There’s a classic situation happening in the marketing industry, and your awareness to it could (maybe) shape the future of your company. While more and more attention and financial resources are being dedicated to the popular Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter platforms — people are overlooking the redheaded stepchild, Pinterest. Yeah, remember her? She’s still thriving.

The site many of us take for granted — keeping it installed in our phones only to score inspo for haircuts and kitchen recipes, is actually used by more than 70 million users each month. The network is known to more than double exposure and website traffic in as soon as a month; making it one of the easier proven methods in digital advertising. And, the strategy is just as easy to implement as it is to use — literally.

Here are three (super) simple things you can do to increase your exposure and maximise results in the Pinterest community:

Master your profile. Think of it as the first impression, because it is. Craft your account to cater to your target market or Hubspot persona. (Not familiar? More here.) Think: Less about you, more about them. You’re curating content to appeal to an end user, not necessarily yourself.

Keep your bio content brief and give the new user (stumbling across your profile) a reason to follow you; on-brand, friendly photos are always helpful. Oh, and make sure you’ve got buzzwords — related to your content — in your profile name.

Implement Pinterest SEO into your website’s framework. Contrary to popular belief, Pinterest is a different kind of beast and lumping it in with other social media networks isn’t just unfair — it’s not right. Instead, Pinterest is technically considered a search engine site, like Google, and therefore acts differently. Yoast SEO is our product of choice for clients of The Studio, and I think you’ll find equal success as you move forward in your strategy. (They take the guess work out!)

Furthermore, you should be marking up your individual pins appropriately. This starts with creating and organizing your boards to cater to your target market, not yourself. Next, make sure you’re adding keywords to your board and pin descriptions. This is what the search engine calls on to show your content in its results. Pins should be light in text and strategic in description.

Make Pinning a conscious effort. Once content hits your personal website – or a level of consciousness within you, via third-party content – add it quickly to your feed. These posts shouldn’t just be pinned once. No, there should be Boards for your domestic content (via your personal channels) and the Boards for third-party channels by content or subject matter. Remember, people can choose to follow individual boards — and will. We don’t want them to miss anything!

Google Chrome has an awesome extension that helps streamline the process; you can download it here. And, BoardBooster and TailWind are also great automation tools. (Look into them!) BoardBooster, allows you to pin your scheduled content to a “secret” board and then BoardBooster automatically publishes it to your Pinterest account based on a timeframe you create.

Other fun facts that you probably didn’t know about the network?

The entire network is made up of more than 175 million active users (70 million are domestic, USA) with more than 75 billion pins made. 85% of the users are female and of that 42% are considered ‘adult’ or over the age of eighteen. 67% of the networks database is considered to be millennial, and they account for more than 1.5 billion searches each month. Oh, and 55% of online shoppers in the US choose Pinterest as their favorite social media platform. Boom!

Marketing Strategy Pinterest Marketing Public Relations