Pinterest Marketing: 5 Ways To Expand Your Reach

Table Of Contents

• Is Your Business Relevant To The Pinterest Audience?
• 5 Proven Ways to Grow Your Business With Pinterest Marketing
• 1. Fill Out Your Pinterest Business Profile
• 2. Leverage Pinterest SEO
• 3. Create Engaging, Evergreen Content
• 4. Collaborate Using Group Boards
• 5. Speed Up: Use Promoted Pins
• Bottom Line

Would Pinterest marketing skyrocket your business even when you've been floating on the deck of other social channels? Well, that could be hard to answer.

But, what if we told you 47% of people are shopping for products from Pinterest as you read this article? Yes, that's right.

Pinterest is home to 430 million active users worldwide as estimated in 2021. These people are looking for new ideas, inspiration, and to even make purchases through the platform.

It's the right time to up your game. Ready to find all your answers? Here's what we'll cover in this article:

• What types of businesses should use Pinterest?
• Who uses Pinterest?
• Set up your Pinterest business profile for success
• Five proven ways to grow your business with Pinterest marketing

Let's roll!

Is Your Business Relevant To The Pinterest Audience?

Pinterest is exactly for you if you are an eCommerce, SaaS business, creator, or influencer. Pinterest makes up 76.7% of females and 15.3% of males.

Furthermore, women aged between the 25 and 34 age bracket represent 29.1% of Pinterest’s ad audience.

What does that mean? Women users dominate Pinterest. And if your ideal audience includes women, start leveraging Pinterest marketing.

5 Proven Ways to Grow Your Business With Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest is nothing less than a resource to build your brand and gain organic traction. Here are five Pinterest marketing strategies to help you get on the growth track:

1. Fill Out Your Pinterest Business Profile

First, set up your Pinterest profile as a business profile. A business profile gives you tools like Pinterest analytics and advertising strategies to grow your business. When adding information to your website and social media, be sure all brand elements are consistent.

To set up your profile, simply go to Settings. Add details like your logo, business name, bio, website, and username. Furthermore, you can add more details, like the physical address of your business.

2. Leverage Pinterest SEO

Keywords are the backbone of Pinterest marketing because of their search feature. Pinners use the platform to research their buying decisions and even make purchases. When someone searches for a specific keyword, you want to make sure your products show up in the search results.

If you aren't sure about which keywords to target, go to the Promoted Pins creator and use their keyword suggestion feature. Type a tight-knit keyword. You'll see a list of keyword suggestions with the number of searches per month. Choose the keywords from the suggestions here.

Once you have decided on the keywords, it's time to put them in the right place. Start by embedding them in your username, bio, boards, and pin descriptions.

• Add relevant keywords along with your business name and describe what your business does.

For example:

Movavi Blog uses keywords like photography tips, filmmaking, and video making. When pinners search for any of these keywords and filter down to profiles, Movavi is likely to come up in the search results.

• Organize your Pinterest boards into different categories. Create different boards, give a name to each board, and add board descriptions inside. Include keywords inside the board name and descriptions.

For example:

Freepik uses simple words for their boards, like backgrounds, tutorials, and illustrations. When the Pinterest user searches for these keywords, Freepik's boards will show up in the search.

Similarly, Freepik's board "Summer" highlights board descriptions with keywords like collection, summer, graphic, resources, and so on.

• Add keywords in the pin’s descriptions, title, and alt text. These keywords must be embedded either at the start or middle of the description. However, writing a pin description naturally loaded with keywords is not easy.

Here's How To Write A Pin Description:

• Write upfront descriptions: Pin descriptions contain up to 500 characters. But still, users will see 75 to 100 characters unless they click to read the description further. So put critical information with keywords upfront.
• Read naturally: Pin descriptions overstuffed with keywords will push the users away from your pins. That's why you need to focus on writing pin descriptions for the audience first and then subtly add fewer keywords.
• Sell the pin: A compelling copy can be the game-changer. The rule of thumb for writing converting pins: your descriptions should spark interest and convince them to take the final action.

