Top Mistakes to Avoid on Pinterest

May 2

If you have been thinking about using Pinterest to increase your leads, your sales, and your business, you need to watch today’s video.

I'm going to share with you the three mistakes that I see entrepreneurs make when using Pinterest to market their brand.

In last week's video I broke down my seven top growth strategies for you to use on the Pinterest platform. I also gave you a lot of nitty gritty details about why Pinterest is so powerful, how entrepreneurs can use it, and of course my top seven tips. We are going to link that video here because it is so important that you watch that video so that everything makes beautiful sense.

But as promised, I'm going to share the three mistakes that I see entrepreneurs make when they start to incorporate Pinterest into their marketing.

Now, Pinterest is one of the top reasons that my clients join me inside of Brandmerry Academy, my group program to help entrepreneurs brand themselves online, market their mission, and create a sustainable brand that allows them to live their lives. Pinterest is one of the tools that we use because of the longevity of the platform.

Creating content on your blog and sharing it on Pinterest can continue to drive traffic for years and years to come. It's a great way to get consistent views on your website, leads onto your email list, and sales in your business without you having to show up every single day with something new, like on Instagram. Am I right? I'm right.

However, Pinterest is a beast. It's got a very intense strategy that you need to harness to make it work for you and your brand. Many entrepreneurs make these three mistakes. So let's get right to it so you can avoid them at all costs.

PINTEREST MISTAKE #1: PINNING ONLY ONCE

Mistake number one is that you pin once, cross your fingers, and hope that it works to drive thousands and thousands of views to your blog every single week.

It's just not going to work like that, my friend. Not only does Pinterest want you to consistently show up on the platform creating new content for its users, but it's also important to test out multiple variations. You might create a pin that you think looks absolutely amazing, has the best title, is totally optimized and it might fall flat when you post it.

If you stop there, you're not testing out different pieces and really utilizing Pinterest to its greatest capabilities.

Another thing to keep in mind is content typically takes a little bit longer to go viral on Pinterest. It could take anywhere from six months to a year. So if you're only posting one pin every single week, you're missing out on quick growth. You're putting all of your eggs into one basket and hoping that it works for you and it just doesn't work out that way.

Now, I don't want that to scare you. I don't want you to think, "Oh, if I post now, it's not going to take off for six months." We have had multiple pins take off quickly, but that has been through testing, through creating in bulk, through trying different variations, and using different keywords that have really harnessed the power and optimized it for the platform.

But the bonus thing about content taking a little longer on the platform is that it also lasts longer too. Unlike other platforms like Facebook or Instagram, for instance, your content doesn't live past 24 hours typically.

On Pinterest it can last for years. So if you are making this mistake and you're just posting a pin or two a week, I highly recommend that you embrace a consistent pinning strategy on the platform. It's something I talked about in last week's video. So definitely check that out.

PINTEREST MISTAKE #2: BOARDS THAT DON’T MATCH YOUR BRAND

The second mistake that I see happen all of the time on this platform are boards that have nothing to do with your brand.

Now let's take it back to 2017 when I first got on the platform. So much of our pinning strategy was bulk, bulk, bulk. You wanted to pin as many pins as you possibly could in a day, anywhere between 30 to 50 pins a day. You were creating multiple variations of your pins from your blog and repinning a lot of other people's content.

The reason for this, and the reason that repinning was such a prominent thing for businesses and brands to do was because we needed more content to pin. We just couldn't possibly create 30 to 50 fresh pins a day. And so we would often repin other users' content.

And to make sure that we weren't competing with our own brand and our own messaging, we would pin that content to travel boards, home cooking, dinner options, home decor, just to give a few examples.

Yes, it did work in getting impressions and getting views on our boards, but let's be honest, it didn't necessarily attract an ideal customer. Luckily, today, like I shared in last week's video, we don't need to pin that much, which is amazing.

Now it's more important than ever to make sure that the type of content that you are pinning is directly related to your brand and your ideal customer.

So as with all platforms, things shift, things change. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs coming to me with this outdated strategy. They're converting their personal account to a business account and they have one board that is relevant to their business and the rest of their boards are just old, personal boards about decorating their living room and cute clothes.

That is not helping your brand. Your boards are incredibly important. Not only can you optimize your boards for search, which is amazing, but there's also a pin to board relationship that Pinterest takes into consideration. We teach this in depth inside of Brandmerry Academy, which is where we have an entire course dedicated to Pinterest.

But you really want to keep this in mind when you're creating your boards and you're creating the titles and the descriptions, that they are relevant to the type of content that you create for your brand. That is going to draw in your ideal customer.

Quick little note on that. If you do convert from a personal account to a business account, you can very, very easily make all of your personal boards secret because that'll allow you to still use Pinterest for your personal reasons, but then you're not pinning that kind of content on your main boards. It's all hidden behind the scenes so you can see it, but your audience doesn't.

PINTEREST MISTAKE #3: NOT OPTIMIZING YOUR PINS

And the third mistake, and maybe the biggest mistake that I see entrepreneurs make is they are not optimizing their pins. They are guessing. Pinterest is not a platform where you need to guess, thank goodness.

I don't know about you, but when I'm writing captions or different things for Instagram or Facebook, it's just like, "Oh, this sounds nice. This is what I would like to share." But for Pinterest, we actually have the information at our fingertips to be successful.

Because Pinterest is a search engine, we can very easily find important keywords for our boards, our pins, and our titles that we can integrate into our content. This allows us to clearly tell Pinterest what our pin is about so they can categorize it correctly. Yet many entrepreneurs miss this step.

You've seen it where you see a pin and the title is just super generic and there's no description, but a link to their blog. This is not helping you. You want to take the time to get super clear on the main keywords for your brand so you can integrate those into your boards like we talked about before, and you can use them in your pinning strategy.

Inside Brandmerry Academy we give our clients a full spreadsheet where they can do their SEO research in the beginning and have it to tap into and use it to reference any time they create a new piece of content. It saves so much time, but more than anything, it's incredibly important.

The reason that Pinterest is so powerful is because of its search engine optimization. Meaning if you take a little bit more time to use the right keywords to write an effective description, to create a great pin, you are going to be more successful on the platform.

So the next time you choose to pin on Pinterest, make sure that you've done a little bit of research on the types of keywords that you, your brand can use to attract your ideal customer.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it. There are the three main mistakes that I see entrepreneurs making when they decide to use Pinterest in their marketing strategy. If I'm being honest, there are a lot more mistakes, many of which I touch on in last week's video. So make sure you head over to my channel to watch my Pinterest growth strategy video. It's going to be incredibly helpful for you.

And again, this is something we teach in depth inside of my program, Brandmerry Academy. Learn more about that here.

If you want to learn more about our approach to marketing here at Brandmerry, how we teach entrepreneurs to use their marketing to create a more sustainable business, not one that requires them to create content all the time or live on their computer, but actually live their life and you want to find out if Brandmerry Academy is the right fit for you, head to my free class.

You can go to brandmerry.com/class, and I will teach you everything you need to know to get your brand seen and paid consistently online.

P.S. Ready to get your brand seen and paid without the pressure of social media? I'm teaching my top strategies inside of my new free class, "How to Build a Brand That Gets Seen and Paid!" You're invited to tune in and learn my signature 3-part framework for a sustainable 6-figure brand. Sign up to watch for free at Brandmerry.com/class