If you want to learn how to build a Pinterest holiday marketing strategy for any holiday that you want to target, today’s post is for you with all the best practices. As I’m publishing this, autumn is right around the corner, so this is the time frame when the upcoming holiday season needs to be focused on for pinners. 

Starting early with your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy

You want your content to be found during Christmas time (or whatever holiday) and the prior leadup to Christmas because you want those sales. Trust me, I want them for you too. It’s like the stores putting out decor right with back to school stuff so it’s on your radar. Same here, only it’s an algorithm we’re priming.

Holiday success on Pinterest isn’t just about publishing a few gift guide pins and hoping for the best a few weeks prior to the holiday. In fact, it is a little bit more than that. I am going to give you a framework that you can follow going into Q4, and a great way for repurposing for any other holiday on Pinterest that you want to use it for. But you want to start planning for it now and always have it in your Pinterest marketing strategy.

If you’re new here, my name is Heather Farris and I’m a Pinterest marketing educator and marketing strategist. I have been working on Pinterest and inside of this platform for almost 10 years. Let’s dig in!

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Why Pinterest holiday marketing strategy is different

Let’s talk about why holidays on Pinterest are different first. Pinners on Pinterest are planning throughout the year. They are doing that early and often and they are gathering ideas from all over the web and saving it to their Pinterest boards. 

Then they come back to all their pins they’ve collected and their boards sometimes months or years in advance. Pinterest holiday search behavior is showing up five plus months in advance of the holiday actually happening. Now, because pinners are such planners, usually with a lot of families, they are doing this for a variety of reasons, there’s probably a bit of a budgeting component that goes into it as well.

When you walk into Target and you see holiday decor on the shelves and it’s not even Halloween, it’s because there are a lot of people that are putting those holiday items in their shopping carts. 

This is behavior that is common within the Pinterest space too. So I really want you to shift from minute thinking of oh let me throw up a few gift guide pins a few weeks before the holiday, to more proactive trend-based planning.

Interest spikes do bring really high intent buyers to your seasonal content to your website, but only if you were ahead of that trend and are publishing your pins before it spikes.

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Tools for planning your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy

As we dive into the framework for your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy, let’s actually first talk about the two tools that you can use that Pinterest has already created for you in order to do this planning.

Pinterest predicts tool

Number one is the Pinterest Predicts tool. The Predicts is a report that is put out by Pinterest once a year and it’s really highly tied into the Pinterest Trends tool which is the second tool I’ll show you in a moment. 

Pinterest Predicts report will give you all their highly rated content topics, themes, or interests they think will be very popular for the year. And this report is very accurate. Review it and if you have any content that lines up with what they’re putting out–use it!

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Pinterest trends tool

Using the Pinterest Trends keyword tool, you can search your audience’s interests or your keyword, and it will tell you what is coming or what has been growing over time in that space. It gives you four main filters: growing, seasonal, yearly, and monthly. This will help you plan out your content calendar, knowing what is popular when.

So, those are the two tools that you’re going to use as we talk about the framework for your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy.

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Using data into your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy

The biggest regular example you can search up is Christmas trends already starting to pop up in July. The specific example I found really interesting is “Christmas gifts for co-workers” and it has a 300% growth month over month right now in August, when I’m writing this. And it is predicted to rise over the coming weeks, clear into the shopping season.

Now, this is really where I want you to start thinking about proactive versus reactive marketing. You are going to focus on the trends that Pinterest is telling you people are looking for in your interest space. 

Use those trending keywords to create boards, Pinterest pins, and to get that content out into the world immediately. So, instead of thinking and planning based on vibes, we are going to think and research and plan based on trends.

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Step #1: Research and planning

Now step one is research and planning, one of the most important things for any marketing strategy. This takes place roughly four to five months in advance of the trend happening. Especially if you’re looking at a major trend like Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, New Year’s, the biggest holidays. Sometimes it’s a lot further in advance than that, depending on what it is. 

Another example, if I were pregnant and I wanted to plan for the arrival of that baby, I could be planning very far in advance. Before the arrival of the baby, before I got pregnant, when I got pregnant, and then clear up to giving birth. It could be anywhere from 10 months in advance to more, depending on how organized I am and what my personality is.

Treat your holiday content like you’re serving up to a mother planning on getting pregnant. Plenty of phases to create for with lots of advance timing. Do your keyword research, the earlier the better, then have it for your content creation next.

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Step #2: Content creation and repurposing

Now, step two of this process is the content creation. This is the part where most people actually love to be. They love creating pins and designing things and being in Canva. A lot of my audience and my students love that part.

You can start by repurposing what you already have inside of your business without constantly having to come up with new content ideas. This could be anything from products to content that you have that you can spin more towards a holiday marketing perspective. Whatever holiday it is that works, I’m sure that you have content and products in your business that you can spin slightly a different way and utilize these holiday trends, maybe even from your evergreen content.

But you might also need to create some new content or products to fill any gaps that you might have. Let the trends actually tell you what people are searching for and you can fill those needs.

And don’t just look for high intent or high search volume keywords. Be looking for keywords that have a lot of growth too. That actually shows high intent because they have growth. Look for those and see what you can find in your space and let that be your guide. 

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Examples of Repurposing Content

I have some examples of how you can take a Christmas angle keyword and flip it into a new holiday.

Let’s say it’s a sugar cookie scented candle for Christmas and you wanted to flip that, you could do a Mother’s Day spa-like gift candle. This might take a simple label swap, or text replacements, but you have the same product and content that can be utilized more than once. 

Another example could be a holiday decorating kit for baking. What you can actually do is turn that kit into something like a Springtime or Valentine’s decorating kit, tailored to cookies or certain deserts.

Another example, say you sell a red plaid blanket in your store, or a pattern for a quilt. You could flip that to be something like fall cozy home decor and change the color to orange. 

Or if you sell a DIY wreath kit, you can swap out the decor accessories on the wreath for any holiday–Christmas, springtime, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.

You really do have so many options when coming at this holiday season strategy and simply plugging in your new trends and swapping the content themes out with new images. You don’t always have to start from scratch as a content creator or marketer.

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Step #3: Publishing and momentum

Step three is publishing and momentum. Momentum is what we all want, but we obviously have to get things published first. We have to get into our scheduling tool and make things happen here.

Now, a word of caution on this–if you are using the native Pinterest scheduler, you can only schedule up to 30 days in advance. So, this might be where you actually invest in one of the secondary Pinterest scheduling platforms that allow you to schedule weeks ahead of time.

Now, you can obviously start scheduling 30 days in advance in August for the holiday season, and that works just fine. It just depends on what you have going on in your business. But if you want to schedule all of your content going straight up to the holiday season, then you’ll need a tool that goes farther.

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Final thoughts on your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy

Following this simple framework of research and planning four to five months in advance, content creation three to four months in advance, and then implementation in the form of publishing up to three months in advance. You are going to do just fine with your Pinterest holiday marketing strategy.

But if you want to learn more about your Pinterest marketing strategy or getting ready for the holiday season with Pinterest trends, you can always join us inside Pin Profit Academy. You’ll have direct access to me and we’ll be able to support your Pinterest marketing strategy in even more ways. See you inside!

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