Not gonna lie, I was really struggling with Pinterest.
It’s not that I find it difficult, as I have been highly successful on the platform before.
In fact, I once managed to get over 1 million monthly visitors at one point.
No, the problem that I had was that I hated how my pins looked.
They didn’t resonate with me nor my brand.
As a consequence, the design process became a chore and I fell out of love with Pinterest 😔
My problem lied with the stats.
As reports show that the majority of Pinterest users – as at the time of writing – are female.
Because of that, I designed all of my pins with that in mind.
As you can probably guess…
I used your stereotypical pinks, fonts and photos that all of the other [female] creators were using.
All because I thought that I needed to create content that appealed to a feminine audience.
Although I do actually use pink as part of my branding…
I felt like my darker, more masculine colour palette would surely have messed up people’s pretty and carefully constructed feeds.
That was until I came across Kat Sullivan, CEO of Marketing Solved.
She shared with me some advice that would change the entire mindset I had towards Pinterest.
Advice so simple, I actually feel stupid sharing it with you.
But here goes…
To paraphrase Kat, her advice was to…
- Perform a keyword search on the topics that you would like to rank for
- Have a look through all the pins towards the top of the feed
- Highlight common themes amongst all of those pins (i.e. colours, fonts, layouts)
- Do the opposite
The idea is that although it’s great to meet a standard that is expected within a certain niche, and by the content creators within that niche, it’s also important to stand out from the crowd.
For example…
I’m doing a search on Pinterest for “Tattoo Ideas For Men”.
As expected, I’m confronted by a wall of ink.
Roses, lions, crosses and more.
You name it, all of the popular tattoos are there.
But as highlighted in the image above, there is one particular pin that stands out from the rest.
Why?
It’s simple really.
That’s the only image (bar one) with a colour overlay AND text.
Yet it’s still relevant to what I was searching for.
(Which is an important point that shouldn’t be ignored).
So with all this in mind, I realised that I could just create pins that I wanted to create.
Not what I thought I should.
Conclusion
Do you want more pin clicks on Pinterest?
Change up your pin designs by using different colours, fonts and images that stand out from the pins that are already ranking high on your chosen keywords.
This will ensure that if and when you do rank towards the top of the search results, your pin will be the one that gets noticed (and clicked on) the most.
Have any questions on feedback on this article? Leave a comment below!
