Getting Started on Pinterest: A Guide For Private Practice Therapists
To avoid marketing burnout, I recommend that private practice therapists build a foundation of passive marketing channels. These are ways that clients can find you rather than you seeking them out. While active marketing, like social media, email, and networking are valuable and worthy pursuits, they become harder when we’re busy or under higher levels of stress.
In this post, I talked about passive marketing must-haves: a hardworking website and a solid SEO strategy. In addition to your website and SEO, I mentioned one of my favorite passive marketing channels: Pinterest.
Each time I publish a blog post (like this one), I create graphics (like you see below this intro) that I post to Pinterest as “pins.” Then, when people click on my pins from Pinterest, they go directly to my website to read my post. Perhaps you’re reading this now because you found my pin on Pinterest; if that’s the case, I’m glad you’re here!
Pinterest consistently generates at least 80% of my website’s social media traffic with a fraction of the work on my part. Needless to say, Pinterest is one of my favorite marketing tools, and I wanted to share its magic with you too.
Since I’m more of a Pinterest fan than an expert, I enlisted the help of Christina Willis, a Pinterest Strategist, Registered Nurse, and founder of C. Willis & Co., to help you get started.
Enjoy!
Guest Post By Christina Willis, of C. Willis & Co.
You can use Pinterest to widen your reach and build your authority as a therapist in private practice, especially if you’re just starting out or looking to expand your practice.
In this blog post, I’ll be sharing with you how a private practice therapist can get started with Pinterest, what are the first steps/things you should do, and what are the follow-up steps after you’ve set up your Pinterest account.
What is Pinterest Marketing?
Pinterest has become such a popular platform where people from all over the world can go for inspiration and discover new ideas, interests, and services.
There are so many businesses out there that have maybe underestimated Pinterest & have taken their business marketing efforts towards Instagram and Facebook. But, Pinterest has become a powerful platform that allows you to leverage your brand awareness and engagement to set yourself apart from the competition in your niche (in a good way, of course).
Pinterest has become such a huge hub for business ideas that it has grown this past year (since the pandemic) to well over 440+ million active monthly users.
Little do some private practice therapists know that Pinterest is the perfect place where your business ideas can be shared with a prospective audience who’s looking for your particular qualifications and services.
There are tens of millions of people who head to Pinterest to find strategies for living a more fulfilled life, further their business, navigate relationship conflicts, or find answers to whatever their pain points may be.
For a long time, Pinterest has proven to be the best free traffic driver, right after Facebook.
In today’s social media arena, it is so easy to become distracted by all the ‘new’ platforms that are out there, but I’m here to tell you that Pinterest is the unspoken marketing tool you need to start using this year to increase your brand awareness & your online reach to ultimately grow your business.
The Significance of Pinterest Marketing for Private Practice Therapists
The basis of Pinterest marketing is for your business to get in front of the right people at the right times who are looking for exactly what you offer.
I have discovered that many private practice therapists have never heard of using Pinterest to grow their business.
A good majority of therapists are currently using Instagram, Facebook or Linkedin to promote their business or educate their potential clients, and while this is good, there are quite a few things that these platforms do miss: they are not the best traffic drivers to your website.
If you feel like you’ve been struggling with promoting your business on social media, then Pinterest might be the best solution for you.
Being on Pinterest provides you with more reach for your business as the competition may not be as high within your niche, in particular if you want to start ranking in your town or city to start attracting your potential clients to your private practice.
Sounds great, but where do I start?
If you’re on board with using Pinterest to grow your business this year, I’m going to give you some actionable steps you can take right now to increase your brand awareness and business reach.
As we know, people come to Pinterest when they are in their discovery mode - they are looking for help with their particular pain point.
If your potential audience has never had experience with a therapist, this is where you would come in to help them discover your unique skills, education, and services.
Before anyone gets started with Pinterest marketing, I always encourage them to make sure they are publishing content to their website (via a blog page) that they know their audience is searching for & that you are set up well for SEO (search engine optimization).
If you have been blogging for some time, you know the importance of keywords. Keyword research is imperative with Pinterest and a step that I encourage all therapists to really take the time to understand & explore your audience’s topics of interest.
For example, if you are a private practice therapist who focuses on stress management, you know what your audience is looking for when it comes to your service.
If you type the keyword ‘stress management’ into the Pinterest search bar, you will see a drop-down of suggestions for your topic. These are keywords that you can use when gathering information about your audience and their needs.
But taking it a step further, once you hit ‘Enter’, Pinterest provides you more qualifying keywords under the search bar. I suggest you keep a spreadsheet document of your keywords that are relevant to you, so that you can reference it at any time you need.
Now, that I’ve given you a brief understanding on the importance of keywords and how to find the ones that are best suited for your business & niche, let’s dive right into how you can get started with optimizing your Pinterest account for success!
1. Create a Pinterest Business account
Many people start out on Pinterest with a personal account where they start pinning content they love & feel inspired by.
