The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest Marketing
If your business isn’t already utilising Pinterest marketing, it’s time to reconsider! With over 400 million active users, the opportunity to improve your online presence and drive more traffic to your website is not to be underestimated. As an award-winning digital marketing agency specialising in creative campaigns powered by technical excellence, we view Pinterest as so much more than an inspiration board. As part of your wider SEO strategy, it acts as a visual search engine, with its own algorithm and search engine optimisation rules.
Unlike other platforms, Pinterest has some of the highest buying intent from its users, with purchasing decisions being made there and then if the person scrolling likes what they see. The people on Pinterest are ready to purchase, it’s as simple as that. This makes Pinterest a viable, stand-alone eCommerce platform, and somewhere that can be leveraged by your business.
Pinterest for business is a powerful tool for not only increasing a business’s brand awareness and driving website traffic but also, and perhaps not as well known, it’s a fantastic online tool for increasing sales.
As we said, this page will help you better understand why you need this social media platform as part of your marketing strategy but to learn more about how it can help you, specifically, be sure to get in touch with our team. You can call us on 0161 327 2635 or email us at [email protected].
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What is Pinterest?
Often overlooked in the world of social media marketing, Pinterest is an image-sharing platform that allows users to visually share, discover and categorise ideas. Essentially a digital mood board. But with 433 million people using Pinterest every month, it’s not a channel to be messed with.
From bedroom decor inspiration to gluten-free recipes. If you’re interested in a subject, Pinterest is full of new ideas that you can ‘Pin’ to your own boards and create a collection of ideas for that specific theme.
For example, if you’re looking to host a dinner party you can create a recipe Pinterest board, scroll through Pinterest to find images of dishes you want to try, and then click the image to visit the website where you will find the recipe.
Pin that recipe to your recipe board to access it when you want.
You can view other members’ pins, follow accounts and even follow other users’ boards. The more you use the platform, the more Pinterest learns about your interests and is able to recommend Pinterest pins, boards and users to you to improve your experience.
With our expertise, utilising Pinterest as one of your social media marketing channels will enable you to appeal to a wider audience and build your online presence.
How Effective is Pinterest Marketing?
Pinterest is a channel people use for discovery, which makes it the perfect channel for businesses to showcase their products to potential customers. The social media channel is now a crucial part of the buyer’s journey, even if shoppers aren’t necessarily purchasing from Pinterest directly.
Pinterest users use the platform at the start of their customer journey. They are discovering new ideas and looking for inspiration, so having your business at the forefront of their mind when they’re exploring and researching is key. Pinterest says that 46% of weekly Pinners have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest and 83% of weekly Pinterest users make purchases based on the content they see from brands on the platform.
But that’s not to say it’s only good for brand awareness, more and more people are shopping on Pinterest. Pinterest has reported that businesses see double the return on ad spend for retail brands, compared to social media platforms and that Pinterest users spend 2x more per month than people on other social channels.
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Our team of experts are ready and waiting to work on your Pinterest profile to increase the strength of your business.
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How to Use Pinterest for Marketing
Pinterest is an often underestimated social media channel for marketing. This makes it a powerful marketing tool for businesses to utilise as the platform isn’t as saturated as Facebook and Instagram might be.
One of the main things to consider when choosing the right platform for you is whether your audience demographics on there. Although women make up more than 60% of the users, the number of male users is increasing rapidly year on year. Pinterest reported last year the male audience grew 40% year over year.
Another key factor to consider is the creative side of your business. One of the reasons Pinterest ads work so well is that they blend seamlessly with the authentic organic content on the feed. Image quality is key when it comes to Pinterest marketing.
Lifestyle content, aesthetically pleasing photography and carefully curated graphics that will stand out are vital to Pinterest’s success. It’s a visual platform so high-quality content is a must.
4 Key Factors of a Successful Campaign
1 Distribute your content
Creating beautiful content is only the beginning. Your target audience needs to be able to find it. Take a look at key trends within the platform and think out of the box when reaching your audience. For example, if you sell bedding, don’t just consider home decor interests, think about what else your wider audience may be searching for.
You can reach your audience via keywords or interests. Keep an eye on trends and audience insights to gain an understanding of who your audience is and how you can reach them.
2 Drive website traffic and boost online sales
Pinterest is a really good tool for getting your product in front of potential customers. But don’t overlook it as just a brand awareness tool. When done correctly, Pinterest can be a fantastic tool to drive website traffic and increase your online sales. The platform is made for storytelling and allowing users to find and connect with your brand, but there are ways you can take your audience engagement to the next level and convert them to website visitors and even customers.
Undertake keyword research and use relevant Pinterest ‘trends’ to reach your audience on the platform but then leverage rich pins, share blog content and pin consistently and regularly to ensure your audience is engaged. Ensure your content is ‘pin-worthy’ every time you post on the platform, the more interesting your content is to your audience, the more likely they will visit your website and buy into your brand.
3 Build a community
Pinterest, unlike other social media channels, doesn’t really have a social element as such. There’s no messaging element, So how do you build an active community?
A business should approach Pinterest the same way a personal user would. Creating organised boards that allow other users to view your products in categories and collections that work well together. Making your profile easy to navigate and your pins easy to find by your audience. Creating regular content is also a great way to keep your followers engaged and maximise your potential to reach new audiences.
