Pinterest 101 for Wedding Pros

I’m sure you’ve heard that Pinterest is a search engine. We hear this all the time but still many of us don’t know what that means!

So our team buckled down to learn how Pinterest works back in the summer of 2020 when we were all bored and had nothing else to do, right?

We’ve always used Pinterest for a company, but we used to only throw pretty pictures up there. That’s what we thought we needed to do!

We made some pretty fatal mistakes we’ve fixed recently thanks to our new Pinterest manager Gaby Pinkerton.

So I’ll be sharing some key strategies she shared with our audience we need to think about as wedding pros to drive traffic to our websites:

Keywords for Your Ideal Client

Your Pinterest Profile

People usually see Pinterest as a visual platform, but when you break it down, it’s all about keywords. When switch your mindset to see Pinterest as a search engine, that means any time you enter text on Pinterest, it has to be strategic.

For example, take a look at your profile and check if it only has your company name. Well, let’s think about that for a second. Who is going to come to Pinterest and type your name? Nobody, because they don’t even know we exist!

We want users to get to know us, but we need to attract them with different keywords. It goes back to the whole concept of who is your ideal client and how they are searching for you. You are doing them a disservice if you only say “wedding planner” because your content will get buried with all the other wedding planners!

For Blush, a great tagline for our Pinterest profile would be “Orlando Wedding Planner”. Sometimes we want to get so creative and want to use whimsical language. But Pinterest limits us in the number of characters we can use. Instead of being creative, we have to think about the terms our ideal client would search for.

Describing Your Pins

Pinterest is not a platform where we have to do this crazy amount of storytelling. We have to do that a lot on Instagram, sure. But on Pinterest, you should describe exactly what you see in an image when you post a pin! If you have an image of a three-tiered cake, your pin title should be “White Three-Tiered Cake”. The description could be something like “white three-tiered cake with pink flowers from a beautiful Orlando wedding venue.”

Luckily, you don’t have to be a good writer to be successful on Pinterest. You only need to exactly describe what you see in a picture, start there, and track which images get the most traction.

Amount of Times to Pin

The suggested daily pin count has changed over the last 10 years. When Pinterest was first a thing, it was telling us to pin 100 pins per day. That was the strategy. Thank goodness it isn’t anymore! But now Pinterest is about quality over quantity. The platform recommends us to pin 5-10 fresh pins per day. That’s referring to new content.

Story Pins

So now comes story pins. And for those of you who don’t know, story pins are almost like an Instagram story. It’s a series of vertical and swipeable images. Pinterest has been boosting story pins to the top of people’s feeds for the last several months.

It’s encouraging Pinterest users to get creative. For weddings, we can still use this to present a gallery for a user to swipe through. The only difference with the story pin is it doesn’t link to a URL, it links to your Pinterest profile.

At first, people freaked out because the whole point of Pinterest is to link back to your website right?? Well not to worry. If a user loved your story pin, they will then click around to the other pins on your profile, which of course all link back to your website!

Don’t Link Back Only To Your Home Page! Link to Your Blog Instead

Why Linking to Your Home Page Doesn’t Make Sense

Another thing we’re told ALL the time is to link back to our website. At one point we were doing this to the point where it was almost making things worse! Let me tell you what I mean…

We were ONLY linking back to our homepage! Let’s take a step back put ourselves in the shoes of our ideal client to dissect why this was a mistake.

She’s looking at Pinterest and our photo comes up. She thinks to herself “I cannot wait to see the full gallery!”

She clicks over to the website and she’s sent straight to our home page. The photo they clicked on is nowhere to be found. And they’re like “Well, where is it??” and will bounce off our page.

Pinterest keeps track of this. And worse, they might even flag your pin as spam. So when we link back to our website, it has to be strategic.

Best Practices for Blogging and Pinterest

You probably saw this coming. If we link back to our site, we should almost always link back to a related blog post. That’s where you should credit and link back to all your vendors as well.

Not only that but when you are linking to a blog post, all your images should be in that blog post with context. You can tell a bit more about the story from the wedding, and how you brought it all together!

I had actually turned the blog off on our website for a while because we didn’t know how to blog and we were so irritated now one was reading. But now, we do two real wedding blogs and two educational blogs a month. 300-500 words tops!

Don’t Forget a Call to Action!

You can drive traffic to your website all you want. But what happens on your website depends on you as the business owner. Once you have your blog, you want them to take some sort of action. Whether that’s to get on your email list, book a consultation, or get them to do anything!

The actionable steps within the blog was a game-changer for us. Ultimately you’re trying to drive traffic to your website so they can book you. As long as you focus on one call to action that makes sense, that’s when you’ll notice your Pinterest strategy take off!

How Will You Use Pinterest in Your Biz?

Oh my gosh, I hope you learned a heck of a lot from this blog to learn all things Pinterest! If you want to dive into more things Pinterest, we highly recommend visiting Gabby Pinkerton to learn more about her Pinterest course! Our team is so blessed by her and her expertise both on the Blush side and my coaching side!