But when it comes to using a Pinterest account to generate leads for your business, you need to have a business account to satisfy Pinterest’s terms of service. Failure to do so can result in a suspension of your account and you don’t want that!
If you currently have a personal account with Pinterest, I suggest you switch your account over to a business account. The steps to this are very simple & takes less than 5 minutes to complete.
In addition, a business account enables you to access countless analytics that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to access with a personal account such as information about your audience, their interests, country, devices of use, and your overall account reach.
2. Enable ‘Rich Pins’
Rich pins are a type of pin that gathers more information from your website and embeds the content into your Pin for the user. This information automatically syncs with your website which is an awesome way to keep things consistent and up to date for your audience if they come across your content on Pinterest.
If you have an ecommerce shop to your website and you make a change to your website’s content such as a change to the price or quantity, the information will be automatically reflected in your pin content - no extra work for you! To apply for rich pins, activate the process here.
3. Optimize your Profile Account for SEO
When it comes to optimizing your Pinterest account, I will not lie - this part does take quite a bit of work, but if you are committed to the process, I will break down the steps for you here.
Profile Cover Photo
I suggest changing out your profile cover photo to something that is more branded and suited to your business. By default, Pinterest will show content that you have recently pinned but try adding a branded photo that is unique to you or your team in your practice setting.
Profile Image
Changing out your profile image is one of the first steps to optimizing your account. If you are the face & brand of your business, try changing your profile image to a clear photo of yourself. This helps for your potential customers to connect with you and your business.
If you own or operate a larger brand or business, you can upload your logo but generally, a branded photo will convert better.
Profile Title
This is one area that not a lot of business owners pay attention to when optimizing their Pinterest account. Your profile title should be descriptive with keywords to your business name and the services you provide.
You can always update your profile title by clicking into your top right corner admin panel and accessing Settings >> Display Name.
Profile Description
When changing out your profile description, always make sure you add your researched keywords as this helps increase your Pinterest SEO.
To access your profile description, head to your admin panel again, go to settings, and from here, you're able to access About Your Profile.
Key elements in your profile description are descriptive words that further tell your audience who you serve and what you can help them with.
Verify Your Website & Social Media Accounts
In the ‘Claim’ setting of your account features, make sure that you claim your website and other social media accounts with Pinterest. This will enable your name and profile picture to show up next to your pins that come from your site or any other external sites.
Once your website and social media accounts are claimed, they will show up in your profile description by default where a clickable link to your website (which is what we want!).
4. Create a Tailwind Account
Tailwind is a huge key to your Pinterest marketing strategy. With Tailwind, you can pre-schedule your content to go to your different boards, and the beauty of Tailwind is that it works seamlessly with Pinterest to find the most appropriate times your audience is on the platform & Tailwind will schedule your content accordingly.
To get a free month of Tailwind, join here.
5. Join Tailwind Communities
When you create a Tailwind account, you have the opportunity to join Tailwind Communities. With Tailwind Communities, this helps to expand your reach and your content distribution.
Once you find and join a Community that is best suited for your content, there are specific guidelines you need to follow as a Community member such as a pin one, share one content, The guidelines are only set to help each community member have their content equally distributed as much as your own.
Other Things To Think About
Group Boards
The use of group boards is still common practice for some Pinterest users. While group boards have started to lose their appeal with some, you can definitely find some group boards that are beneficial for your Pinterest strategy. If you are wanting to include group boards in your strategy, try checking out group boards from therapists in your niche and joining them if your content fits well within the group board.
Cleaning Up Your Boards
If you have personal boards that you are not in alignment with your business, I suggest archiving them. Once you do this, you are able to add in your keyword rich titles and descriptions to the boards as this will help with Pinterest account optimization & ranking in search.
What do I have to do after the initial set-up?
Continue publishing consistent, high-value content to your website’s blog, creating pins that correspond to each blog post, and scheduling them via Tailwind.
Once you have your Pinterest account optimized and working in the background to help attract your ideal customer to your private practice, I suggest you keep track of your analytics in your Pinterest Analytics dashboard such your content impressions, saves, and outbound clicks.
Keeping a simple spreadsheet of your data analytics will help you to uncover what content is performing well with your audience. This will also help to inform you of what direction you can take your content marketing strategy for the future.
In conclusion
There is no doubt that Pinterest is one of the best traffic driving sources to bring customers to your business.
The above tips will help you set up your Pinterest for business account for success and aid you in experiencing long-term sustainable growth of your private therapy practice.
You’ll be amazed at the benefits of adding Pinterest marketing to your workflow and how well Pinterest can market for you on auto-pilot so that you can focus on your zone of genius in treating, caring, and working with your therapy practice clients.
I’ve created a quick guide to help you set up your Pinterest account for success. Want in on this goodie? Simply sign up here & your FREE Pinterest Account Set-Up Guide will be sent directly to your inbox!
About Christina
