floriology magazine november december 2017If you read and implemented our advice in the September-October Floriology issue about starting a Pinterest account, you should now have several Boards showcasing segments of your business, loaded with Pins of your best products. In this issue, we pick up where we left off and share with you more advanced practices in building and boosting your Pinterest presence.

pinterest logoLast issue, we discussed the importance of installing a Save button on your website so Pinterest users can begin sharing your Pins on their Boards—which hopefully will then be re-pinned by their own Followers. Begin using these buttons yourself to save Pins you’d like to promote on your own Boards. Make it a habit to do this every time you post new products on the website to keep your Pinterest presence updated.

PINTEREST WEBSITE WIDGETS

You can enhance this presentation by installing Pinterest widgets on your website that feature specific Pins or Boards. Best practice is to publish a Board of your wedding work or your trend expertise to share your sense of style with customers. Visit business.pinterest.com/en/widget-builder and work with your web developer to install these widgets.

Another activity requiring technical help is confirming your website on Pinterest. There are two methods to do this which require technical expertise—embedding a meta tag in your pages or uploading a file to your root directory. This might be “Greek” to most florists so to complete this process, direct your web developer to this page: help.pinterest.com/en/articles/confirm-your-website.

Confirming your website is critical to your success with Pinterest because it allows you to access analytics and measure success using it. Let’s discuss the following ways to convert analytics data into actions to build revenue.

ANALYZE PINTEREST ANALYTICS

First review Profile Analytics, specifically your top Pins in the last 30 days. This data represents the products which are most popular and interest people the most. Best practice is to place the products correlating with the top Pins on the home page and at highlighted or featured spots of category pages on the website.

Next, review Audience, specifically Interests. Are you finding customers’ interests are home décor, art, or event work? This may be a good prompt to create similar category pages on your website to appeal to these customers.

Lastly, review website analytics and zero in on top Pin impressions from the last 30 days. Whatever you see as popular, start re-pinning to your own board to boost activity of your Pinterest presence. This data should also confirm anything you found examining the top Pins in the last 30 days on what products resonate with consumers.

EXPLORE BUYABLE PINS

The last strategy we’d like to make you aware of and consider involves creating Buyable Pins—yes, you can conduct commerce via Pinterest! But there are caveats that could be deal breakers. First, you’ll need to use one of the following ecommerce platforms as these are Buy Pin ready:

Because of this first requirement, adopting buyable Pins may be a challenge for florists considering most floral-specific web providers may not necessarily host websites or partner with the platform providers mentioned. A path you may want to consider is signing up for a shopify account which provides you with a web presence to not only start offering Buyable Pins with Pinterest, but will allow you to start selling on both Facebook and Amazon. My recommendation is this is something to explore considering you want to begin expanding your marketing—and selling—capabilities to users of two extremely popular commerce ecosystems.

Beyond this first requirement, Pinterest outlines a strict set of guidelines for Buyable Pins. The floral products you intend to offer must be items you can confect and deliver with high reliability; check this site for guidelines: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/buyable-pinsguidelines. Looking at Pinterest from a larger perspective, building this presence not only appeals to this specific audience, it also builds your website relevance. In essence, you are building a larger and larger cache of inbound links from a very relevant source, which only results in better search engine optimization. If you are active on Facebook and Pinterest, you should begin to see Pinterest pull ahead of Facebook with regard to clicks it refers to your website.

Download the entire article “Optimizing Your Pinterest Presence” in the Floriology November-December 2017 issue here.