Can Equine Businesses Use Pinterest?

Pinterest is an incredibly powerful tool that can grow your email list and drive traffic to your website. Think of Pinterest as a search engine. It’s a lot closer, closer to YouTube or Google than a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram.

Pinterest is for you if you have a blog, vlog, podcast, or sell a product AND you have a website. If you’re selling products on Etsy, running your podcast through a platform like Anchor, or only posting your videos to YouTube or Vimeo, you’re not quite ready for Pinterest.

Pinterest takes some work to get set up. You want to make sure that you own the results that you get. Driving traffic to a platform that you don’t own can end in wasted effort if you get kicked off the platform or the algorithm changes.

This happened to Laura. She was using Pinterest to drive traffic to an Etsy shop. The algorithm changed to favor the shops with the most sales and all of a sudden she could not get her products to show up on their first page.

She had built her business on borrowed land. She was still getting her traffic from Pinterest, but all the traffic she got from active shoppers on Etsy (which converts at a much higher rate) was gone. Her sales tanked, and she ended up closing up the shop a year later.

Wait until you have a website, don’t waste your efforts using it to drive traffic to a platform that isn’t yours. If you do have a website, Pinterest can be an incredibly powerful tool for you.

The Aesthetic of your Pins

You want your pins to match your brand’s aesthetic so they are easily recognized as yours. Be careful to make sure any text you put on your pins is legible. People try to make them super pretty with cursive fonts, but you can’t read what they say. Those pins don’t get a lot of clicks. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to use text on your pins. It encourages users to click on your content.

You can drag and drop the order of your boards on Pinterest. Make sure your first board is your brand board. You will share content from a lot of different people, but you want to make sure the people who visit your profile can immediately see your content. It’s all about you, make sure you show up first!

Horsey Update

April and Laura pulled up their Pinterest accounts and looked at some dream horsey items they have pinned on their accounts for this Horsey Update. When April gets back to the states, she wants to get back into Western Dressage. She has all kinds of Circle Y saddles pinned in her boards.

She doesn’t want a mass-manufactured saddle. She wants a handmade Circle Y. It’s super important to have a quality saddle, and April loves pinning all the pretty ones that will look good on King.

Laura’s horsey Pinterest dream is a barn pros house. She has about 50 different pins of all the different horse/barn compos they offer. They are gorgeous log homes on top and barns underneath.

Securing financing for such a unique home is near impossible, but Laura dreams about her future house/barn combo daily. She wants to be able to run down the stairs in her PJs and feed the horses as the coffee brews every morning.

Using Pinterest for Your Horse Business

When you get started on Pinterest, it’s essential to understand your goals. The number one goal of being on Pinterest is for Pinterest users to click your pin and visit your website. A pin is an image that links directly to a page on your site. When someone clicks it they end up watching your video, reading your blog, downloading your freebie, or viewing your products.

It’s easy to get super excited about your Pinterest views. We have posted about 30 pins from the podcast on our account, and have just over 50k monthly views. That seems incredible at first glance, but you want to pay attention to your clicks. Our 50k monthly views have only translated to about 25 clicks, so we still have a lot of work to do.

If you aren’t happy with the number of clicks you are getting, find out where people are dropping off. You need to play with your title, description, and hashtags if your pins aren’t getting a lot of impressions (views). Make sure each pin has a keyword in the title and the description, and add 3-5 one word hashtags at the end.

When a pin gets a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, look at your image and caption. It might not be eye-catching enough to stick out from the sea of other pins users see. Your title and pin description should be catered to the Pinterest algorithm, and the graphic with your text is for pinners.

Creating Content for Pinterest

If you spend some time researching Pinterest best practices, you’ll learn that it’s best to pin around 15 times per day. This does not mean that you have to pin 15 pins from your account each day. You can re-pin relevant content from other pinners. Laura pins ten times a day. Two pins from her website and eight re-pins from other business accounts.

Trying to create tons of content always leads to burnout. Pace yourself and stick to a schedule that feels manageable. It’s better to get started small than attempting to stick to an unrealistic content creation schedule. If you cannot create tons of content right now, just create multiple pins for each page.

Each pin should have a different image, and you can play with your SEO and try different titles and descriptions. This helps each one of your pieces of content go a little farther. You can create a pin for every one of your boards relevant to the pin’s topic.

Remember, in marketing people often have to see something upwards of seven times before they take action. If people see your content across multiple pins, they are more likely to click.

We hope this Episode got you thinking about the possibility of Pinterest for your business. If you have a website and want to drive more traffic to it, Pinterest is the ticket to making that happen.

Laura’s Pinterest challenge walks you through getting everything all set up and running for your business account. It teaches how to set up your profile, build out your boards, and pin your first pins. You can check it out here.