Even though Pinterest is visual-heavy, people want to know more about the pin before they click on it. For example, if you are a jewelry store, pin a collection of earrings and tell the users whether it is a silver-oxidized earring or gold-plated.

💡Tip: Use hashtags to add more weight to your keyword optimization strategy. This works mostly when you add hashtags, either in the board descriptions or pin descriptions. Start off with at least one hashtag in the description and two when it's relevant.

3. Create Engaging, Evergreen Content

When your goal is to drive organic traffic to your website and grow your business, adding keywords is not enough. Create content that lands in the user's feed, too.

But first, let’s understand the three different kinds of pins you can create on Pinterest:

Idea Pins

These are multi-page pins to tell a story, engage your audience, and increase your follower base. From single images and videos to multiple images, these pins feature everything. Use them to repurpose Instagram reels, carousels, or feature product details.

Because Idea Pins are a new feature on Pinterest, the organic traffic you get is enormous. The best part? Unlike other platforms, these pins do not vanish after 24 hours making them more convincing.

Tamara Sykes, the SEO Strategist of Next Level Presence, had this say about her experience with Idea Pins:

My top pin before the idea pin feature had around 10,000 views. Now my top pins that result in follows, saves, and clicks are 2 story pins that have surpassed a million views by the end of 2021.

Since Idea Pins are getting more visibility, it's a smart way to boost your Pinterest marketing strategy.

Before you create your next story pin, you must know:

• These pins don't link your pins to a URL. So what can you do instead? Write a solid pin description.
• To promote your products, share a series of photos or behind-the-scenes videos.

How To Create An Idea Pin:

1. Click on the Create tab after logging into your Pinterest business account.
2. Choose the Idea Pin from the three options displayed on the screen.
3. Select images or videos you want to upload.
4. Design and edit your content. You can add texts and stickers and choose from different fonts and font colors.
5. Click on Next to preview the pin.
6. Add the title, tag related topics, and pick a board.
7. Hit Publish.

Product Pins

Formerly called shoppable pins, Product Pins are clickable. You can sell your products directly to customers from your eCommerce store. They look like regular pins but highlight product information, including title, description, price, and stock availability.

By clicking a Product Pin, you’ll see extra details like:

• Larger pin title
• Product description
• Price
• Brand name (and blue tick for the Pinterest Verified Merchant)

There Are Two Ways You Can Create Product Pins:

1. From the catalog: Upload your product catalog to Pinterest. This will convert all your products into Product Pins. These can be easily converted into Pinterest pins.
2. From Rich Pins: Apply for Rich Pins. All the product information will be synced from your eCommerce store. As long as the Rich Pins code is installed on your website, your products will be shown as Product Pins. These cannot be converted into Pinterest ads.

Rich Pins

These are informational pins — the ones that influence your sales. On the surface level, these pins are similar to Product Pins. But, these pins are more SEO-focused-they display metadata like keywords, phrases, and price tags from your website pages. When you apply for Rich Pins, your site’s metadata forms Rich Pins.

There are four different types of Rich Pins:

1. Article pins: They contain information from your blog posts, like the blog title, description, and author’s name.
2. Product pins: They include information like price tags and product details to convert customers. On the flip side, these are not buyable pins. They do not allow users to purchase anything from Pinterest. Instead, you need to link it to the product’s page.
3. Recipe pins: They help users look for ingredients, cooking time, serving information, and ratings right from within Pinterest.
4. App pins: They allow users to install your app

How To Set Up Rich Pins:

1. Install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin
2. Go to SEO, then choose Social –> Facebook and enable Add Open Graph Metadata.
3. To activate the article pin, add your blog post’s URL into the Rich Pin Validator and hit Apply Now.
4. To activate Product Pins, you need to have a seller account on eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Etsy, or eBay. Go to Rich Pin Validator, paste your product link, and add “.oembed.” You’ll see Rich Pin information about the product. Select the relevant eCommerce platform and click Apply Rich Pins.

