it will give you an insight into what type of content is working well for your target audience. 

The image above is an example of a Pinterest Analytics Overview showing the Total Impressions of Pins and Boards for the last 30 days.

b. SEO Strategy

This strategy helps to optimize your Pinterest profile to generate more organic website traffic from Pinterest. Maximize the use of Pinterest Smart feed keywords search results in naming your Pins and Boards especially for products that you will promote on Pinterest. Keywords are so important because these will be used to drive more traffic to your Pinterest pins.  Optimize your Pinterest profile and Pin images in such a way that the pinners will notice your pins. Make sure you are posting high-quality pins that will attract your audience. 

Here’s an example of SEO Strategy using Keywords. 

In the example above, the user searches for “home decorations” and the keywords seen below the search bar are the related words that can be incorporated within Pins and Boards description. 

2. Pin Timing

The right timing of pinning is important because if you post at the wrong time, less audience will see your post. The best time to Pin during the day is from 2 PM to 4 PM EST, and 8 PM to 1 AM EST. Scheduling a post will make it better and you can use a scheduling tool such as Tailwind. It allows you to Pin and Repin to a specific Pinterest board especially if you do not have the time to pin every day. 

However, with the latest Pinterest algorithm, we have noticed that there are better impressions and engagement on Pins that are posted manually compared to the scheduled ones. It is best to post at least 2 Fresh Pins per day and schedule the repins throughout the day using a scheduling tool.

3. User Friendly Pinterest Profile and Website

If you’re going to promoting holiday sales on Pinterest, your Pinterest profile and website must be user-friendly where everything is accessible and shareable. Below are the important tips to achieve a Pinterest-friendly website:

a. Embed Pinterest Buttons and Board on Your Website

Add the “Pin it” button to your website so that it will be much easier to share your product. This is a great way for your business to get your content on Pinterest. This is a hover button that helps people save your content to their Pinterest Boards without leaving your site.

b. Check your Products

Pinterest content is evergreen. There is no reason for your products to get unseen and unnoticed even if you might have stopped selling them. Sometimes, users will experience a 404 error or the “page not found error” upon clicking the links you provided on your old pins. In order to fix this, edit the old link by replacing it with the updated link of your website.

To edit your pins and replace the old source link, follow these quick simple steps:

• Hover the mouse over the Pin and select the edit pencil. 

• From here, you can change the old source link to the new one. Once you are done, click ‘Save’.

Since we don’t allow certain redirects or URL shorteners, this is the best way to make sure that your link will work properly.

4. Gift Guide Pin Creation

Pinterest is the best place to go when users need recommendations and suggestions for gifts on holidays. Creating a gift guide Pins and Boards will help your target audience identify what they want. Other than that, you are also promoting your products. 

Interest-Based Boards

Interest-based boards are boards on Pinterest that contain pins based on the common interest of your target audience. These can be according to current trends, seasonal pins, or products of your business that fit the current season. Brand owners organize Pinterest boards in such a way that the pins will easily be identified.

Take a look at the example above that shows Keto Diet recipes on each holiday such as Thanksgiving and Christmas from Healthy Ambitions. Also, see how the other Boards are organized specifically according to a specific interest. 

5. Use Rich Pins

The Rich Pin is a markup that provides additional information about your product or service. Using Rich Pins will give your audience an idea of what your content is all about even knowing leaving the site.

If you are promoting your brand on Pinterest, it would be a great help for you as a marketer if you will be using Rich Pins because it will make your pins stand out in a crowd. The extra information that is displayed with rich pins will show up no matter who pins it, whether it is straight from your website or a repin.

6. Promote Products with High Popularity

Pinterest has a huge number of pinners and business owners who are promoting their brand and services using Pinterest. This means that there’s competition on Pinterest, and the question of how to get noticed by your target audience is the goal of every marketer. Here are the basic important tips that you can use:

• Determine the needs and wants of your target market, check on what people usually search for during these days, and see products they are up to. This entails current market trends and maximizing your Google Analytics data. 
• See your Pinterest Analytics data on which Pins and Boards are getting high engagement so you can optimize this during the Holiday seasons.  
• Visit the latest Pinterest trends to determine what you need to Repin or Pin content that will spark interest in your target market.
• Always repin the Top Pins that are related to your niche. 

7. Progress Tracking

Tracking the progress is a way to recognize what needs to improve for the next marketing effort. Your marketing strategies will determine whether your brand has an impact on your target market. Use progress tracking tools such as Google Analytics and Pinterest Analytics in planning for the next steps. 

Conclusions

Promoting your holiday sales on Pinterest requires a lot of consistency and dedication from your end to create a successful one. Have in mind that it’s all about the consumers, understanding their needs, and meeting their expectations. As a marketer, it is important to determine what is trending and analyze data results to be effective in promoting your products during the holiday seasons.