PINTEREST MARKETING: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS

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Have you been wondering if Pinterest marketing is a good fit for your business? If you feel you need a deep understanding of Pinterest to find out if you should invest your time, energy and money in this platform, you’ve come to the right place.

During the last 5 years, I’ve worked on many Pinterest accounts and I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. In this article, you’ll find out what Pinterest is, if it can work for your business and how to get started with Pinterest marketing to promote your business.

TABLE OF CONTENT

What’s Pinterest?
Why is Pinterest important for your business?
What types of businesses can benefit from Pinterest marketing?
How to get started with Pinterest marketing
The four pillars of Pinterest Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Pinterest Images
Consistency on Pinterest
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest Ads
Your next steps

What’s Pinterest?

Pinterest is a very powerful marketing tool that can promote your business 24/7. It’s a visual platform that combines the power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with images. It’s different from other social media channels because of the user intent.

When someone goes to Instagram, for example, they’re mainly looking to be entertained, whereas when they go to Pinterest, they are actively searching for a solution to a specific problem they have. Pinterest is a search engine just like Google so your pins can appear on the search results if you’ve used the right strategies.

For example, someone might search for ‘Easy recipes for dinner’, or ‘Back to School Must Haves’. Most people don’t just scroll through Pinterest, they have an intent and they can find your content if you’ve positioned it correctly.

What’s really cool about Pinterest is the longevity of the pins. On most social platforms, your content gets buried after a few hours or days, whereas Pinterest pins can last months or even years. One of my top pins still brings me a lot of traffic these days and it was created four years ago! And I see the same situation with my clients.

Pinterest Marketing’s main goal is to bring traffic to your website, so more people can get to know your content and your offers.

Why is Pinterest important for your business?

Pinterest is a great way to diversify your marketing efforts. We all know that it’s not a great idea to have all of your eggs in the same basket and diversification is the name of the game in business, as in many other aspects of life, I think. When you rely only on Instagram or Facebook, you know they could make changes overnight, as they have in the past, and you don’t want to suddenly be left with no traffic to your site.

Another important reason is that Pinterest traffic also increases your chances to get found on Google, which is so crucial, as you know.

Once you’ve done the initial work and set up a consistent routine for your Pinterest marketing strategy, you can see traffic coming to your site for years to come, so it’s really a great investment for your business.

Pinterest has 463 million monthly active users so you want to take advantage of the people on this platform.

What types of businesses can benefit from Pinterest marketing

Pinterest can work for product based businesses and also for people offering services. Some really big niches on Pinterest are:

Food
Beauty and Fashion
Travel
Wedding
Education
Parenting
Home decor
DIY and craft
Design
Gardening

The main question you should ask yourself if you’re considering Pinterest marketing is:

‘Is my ideal audience on Pinterest? Are they actively searching for content related to my offers?’

If you’re not sure, you can:

Ask them during your market research
See if your competitors are using this platform
Use the Pinterest search bar to see what types of results come up when you type your product or service.

How to get started with Pinterest marketing

First of all, you should open your Pinterest account. Should you use a personal or business account?

If you’re using Pinterest for your business, you should definitely have a business account: it’s required from Pinterest and it lets you have access to Analytics (which are very useful, as we’ll see later on) and also to Ads, in case you want to pay to have more reach.

You can then upload your profile picture, claim your website and start doing some keyword research.

Search Engine Optimization

This step is crucial for Pinterest, because it is one of the largest search engines in the world, just like Google and YouTube, so you want to make sure you know what keywords your target audience is searching for.

Where can you find those keywords?

The best place is on Pinterest itself. You can use these tools:

1. Type your main keyword in the search bar and see what suggestions Pinterest gives you: this is what people are searching for.

2. Look at the colorful bubbles that appear. In this example, I typed ‘dinner recipes’.

3. Have a look at the images that come up and their text overlay.

4. Scroll down until you see the Related Searches.

5. Use the Trends tool that you can find in Analytics > Trends to find out the terms your audience is looking for.

6. Take note on a spreadsheet of all the related keywords that come up and are relevant to your product or service.

Once you have a good list of keywords, you can now start to optimize your profile. These are the places where you should insert relevant keywords.

Your profile name
Your profile description
Your profile banner
Your boards (create at least 6 if you’re starting out)
Your boards’ descriptions
Your pins’ titles
Your pins’ descriptions
Your pins’s text overlay (if you have any)

Pinterest Images

As we said, Pinterest is a very visual platform, so having clickable images is crucial. Here are some features you want to consider when creating images:

Clear text
Use your branding colors and fonts
Nice and clear layout
High quality images of your product if you’re selling a digital or physical product.
High quality stock photos if you’re selling a service.

I personally use Photoshop or Canva, but you can use whatever tool you feel most comfortable with. I recommend creating at least 5 or 6 templates so you don’t need to start from scratch every single time.

Here are two examples. You can see I used my branding, clear text and high quality stock photos.

Consistency on Pinterest

Once you’ve done keyword research and created some templates for your pins, it’s important to establish a workflow. It can be simple, but it’s important to dedicate some time to it every week. You can track the pieces of content on a spreadsheet, then do keyword research and create images.

As you already know, video is a crucial part of content marketing right now, so remember to include standard pins as well as video pins.

In order to publish at the best times and automate the process, you can use a scheduler, it’s really a time saver! I personally use Tailwind, as it has many features and pins get published automatically once I upload them there. You can read more about why I use Tailwind here.

It’s certainly better to post less, but on a consistent basis, rather than posting a lot one week and then nothing for months.

Carve out some time in your schedule and insert it as a repeating task in your calendar, so you’ll get it done.

Pinterest Analytics

If you go to Pinterest Analytics and select Overview you’ll be able to select a period of time and then see the engagement, impressions, saves, clicks for your top pins and top boards. I recommend looking at your analytics at least once a month. In this way you’ll know what kind of content is resonating with your audience, and you’ll be able to create more pins that are related to those topics.

Under this section you’ll also be able to access your Audience Insights dashboard. You’ll find really interesting information about your audience, such as age, gender, location and devices they use.

Pinterest Trends is a very useful tool where you can see what people are searching for during different times of the year. I use it to find related keywords and to plan seasonal content ideas for my clients.

Pinterest Ads

If you’re just starting out on Pinterest, you can grow organically, but Pinterest is based on SEO, so it can take months to see your traffic grow. The good news is that it’s an investment that will get you results for months and years to come.

In case you want to speed things up and you have the budget to invest in Advertising, you can try out Pinterest Ads: in this way, Pinterest will boost your posts and you’ll reach a wider audience. There are a few types of campaigns you can choose from:

Conversion Campaign
Consideration Campaign
Brand Awareness
Video Views
Catalogs

If you have the budget to explore Pinterest Advertising, I’d definitely give it a go.

Your next steps

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of Pinterest and how it can help your business, it’s time to take action! You can go ahead and implement all these tips on your own. If you have any questions, post a comment below!

And if you’re thinking: ‘This sounds great, but I’d rather focus on my zone of genius instead’, I’m happy to say that Pinterest marketing is my zone of genius and I’d love to help you out!

Find out what a Pinterest Manager does and if you’re interested, get in touch with me and let’s chat!