Great! Now, you can create numerous pins. But to get you started, here are some pin inspirations:

• Blogs posts: Create pins to direct pinners to your blog and increase blog traffic. Highlight the blog title on the pin and insert the blog link as the destination URL.
• Infographics: Infographics dominate Pinterest and grab users' attention. This is why you need to use the right fonts to bring the information out.
• Videos: Tutorials and DIY work well on Pinterest. Either import them from YouTube or upload them directly to create your video pins.
• Image: Create single image pins and showcase your products. There are ample ways to show your products with an image pin.

Here is some inspiration for product-based pins:

1. Product With Logo

It features product with a logo. You can display these pins with your brand logo anywhere on the page.

‍

To up your game, you can also add the CTA. Here’s what it looks like:

2. Product With Tagline

It features product with a tagline. Taglines are a great way to interact with your audience while telling them about your product in a playful way. Here’s what a Product Pin with a tagline looks like:

3. Product Collage

It features a product collage of many images and videos. Yet, this collage is different from the story pin. For example, if you have 2 to 3 images of a single product, arrange them and create a product collage like the one below:

4. Customer Content

It features the product in action, i.e., the products customers use. Also, leverage customer reviews and use them as pins.

So you know what works on Pinterest and the kind of content you can utilize for Pinterest marketing. But you need a posting schedule to boom on Pinterest.

The good old days of Pinterest say you need to push yourself hard to post 10 to 20 pins a day. But we recommend you start with 4 to 5 pins per day.

Not only this, the Pinterest algorithm pushes fresh pins to its audience. So you need to check that every pin you publish is new. That could be challenging, though. What can you do instead? Repurpose existing content.

A smart way to do it is by looking at your existing pins, choosing the pins you want to repurpose, and changing their fonts and texts. This way, you’ll be publishing the same pin.

Now, think of the burning challenge in growing your business on Pinterest—consistency. And the best way to tackle it? Create a publishing schedule. Plan your content ahead and schedule it using social media planning tools like Tailwind.

You can upload pins and schedule them in advance with this tool. What next?

SaaS reporting tools for social media provide analytics to help analyze the performance of your content. Track how your pins perform, download the analytics reports, study them, and based on the analysis, create better pins to improve your Pinterest marketing efforts.

4. Collaborate Using Group Boards

‍

Kaviyakavi Baskaran, Social Media Marketer of Vmaker, showed support for the strategy:

We created group boards where we invited other influencers and bloggers and networked with them within Pinterest.

Group boards are a great way to invite influencers and bloggers and add their pins to your board. How does this help?

When a creator publishes to the group board, their pins will be shown in the Pinterest feed of people who follow the board or its owner. And if your group board has contributors with a strong follower base? Chances are your products will be seen by their audience.

A win-win for both.

How To Create Group Boards:

1. Log in to your Pinterest account.
2. Tap on '+' to create the board and choose Board.
3. Pick a board name and add contributors under collaborators.

Whether you are creating your own group boards or publishing on someone else’s group boards, make sure to follow these best practices:

• Study analytics: Check your Pinterest analytics to determine if your group boards have been performing well. If they do, figure out which ones.

Use Tailwind analytics to see which pins are performing well. Tailwind shows all the pins from your Pinterest account with more engagement. Study them, find which pins belong to group boards, and they will lead to conversions.

• Stick to niche boards: Invite only niche bloggers and content creators who create content specific to your niche. Let's say you have created a board for content marketing tips. Invite influencers who talk about content marketing.

💡Tip: Limit the number of collaborators on your board to less than 500 because Pinterest considers the above number to be spammy.

5. Speed Up: Use Promoted Pins

Pinterest pins are basically paid ads on Pinterest that help you increase brand awareness or sell products.

These pins run on a cost-per-click model like the Facebook and Instagram ads. To create these pins, you must have a budget. These pins are run for a specific duration. You are charged for these ads only when someone clicks on them.

With these pins, you can attract people to view a specific pin like a feature, an article, an event, or your products. It's a whopping Pinterest marketing strategy for time-sensitive elements to improve your business sales.

For example:

For Valentine’s Day, your e-commerce store launches a series of products. You can create pins and promote them to drive more sales to the products.

