The evenings are drawing in, we’re all getting a bit snuggly, lighting the fire, maybe settling onto the sofa with your phone, browsing Pinterest for halloween ideas or recipes for treats that your kids won’t notice are healthy.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Pinterest is like a web-based pinboard, a visual bookmarking tool. Here you can curate your own galleries of linked images in one inspiring personal library. But Pinterest is so much more than a cosy timewaster.

If any element of your business is visual, inspirational or aspirational, you could be using Pinterest to:

a) show potential customers how your product or services could help them actually accomplish their ideas

b) drive quality traffic to your website far more than any other social channel.

Beautiful images are key, try Unsplash for a huge range of beautiful rights-free images.

Despite its logo regularly appearing alongside Facebook and the like, Pinterest is not really a social channel. It’s a visual search engine, and a highly effective one – there are over 2 billion searches a month on Pinterest. Plus, this is a proactive audience, studies show that 93% of pinners use it to plan purchases, and 47% of pinners are likely to experience a major life event in the next 6 months (like getting married, having a baby, or buying a car) – these are people in serious Active Consideration Mode. All of this means that if your business target demographic is using Pinterest, you should be too.

So how do you attract some of the 10 million monthly users in the UK to your business? As with all marketing, you need to get specific about your users needs. The key to Pinterest is posting regular, inspiring and eye-catching content that is relevant to your customers plans.

Curate boards that hone in on relevant themes, showing how your business can fit into their vision. For example a jeweller should show how your product looks with fashion that will resonate with your customer, a wedding venue can create boards for a range of different types of event – showing how the venue can work in different ways, and also repinning other’s work to create an inspirational – and useful – resource for your potential client, which links back to your website.

How to use Pinterest to generate long-term traffic to your website:

1. Set up a business Pinterest account 

Ensuring that your title and description is keyword optimised. Claim your website so that Pinterest knows you’re legit. Using a business account also means you can check out the analytics for your account and really understand what is working.

2. Enable rich pins 

Particularly important for products, recipes etc, rich pins will automatically pick up content from your website.

3. Pin regularly, and consistently.

If you are serious about a Pinterest strategy, you need to pin at least 10 images a day. Pinterest prefers regular pinning to bulk pinning less often. These should be 50% your own original pins, and if you have a lot of content, up to 80%. The rest should be other people’s relevant pins – support your pals in the industry, pin what inspires you!

4. Don’t pin all your own stuff to one board

Though it might seem logical to keep “my stuff” in one place, it’s a complete waste to have a single board for your own product or articles. By pinning to one board, you are not showing users (and Pinterest) how you are relevant in all sorts of categories. Create a range of boards that cover different themes. For example a Wedding venue can create boards for a range of different types of wedding – inspiring a range of people, and showing them how their venue can work in different ways. Similarly a local bricks and mortar business might create a range of boards for local themes – local events, local attractions. To get an idea of the types of board you might create you need to…

5. Research

Look for keywords, boards and themes that your customers are looking at, and you can do it right on Pinterest. Browse your categories, and even start typing in search terms and see what comes up in the automated box, these are the terms people are using, so see if you can create content to meet the need, and ensure you’re using these keywords in your file names and descriptions. 

6. Use pin-friendly images on your post

Vertical images work best in the Pinterest feed, so include this in your posts and encourage people to share your content on their boards too. Images with text work considerably better than most. Keep your eyes peeled for a new post giving you the key elements of a great Pinterest image!

7. Optimise your descriptions

Just like your SEO metadata, ensure the descriptions of your images are optimised. You have up to 500 characters, but only the first 75-100 show in the snippet with your image, so make them count. Take the search terms you identified in your research and turn them into a sentence so that the description makes sense – the more relevant you are to the search, the more likely to be clicked.

8. Evergreen works best

The nature of Pinterest is that your gorgeous picture could spend ages in the ether, even years, and suddenly it will be relevant to one pinner, and then another, and the more clicks you get, the more you get shown, before you know it, you have a pin leading to your website that you consider to be old news, but nevertheless is driving new traffic. So keep your content evergreen, and make sure you go back and edit/improve any page which is getting seen. Add a new call to action, make sure the content is up to date and the images look great.

Now go get pinning, and while you’re at it, pin my picture too!