Pinterest, the virtual scrapbooking site, is a boon for businesses with visually appealing products to promote. Alison Lewy, founder of Fashion Angel and author of Design Create Sell, offers her top pointers for small fashion enterprises to get the most from one of the fastest-growing social media platforms.
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Pinterest’s visually driven content has led countless fashion brands and retailers to use it to promote their goods and their brand, writes Alison (left). It’s a highly effective tool to share your personality and unique view of the world, all while building a relationship with your existing and potential customers. It’s also one of the easiest platforms to set up and maintain. |
Here are my five tips to help you get the most from Pinterest with your fashion brand.
1. Plan a range of boards.
First research what your target customer is pinning and other pins, boards and brands that are getting results. Then decide on the themes for your range of pin boards.
If you’re a footwear designer, for example, you could create boards devoted to historical shoe designs you love, photos of your designs worn by celebrities, images of outfits you think work well with particular shoes or your inspiration behind a forthcoming collection.
Fashion favourites, travel destinations, exhibitions and things that inspire you also work well on Pinterest. What you want is for people to find something on your board they emotionally resonate with and repin to their board. This will increase exposure to your board, and ultimately your brand.
2. Start pinning.
Create pin-worthy content by choosing great images and videos from your blog (and consider adding a watermark with your website URL so that other pinners know where it came from) – make your product images as attractive as possible so people will want to buy (and re-pin) them. If you’re selling a product, add the price to the pin description.
Just pinning your own images can seem too self-promotional, however, and could turn off other users. So in addition to giving your website visitors something pretty to pin, visit other sites and pin, comment and repin their images as you browse online. The more you can show your audience what an authority you are in your field, the more you’ll establish yourself in your niche. Tag other pinners by name and say thank you for repins – and if you’re pinning from other sources, be sure to ask permission, or make sure the image is royalty-free.
Being creative and genuine will help build your Pinterest following, which ultimately boosts your business’s potential reach.
3. Get your pins found.
Consider what content will bring users to your pins and what you want them to take away (repins). Add categories, keywords, hashtags and urls to make your profile and pins SEO-friendly.
Mix your Pinterest activity with other content on your blog or website and optimise your website for pinning by encouraging your website visitors to pin your content by adding a ‘pin it’ icon to every page. This will let anyone on your site repin any image on your site they might like.
Once you’re up and running, post a ‘Follow on Pinterest’ button (available on the Pinterest goodies page) on your blog and email signature, and integrate Pinterest share buttons on your other social media platforms.
4 Host a competition on Pinterest.
Several businesses have hosted ‘pin-to-win’ contests on Pinterest, which can create a tremendous amount of viral excitement around your Pinterest presence. When you get comfortable with Pinterest, you might want to give this strategy a go. Everyone loves free stuff, so the cooler the prizes you offer, the more excited people will be to share with their followers.
5: Keep at it.
As with all social media sites , Pinterest requires maintenance. If you decide to start a Pinterest board, it’s important that you stay in the game – dormant Pinterest boards won’t attract new followers. If you download the Pinterest App for mobile/tablet and add the ‘Pin It’ button to your browser it makes it easy for you to create and add boards wherever you are.
See Alison talk about social media for fashion businesses
If you want to learn more about Pinterest and how social media and blogs in general can help promote your fashion brand, you’ll find Fashion Angel’s forthcoming Social Media for Fashion Brands talk on 30th January at the American Intercontinental University in London very useful.
Alison will be joined by fashion blogger Lois Waller from Bunni Punch and fashion communications lecturer Jayne Sheridan for the event, which is free to Fashion Angel Business Club members and £18 for non-members.
Book online via the Fashion Angel Events page.
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Thanks for the useful tips! I am rearranging our boards these days and it’s a huge help. Did you know that you can also create amazing collages from your Pinterest pins? There’s an app for that! It’s called Bazaart.
this article has been a real help – one of my new year’s resolutions was to get to grips with pinterest and having used the tips in this article I can report that I have had some great activity on my newly revised pinterest boards
as I sell nursery art products that are all about visual impact – I can now see how pinterest will be a great source of new customers and keeping in touch with existing ones – thank you Alison Lewy!
Awesome tips on promote your fashion brand. Thanks for amazing post!