Below is the promoted pin by Hootsuite that the Pinterest audience discovers while browsing through their feed.

Before diving into how you can create promoted pins, first understand the different types of campaigns:

• Brand awareness: When your goal is to get your business name out there and spread the word about your products and services, use promoted pins and shopping ads. Your promoted pins can include articles, blogs, and videos to present your brand's credibility.
• Consideration: To increase web traffic and get more clicks on your website, use collection ads and carousel ads.
• Conversions: By far, this is the goal for most businesses through Pinterest marketing. Conversion campaigns focus on getting a specific result, like a sale, signup, or an opt-in activity. For best results, Pinterest recommends giving your campaign 3-5 days. Shopping ads, Idea Pins, and collection ads are the recommended ad types.
• Catalog Sales: These ads are e-commerce focused and have a single conversion goal — product sales. Shopping pins, carousel ads, or product-rich pins can achieve this goal.

Now, let's understand the jargon terms that you’ll work with when creating the campaigns:

• Targeting Strategy: This helps you decide the goal of creating the promoted pin. Do you want to reconnect with your users? Or find new customers? Based on your goal, select the right option.
• Audience Lists: This is the list of the audience you want to target. You can either use an existing list or create a new one.
• Interest & Keywords: This section reveals what keywords your ideal audience uses when searching for pins and what their interests are. To fill in the details in this section, you’ll see two categories:

1. Add interests
2. Add keywords

Under Add Interests, you’ll see a list of options. Select as many interests as you can relate to from this list. Under the Add Keywords section, type a broad keyword. This will display a list of keywords by Pinterest with the monthly search volume. Pick the relevant keywords you want.

• Demographics: You can choose from various elements like gender, age, location, language, and devices.
• Placement: This describes how you want the audience to find your pins—by browsing pins on their feed or searching for a specific keyword.
• Budget and Schedule: Decide your budget and set up the schedule for running the promoted pins.
• Optimization and delivery: Select from the two options: automatic and custom. Decide if you want the most exposure for your promoted pin or if you want to set a maximum cost-per-click for the pin.

How To Set Up Promoted Pins:

1. Select Create An Ad to start creating your promoted pin under Ads.
2. Fill in the details like interests, keywords, demographics, placement, budget, and optimization.
3. Start creating the pin either by selecting from the already saved pins or by creating a new pin from scratch.
4. Click on Review Selected Pins and fill in the details, like the Ad name and destination URL.
5. Hit Publish.

Now, you can skillfully create a Pinterest campaign to acheive your business goals. Right? Probably not.

You need to track your campaigns and find out how they are performing. That's where you need a Pinterest Conversion Tag.

A Pinterest conversion tag lets you track the conversions that come from Pinterest traffic to your website.

How To Add A Pinterest Conversion Tag:

1. Log in to your Pinterest Ads Manager account, and go to the conversion tracking page under Ads.
2. Select the Create Tag button.
3. Name your tag and select the Generate Code button.
4. Copy the Pinterest tag code from here and paste the code into your website between <head></head> tags.

Bottom Line

Here's hoping you now have a full picture of how to upgrade your business using Pinterest marketing. Let’s recap:

• Sell products by creating Product Pins, Idea Pins, and Rich Pins.
• Collaborate with influencers on the group board and reach more people to boost your brand awareness
• Create promoted pins to reach more people, increase brand awareness and sell your products.
• Embed keywords in your username, Pinterest boards, and descriptions to improve search results
• Publish at least 4 to 5 pins per day and create fresh pins for the Pinterest algorithm to push your content to its audience
• Use social media management tools to plan your content in advance and see the performance of your content.
• Activate the Pinterest conversion tag to track the performance of your Pinterest ads.

We are sure you'll no longer sit on Pinterest marketing and step up your business growth right away.

Ready to design your logo? Get started with our logo maker!

‍

Nidhi Kala is a freelance writer for SaaS and eCommerce brands, specializing in creating long-form blogs and ghostwriting LinkedIn content for founders. When she is not working, you'll find her exploring new calligraphy scripts.