Among jewelry marketing columnist Jacqueline Stone’s tips for using Pinterest: Create boards with intriguing names, like “Girl’s Best Friend” from Los Angeles retailer Roseark.
Time for some brutal honesty: I’m not very pro-Pinterest when it comes to constructing your fine jewelry digital marketing plan.
Let me explain.
Recovering jewelry designer Jacqueline Stone is CEO of her own marketing consulting and coaching business, Bubblegum and Duct Tape.Pinterest launched in 2010. It was a fun place to share and create electronic collages. No one gave it much thought, except as a place to save a recipe or create a “secret” board for your engagement ring ideas.
However, it caught on like a viral video with one of the most important consumer demographics—the head of household buyer (known in many instances as mom).
Fast-forward to 2017 when Pinterest launched its online shop.
Businesses rushed to the platform, eager to get a share of mom madness. Everyone’s favorite target market all in one place. It was a dream come true. Or was it?
The answer is yes and no.
Pinterest is amazing if you are in arts and crafts, make food, sell gifts, design interiors, know how to make kids smile, or plan weddings.
Unfortunately, jewelry is not a hot topic on the social media site, unless you are the one putting together that “secret” engagement ring board.
Most of my clients instead choose to focus on Instagram and Facebook. However, if you love using this medium it can become your new best friend.
There are claims Pinterest ad spend yields a big return on investment. However, everything I’ve read points to a key element of marketing that I’ve emphasized repeatedly in this column— consistency.
Not only do you need to be consistent on Pinterest, but the quality of content needs to be superb.
Plus, you need a lot of it.
Haven’t deterred you yet? Bravo, you like a challenge.
Read on to learn my top Pinterest tips.
1. Consistency There is no point delving into social media if you aren’t willing to be consistent with your posting on any channel. This is especially true on Pinterest.
While on Instagram and Facebook you might see some results more quickly, Pinterest success usually comes after months, if not years, of effort.
The payback can be huge.
Style Me Pretty, a wedding blog with a cult following, has amassed over 6 million followers on Pinterest.
The suggested posting schedule is five times per day. You may want to start using a social media scheduler to help you manage the
workload. However, I can’t stress enough how important it is to log onto this channel in real time as well.
Gabriel & Co.’s Pinterest posts incorporate eye-catching, high-quality imagery.
2. Quality Content
This goes without saying, right? Well, on Pinterest the stakes are a bit higher.
Your pins should be more vertical than horizontal and depict your story in an impactful way.
Pictures need to have depth and interest. Colors need to pop. Infographs need to be easily read in the blink of an eye.
You only have a few seconds to capture your audience’s attention and you want to ensure that this not only appeals to you and your target market but has mass appeal.
When in doubt of what to post, try simply asking yourself: Why would someone want to re-pin this to her or his board?
Dubin’s Fine Jewelry added the “Save to Pinterest” button to its website (bottom, far right in the row of social media icons).
3. Add “Save” Buttons to Your Site
You’ve gotten this far and perhaps you’re thinking, nope, I don’t have this much time each week to devote to Pinterest. That is OK.
Probably the most valuable tip I can offer is to use the Pinterest Widget Builder to allow people to pin items from your website to their boards. It allows people to share what they love about your products on Pinterest without you having to do much at all.
Audry Rose uses product pins on Pinterest that link to the company's website.
4. Create Your Online Pinterest Store
Shoppable pins no longer exist (i.e., you cannot shop directly on the Pinterest platform anymore); however, they’ve made it simple to embed a link to your e-commerce website in a product pin.
Let’s say I’m selling a butterfly ring on my e-commerce website, and that is the only place it can be purchased.
I can create product pins on Pinterest that link to my butterfly ring in one of two ways.
--I use Shopify to host my e-commerce store. On the Shopify back end, I connect to Pinterest and it creates a butterfly product pin for me automatically. It lives on Pinterest and redirects to my website. This can be done for my entire product line.
Many e-commerce websites these days make it easy for you to connect with Pinterest. Ones that I’ve played with are the aforementioned Shopify and Wix.
--I manually upload the image of my butterfly ring to Pinterest and embed the link back to my website.
Time consuming, yes. Worth it? Most definitely.
People may not be shopping on Pinterest as much anymore, but it’s definitely where they discover new brands. Will yours be next?
5. Create Boards with Interesting Names While we might not be sifting through boards on Pinterest—we’re looking through pins—we are more likely to click on a board if we’re interested in the artist or the board name has some appeal.
For example, Roseark created a board titled “Girl’s Best Friend.” Can’t argue with that deep-seated love of diamonds!
Because it’s a bit playful, I might just go and take a look to see what else they have to offer.
6. Repost from Another Social Media Channel I never thought I’d say it but if you want to be part of the Pinterest game with minimal effort, consider using the same content from another social media channel.
It looks as though Jacquie Aiche is posting the same content on Pinterest from Instagram (at least in some instances), but I’m not mad at it.
The above is beautiful image that draws me in; I want to learn more.
You don’t have to worry about your captions on Pinterest as you do on other social media platforms, as Pinterest is all about the visuals.
However, you can only use 20 hashtags on Pinterest, so if you are repurposing from Instagram be aware of this, as the hashtag allowance on Instagram has been extended to 30.
Conclusions While I might be a little less gung-ho about Pinterest, know this—it’s only because of the time suck.
Pinterest takes more effort than other social media platforms and requires consistent, quality content over a longer period of time before results are achieved.
Warning: It’s also highly addictive and hours have been lost simply “browsing.”
However, if you have the patience to put this tool to use it could work extremely well in your favor.
I mean, there are over 250 million active users on Pinterest a month, according to Hootsuite.
It’s becoming a larger and larger pond every day, and currently only 31 percent of businesses are actively using this to reach their customers. Fairly big pond but currently not a ton of fishermen.
A recovering jewelry designer, Jacqueline Stone has a diverse background in finance, marketing, advertising, product development, fine jewelry manufacturing, design and sourcing. She now serves as the CEO of her own marketing consulting and coaching business, Bubblegum and Duct Tape. Stone can be reached at hello@bubblegumandducttape.com.
Jacqueline Stoneis a recovering jewelry designer who now works in marketing and runs her own e-commerce site, TotemsandTarot.com.
