Let’s start to plan you your holiday marketing strategy on Pinterest NOW — the holiday season will be here before you know it!
Welcome back!
This week, the podcast returns after an extended summer break. I hope this season has brought you rest, rejuvenation, and just some good summertime fun for those of you who are in the northern hemisphere. For those in the southern hemisphere, we hope you enjoyed your winter break!
We took this planned downtime to get refreshed and give our whole team a break from the weekly podcast production (learn more about my philosophy of rest in this episode). But here we are in August, and we’re getting ready for the ramp-up of the busiest season on Pinterest.
Related: What to Pin in August
Today we’re talking about how to best prepare for the upcoming holiday marketing season on Pinterest. Our goal is to help you avoid that last-minute scramble of trying to get your content onto Pinterest. Let’s talk through being intentional about putting holiday content out at the right time so that you can get more clicks and sales this year.
Before we get into it…if you are interested in Pinterest management services we would love to support your goals.
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Our discovery call team is ready to learn about your business goals and help guide you towards the best service for you. Hop on up to the tabs at the top of this page to learn more about us and how we can help you reach your ideal customer or reader right where they are in their Pinterest journey.
Now, let’s dive into how you can avoid the last-minute holiday marketing scramble.
Believe it or not, pinners are already thinking about Christmas!
I know, it seems pretty crazy, right?
But, last year Christmas searches started in April. We’re pretty sure that’s because most of us were stuck inside and we were just dreaming of getting to Christmas.
Here we are almost eighteen months after the beginning of the pandemic and we are beginning to see a little more of the traditional traffic patterns for Pinterest. We fully expect that NOW is when people will start their search for the perfect holiday gift, holiday decor, and general inspiration for this upcoming season.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Your Holiday Marketing on Pinterest
As we talk about planning your holiday marketing, don’t run the risk of missing the mark with your person by trying to cover every holiday. Put your focus on reaching your specific audience.
Step 1: Narrow Down Your Holiday Marketing Focus
Start first by thinking through all the holidays and which ones most fit your audience.
Narrow down the holidays that connect best with your audience.
Step 2: Identify Holiday-Related Queries Your Audience Might Ask
Next, it’s time to think through the questions your audience will be looking for the answers to, and identify the order in which those queries will happen.
Here’s some possible queries:
• how to make your home festive for…. (insert any holiday)
• how to make decorations for your porch, mantle, or dining table
• where to find supplies for…
• how to store your favorite…
• how to dress for a (holiday) party
• where to find the best Christmas sweater for… (a big one for e-commerce)
Step 3: Create Holiday Marketing Content Design to Answer These Queries
Now it’s time to determine the posts or pins you will need. I love Google Sheets for this. It’s essentially like Excel, but Excel drives me completely crazy. There are other options for organizing your content as well (e.g., Airtable). Choose the tool that works best for you.
Within Google Sheets, I have a place to braindump all of my post ideas. I don’t actually create the content here. Just the main ideas/titles. With a place to capture all of the ideas, you can then utilize the tab feature in your spreadsheet to categorize and organize your ideas.
A lot of people are looking for the “How to do…” or “What to Buy for…” ideas for any given holiday. We have a lot of resources to help you create gift guides so be sure to tap into those. Gift guides are a great way for affiliate marketers or e-commerce business owners to market your particular product.
Before we move to that final step, I want to acknowledge that some of you really aren’t excited about creating a blog. If you’re in e-commerce you feel like I’m not really talking about what you need to do. Here’s what I tell people in this position.
I am not expecting you to write a 3000-word blog post.
I encourage you to go back and really listen to our Laurelbox podcast episode. They are a great example, from the e-commerce point of view, of how a blog post can be an entry point to introduce users to their product.
Laurelbox started with the pain point of their audience which was “What do I say to somebody in grief who’s just lost their parent or a child?” The Laurelbox staff created a blog post that provides a few ideas of what to say. They expand further by communicating to their reader that they “…have a really great solution for you with our carefully designed box to send your loved one.”
Remember, people are thinking about what to do for these holidays and they are searching for how to choose what to do, where to go, what to serve. Those are the questions you need to answer for them.
If you have a product to market, you can’t just say “I have this beautiful candle. Here, buy my candle.”
I don’t know anything about your candle yet. I can’t pick it up, smell it, or see it. I need you to describe it a little bit.
I know it’s hard to write a blog post and you find it frustrating. Some of you may never want to do them and that’s fine. This just means you have to get really creative with your pin.
Your pin will need to communicate the benefits of what you’re selling — and it has to be super brief. Think billboard advertising. If you tell me your candle is going to revolutionize my life and make my children do all their chores, I want to buy that candle!
The point I’m trying to drive home is this:
If you’re not going to write a blog post about your product then your pin creativity has to be super on point. It really needs to hit me between the eyes right away to get me to click over and purchase your product.
Step 4: Determine if Promoted Pins Will Be Part of Your Holiday Marketing Strategy
Finally, to really avoid that holiday rush, you need to decide now whether or not you’re going to run a promoted pin campaign. I think this is really important if you believe you’ve tapped out your current Pinterest audience or you want to get a jump-start on reaching new people.
I’ve been marketing my business on Pinterest for eight years. I get a lot of new users there and that’s why I love Pinterest. But I might put some money behind a promoted pin campaign because I want to reach even more people. A promoted pin campaign can be especially helpful for those of you who have just started on Pinterest within the last six months and you want to get in front of the exact people who would read your blog post or buy your product.
If that’s your desire, we have promoted pin resources for you on the website, we have several podcasts on this topic, and we have our Simple Pin Ad Society. The doors for the Ad Society will open in September. You can get on the waitlist here.
Your Pinterest Holiday Marketing Strategy: Main Take-Aways
- Narrow down which holiday(s) your audience is most interested in.
- Ask yourself what questions your audience is going to be asking about that particular holiday.
- Determine what types of pins you need for each post or each product.
- Decide if and when you’d like to turn your post or pin into a promoted pin campaign.
And there’s one more important thing to remember about holiday marketing on Pinterest.
Pinterest has said that they encourage you to pin 45 days in advance of the holiday. Christmas is a bit different because people are actually searching now. You know, it’s Christmas in July!
But when it comes to Thanksgiving or any of these other holidays, look at your calendar, back up 45 days, and get ahead of it.
If you are in a position where you can’t get your information out 45 days beforehand or you’re working with a brand and you need to post it the week of the holiday, remember to recycle that information for next year to get that particular post up and running 45 days in advance. It’s already there, so use it to get ahead next time.
Look at the content you created last year and get that into the rotation this year. Use your analytics data to see what did well last year. You can learn a lot from your analytics and get a lot of feedback that can help drive your strategy moving forward.
This was a short and sweet episode to get us back into the groove of podcasting.
We are so excited to help you navigate the next several months of 2021 as we land the plane of this year into the busiest holiday season. We look forward to watching your business grow by using Pinterest marketing.
For Further Listening/Reading:
