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For businesses and content creators, the period between September and December (also known as the 4th Quarter, or Q4) is the busiest time of year. It also has the potential to be the most profitable and to skyrocket not only your revenue but your growth on social media too. As we have shared before, Pinterest requires more lead time than other platforms in order for your content to show up in searches. To make sure your content is posted in time, we are sharing the ultimate guide to Q4 on Pinterest.
Just to sweeten the deal, we’re making this timeline as accessible as possible! You can download the printable checklist and timeline for free at the end of the guide. We are even providing a calendar integration to automatically add dates into your Google calendar at the click of a button.
While Q4 officially starts in September, Pinterest activity for most niches starts to pick up in August and doesn’t slow down until the end of January. Q4 is dominated by the “holiday season” and Pinners are planners. In other words, holiday planning starts on Pinterest first. Keep in mind that searches for the holidays start earlier on Pinterest than other platforms and the searches last longer too.
We’ve talked at length about the best time to post on Pinterest. As we’ve mentioned before, since Pinterest is a search engine, in order for Pins to show up in a search, they need to be indexed first. That means that sharing promotional content or time-sensitive content on Pinterest as organic Pins (or not as promoted Pins) is probably not going to help you much… especially if you wait too long.
However, there is a way to get around that! Advertising with Pinterest has shown to be 2.3x more cost-efficient than ads on other social platforms. To help you make sense of them, we’ve included a guide about holiday advertising here as well. If you’re never tried Pinterest ads, Q4 is a great time to try them, but you will need to budget for them appropriately.
For those reasons, it’s important to start planning early for your Q4 content. Searches for all things Halloween start in (if you can believe it) August! Winter holiday-related searches take off in October, so it’s already time to be posting about any products or services you want to draw attention through the end of the year.
Pinterest put out an extremely helpful Holiday Guide this year. The guide is mostly focused on advertising, but there is a lot of helpful info even if you don’t intend to advertise this year!
Wave was so inspired by all for the incredible information in Pinterest’s Holiday guide that we decided to create an even more useful guide for you. We’ve summarized all of the details from Pinterest’s guide and provided ideas or examples of how to interpret the information.
We also pulled inspiration from seasonal trends, the most popular Pinterest niches, and a few important how-tos for business accounts to help you make the very most of the end of this year.
Bonus, we included a Q4 timeline at the bottom of this post that is intended for download. This timeline will help your business stay ahead of Q4 deadlines and holiday planning.
According to Pinterest (and our analysis of historical data), the holidays are already in full swing on the platform! Here is some of the most valuable data to consider for this holiday season.
In the 2021 Pinterest Holiday Guide, they shared 6 types of holiday shoppers on Pinterest. We LOVE this list of personas because it’s incredibly helpful for figuring out who to market your holiday content to. You can specifically market to 1 persona that matches your content best, or you can use this info to try to vary your messaging or creative material to appeal to multiple personas.
We think you’ll love the full guide, but we are sharing an overview here. Be sure to bookmark the Pinterest guide to read later for inspiration!
The Early Bird has probably been looking for holiday ideas since last December (or maybe they never stop!). They likely have holiday decor, food, or gift ideas board and know exactly what they’re planning to purchase this season. They might even know exactly what they’re going to purchase as gifts for everyone on their list, and they probably have a Pinterest board for each person too. This Pinner is a planner!
Since the Early Bird has a vision for what they plan to purchase, they will probably respond to sales quickly if it’s something they already had their eye on.
Some ideas for marketing towards the Early Bird is to produce gift guides throughout the year. Early Birds also make their travel plans early, so if that’s relevant to you, keep that in mind.
Using holiday-related keywords year-round in your Pins, especially if you are a retail brand, will set you up for success with the Early Bird.
This persona does the holidays the same way every year. They have a specific set of traditions they follow and food they eat for each holiday. While it might seem difficult to market to a Traditionalist, they love to see new ideas for their old favorites.
Do you have a hack that will improve their tradition? A product that is particularly nostalgic? Perhaps a perfect set of family pajamas? This is the type of content that will resonate well with the Traditionalist.
To help you find the Traditionalist, focus on the keywords “traditional” or “classic” in your Pins.
The Self-Gifter persona is one that always purchases a special gift (or many) for themselves during the holiday season. They might wait all year to splurge on a luxury item or might be making solo travel plans.
This persona is fun because people falling into this category usually fall into one of the others as well. It works really well if you have a product that isn’t particularly giftable, such as a course for example.
If this category works with your niche, focus on “the perfect gift to buy yourself” type messaging.
This persona is about to hold their first holiday… and has no idea where to begin. They’re looking to level up their knowledge as quickly as possible. They’ll also be looking to get their space holiday-ready, with everything from decor to serving trays to gift wrap.
Sharing helpful gift guides, entire menu plans, or even how-to guides are exactly what the Rookie Host will be looking for. They’re looking to be inspired about how to make the holiday their own, or maybe to make it a little more like the holidays of their past, except this year from scratch.
Anything that will make their lives a little easier during the holiday season and they will need it quickly. Using the keywords “quick” and “easy” along with other holiday-related keywords will help the Rookie Host find your offer.
The Shipping-First Shopper is not interested in brick-and-mortar shopping for any of their holiday needs. If it can’t be delivered, they’re going to look somewhere else for it.
Make use of this by making it obvious which of your products can be shipped (just make sure to include order deadlines). Average shipping time might be a helpful addition too.
If you aren’t in the retail space, make sure that any tools or items that you use in your content can be ordered online. This is a great opportunity to use affiliate links if you use them.
This is your friend on Instagram with the picture-perfect holiday photos. The Next Level Party Planner outdoes themself every year. Their home is immaculately decorated from top to bottom. Their meals look straight out of a recipe book. Even their clothing is trendy and festive.
Since beauty and vision are top of mind for this persona, a visual first mindset is helpful here. Make sure your products and Pins are especially beautiful.
Checking into this year’s trends might get you an in with this persona. They’re always looking to make their holiday decor, fashion, or food even better than the year before.
Pinterest has unique design guidelines in comparison to other photo-sharing platforms. If you’ve never checked out their Creative Best Practices, or it’s been a while, take a look before you start designing with the holidays in mind.
This is especially important if you intend to do advertising! There is a potential for your designs to be rejected if they don’t follow the best practices for the platform.
Additionally, we strongly recommend reading through the Pinterest Creators Code. We absolutely love the focus on kindness and community building- and that Pinterest is taking a clear stance on the kind of place they want their platform to be. You can learn more about it here and sign the pledge! Ensure that your content follows the Creators Code.
Though these aren’t listed specifically in the Best Practices or the Creators Code, Pinterest tends to group their content into the following categories when suggesting “best of” content.
Aim to make content that is:
Do your best to make your Pin designs and copy representative of as many of those categories as possible. We suspect you’ll be pleased with the results!
See the entire guide to making successful Pins for all available Pin types here.
To help get you in the festive (and creative) spirit, here are two resources you can use to see effective ways to use Pinterest during the holiday season.
Ads are a big deal in Q4, and not just on Pinterest. Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company (Business Insider), releases a Quarterly Digital Marketing Report.
According to Merkle, these were the Q4 increases to overall ad spend by internet advertisers in 2020. Keep in mind that this was September through December of 2020- (the height of the 2nd Pandemic wave)
Since last year, Pinterest has completely overhauled its ads platform to make it easier to start advertising on Pinterest than ever. To learn more about advertising on Pinterest, check out their guide here. Looking for support with paid advertising? Reach out to us for a consultation.
If you have a product or landing page to promote, Q4 might be the perfect time for you to give paid advertising a try. Even a small amount of spending could help you achieve amazing results. There are tons of options! To help you decide what might be the best option for you, we have provided an overview of the ads platform. This might help you decide if holiday advertising is right for you.
Ads are an investment, and to be perfectly honest, not something we recommend for brand new accounts. Pinterest ads are best suited for accounts with a proven audience (we will get to why later). If you fall into that category, we suggest focusing on organic success through our proven Pinterest growth strategies or investing in a Pinterest manager to support you.
If you make the decision to advertise on Pinterest, you’ll want to make sure your account is Q4 ready and your profile is fully optimized before you begin.
There are 4 main types of campaigns on Pinterest that correspond to different goals. There is also a “bonus category” that isn’t technically a campaign but does still require ad spend. To figure out which type of campaign is best, think about the product or page you’d like to promote and what your goal is for that page. Pick a campaign that best aligns with that goal.
If you are just getting started with Pinterest or you have a brand new product to share, this might be the right campaign for you. Awareness campaigns will help you find an audience by simply sharing your ads. You are essentially paying for Pinterest to show your ad to whatever group of people you specify. Your ad spend is the cost-per-impression structure (CPI), which means you pay when people see your ad.
While this ad type is helpful for increasing the overall awareness of your brand or products, if your budget for advertising is small, we would suggest you pick a Consideration or Conversion campaign instead to see more impactful results.
This is currently the only type of campaign available for video Pins.
If you want people to click on your ad, this is the campaign for you. Unlike the awareness campaign, where the goal is for more eyes to be on your ad content, this one asks Pinners to take the action of clicking to learn more. This campaign type can be used to increase followers to your Pinterest profile, encourage people to check out a blog post or sales page, sign up for an email list, or more.
However, the ad budget doesn’t actually go towards conversions, only clicks on the pin. If you are attempting to increase your conversions from Pinterest by increasing traffic, start with a consideration campaign. Sending Pinners to a gorgeous landing page that is proven to convert once they get to your page is a great way to utilize this ad structure! This budget is the cost-per-click structure (CPC), meaning you are paying when people click on your ad.
This campaign type is for two specific businesses: those that track conversion events that occur from Pinterest and those that have a catalog on Pinterest.
To measure conversion events, you must have the Pinterest tag installed on your website, along with the event codes on the relevant pages. If this isn’t something you have set up, learn more about this process and conversions in this guide from Pinterest.
Once you have the tag installed and have tracked at least one of these events via Pinterest, you can use this campaign type.
Your budget is the cost-per-action structure (CPA), meaning you pay when someone takes action (converts).
This campaign type can also be used for businesses that upload their catalog to Pinterest. If you are already utilizing the Pinterest catalogs feature, you can turn any product listing into an ad. If you aren’t sure if you should be using this feature, learn more here.
If you’re feeling intimidated by advertising, promoted Pins is a great way to get started. This is perfect if you have an organic Pin that is doing well or a new product you’d like more people to see. The best part about this campaign type is that it isn’t really a campaign! You don’t have to know about targeting or budget structures.
With just a few clicks and a relatively low ad spend (think the equivalent of a couple of morning coffees), you can make sure that your Pin is shown to an audience that is likely to resonate with it. You can set the dollar amount and the number of days you want your Pin to be promoted. The entire process takes just a few minutes.
Do you need assistance with advertising?
Have questions you can’t find the answer to?
Don’t spend hours of your time preparing for Q4 with content only to find out that your Pinterest profile isn’t optimized! To make the most of this timeline, you’ll need to follow a few steps to ensure your Pinterest profile is sparkling.
If you are using a personal Pinterest account or you haven’t converted your profile to a business account, this is the time to do it! Once you swap to a business account, you’ll get access to analytics, the ability to link your website and other social accounts to your profile, and the option to promote Pins.
This step is especially important if you are an Etsy seller! You can directly link your Etsy shop to your Pinterest profile. Anytime someone shares one of your products, it will be attributed to your account. If you haven’t done so already, time to switch!
According to Pinterest, even an increased presence on the platform during this time period can help you be successful. Q4 is a time to put in an increased effort into posting regular content.
Speaking of regular content, are you using a content calendar? We strongly recommend planning out your content (which can include products, not just blog posts!) for the entirety of Q4. Doing so can help make sure you are creating plenty of new content and sharing it regularly. Consistency is so important with Pinterest! Having a content plan takes the pressure off of trying to come up with relevant content on the spot and helps make sure you don’t have holes in the content you’re offering.
Once you’ve created your content plan, make a new snazzy sales page, or introduced a new product or service, it’s time to add new Pins to Pinterest and start posting consistently! Using a Pinterest scheduler is so helpful because you can upload a batch of Pins at once, then automatically drip them out steadily over time. Our favorite scheduler is Tailwind. They do have a free option! If you want to know more about Tailwind’s features, check out our blog post here.
This one seems like a no-brainer, but we rarely see people doing it! If you are on Instagram or have a blog but have never shared your Pinterest profile with your followers, we strongly encourage you to do so. Simply telling your followers in an Instagram story that you have a Pinterest profile where you save things relevant to your niche or industry is an easy way to gain some new Pinterest followers!
These won’t be for everyone, but if you are a business that depends on conversions (sales or sign-ups) directly from your website, we highly recommend doing these things!
Use this timeline to get a general idea of when to do what when it comes to Pinterest in Q4 (plus January!). To make it super easy, we’re including the info here, but you can also download a printable version or add the events directly to your Google calendar. Anywhere you see the “45 days before” date denotes our last recommended day to pin your new content specific to that holiday for this year to make sure the Pins index. Therefore, if your niche or industry doesn’t depend on seasonality (you don’t make season-specific posts, recipes, products, etc.) you might not need to worry about those dates.
If you are in a niche or industry where seasonality is especially important for you, pay close attention to the planning dates to ensure you get content created soon enough for the Pins to have time to index. If you are a blogger and feel uncomfortable with posting about the holidays too early, you can always create and post the content to a hidden category of your blog so that Pinners can start planning and then move it to your main blog category when it’s more seasonally appropriate. Reach out to us if you want to know more about that.
To get instant access to the printable timeline, along with calendar integration, enter your email address below! You’ll love our newsletter, filled with Pinterest + social media tips, tricks, and updates. Plus, you’ll be the first to know about all of our upcoming freebies (trust us, they’re good!)
Enter your email below to get access to your Q4 Holiday Content Calendar
👋 whitney + allie, wave co-founders
disclosure: wave social is part of the affiliate network for some of these online tools and products, so we may receive a small commission if you purchase through any of our links.