4 Educate customers
One of the benefits of using such a visual platform is that it enables businesses to tell a story and educate their audience on both their brand and their products.
Use your platform to share not just your product, but how that product will fit into your customers’ lifestyle, answer any frequently asked questions and share relevant blogs. Reaching out to influencers is also a great opportunity to educate your audience, having influencers or sharing UGC (user-generated content) as a part of your social media strategy is a great way to add an element of social proof to your offering.
All the Pinterest Marketing Tips We Tried and Tested …
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Pin More Often, and Space Out Your pins
Like any social media platform, the more you use it, the more chance you have of success. The more you pin high-quality, relevant content on the platform, the more chance you have of getting your content in front of potential customers and the more likely they are to follow your account.
Create organised boards so users can easily find your content and keep them updated with new products or blog posts so the board followers remain engaged.
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Apply for Rich Pins for Your Website or Blog
Utilising Rich Pins on Pinterest is a great tool for driving website traffic and online purchases on your website. Rich Pins are a type of pin that is available to anyone on Pinterest with a business account.
If you have product, blog or recipe content on your website you want to create a rich pin for,, you’ll need to add rich meta tags to those web pages. To ensure the content is pulled through correctly, you will then need to ‘validate’ your page on Pinterest. Approval for this can take up to 24 hours, but once it is complete, you will be able to create rich pins for each web page you have tagged.
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Create the Right-Sized Images
One of the main things to consider when creating pins is the image. Not only does it need to be high quality and ‘pin-worthy’, but Pinterest images that look like organic posts tend to work better. Businesses that use overly ‘salesy’ images with heavy test use or excessive USP’s stick out like a sore thumb when scrolling through the feed. As a visual platform, it’s vital that your ads and organic pins match the style of the rest of the content on there.
Another thing to consider is the image size. The optimal pin size, recommended by Pinterest, is 1000 × 1500 pixels. However, users can also opt for any dimension that falls within the ideal Pinterest image size of a 2:3 aspect ratio.
When you create your post, consider how much of the feed you want your image to take up. A long pin is a great way of showcasing an infographic or a blog post, whereas creating a square pin can be perfect for product images or lifestyle photography.
Standard pin size on Pinterest: 2:3 aspect ratio; 1000 pixels wide x 1500 pixels tall
Square pin size on Pinterest: 1:1 aspect ratio; 1000 pixels wide × 1000 pixels tall
Long pin Size on Pinterest: 1: 2.6 aspect ratio; 1000 pixels wide x 2100 pixels tall
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Write Better Descriptions
As content marketing specialists, we’re masters at creating effective and optimised copy that packs a punch. Pinterest descriptions are the copy that adds context and clarity to your pin. You can create a description for both individual pins and the boards you create, these should be keyword rich and detailed.
When writing your descriptions, think about how you can leverage this space to increase your reach, engagement and traffic. Be mindful of Pinterest SEO! Pinterest allows a maximum of 500 characters for descriptions. It’s important to use this limit to include keywords, an engaging call to action and a clear description of your content. Note that only 30-60 characters will show in the feed, so make sure you bet your main points in early to make your pin more engaging.
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Use Multiple Images within a Pin [+ How To]
Why show just one image when you can show many? Carousel pins offer businesses the opportunity to showcase different elements of their products, advertise a collection of products at the same time or create a brand awareness piece and tell your brand story.
Users can see your carousel pins in the feed, just like they would any other pin, however, they can swipe through the different cards in your carousel directly, or if they click your pin, they will swipe through each image and be directed to your website.
Anyone with a business account can create a carousel ad, simply go into the ad manager and create a new pin.
- Click + Create a carousel to upload up to 5 high-quality images for your carousel in the order you want them to appear. Currently, Pinterest only allows static images to be added to a carousel ad. The aspect ratio of each image must be either 1:1 (square) or 2:3 (vertical).
- Once you have selected your static images, make sure you add a strong description, a keyword-focused title and a link to your website.
- Make sure you have added your carousel pin to the relevant board, or make a new one if required, then click publish.
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Create Pins with Text in Them
Circling back to the earlier point about the negative impact of businesses creating overly salesy pins. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your image content shouldn’t include any copy overlay. For example, if you are sharing a blog post or a recipe, it will be worth adding a title to your image so it’s clear what you are pushing. Similarly, if you are pushing a specific sale, it may be worth including the sale title on your product images, again though, it’s important to make it look as much like an organic post as possible, you want your content to be aesthetically pleasing and ‘pinnable’ so your image should be the focal point of the pin as opposed to the text overlay.
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Create a “Pin It for Later” Button
The Pinterest ‘pin it for later’ button, also known as the save button or pin it button, is a tool you add to your website to allow users to easily share your content on Pinterest.
Essentially a Pinterest logo that appears on images on your website allows users to click and save your image or article to their Pinterest boards. The easiest way to implement this is to follow the Pinterest Developer’s instructions.
The benefit of implementing this onto your website is that the more people that share your beautiful images on Pinterest the more impressions and therefore traffic you are likely to get. In addition, if a user is at the exploration or evaluation stage of their purchase journey, saving your content shows that not only is your content engaging, but that the user is more likely to come back to your website when they are ready to purchase.
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Keyword-Rich Boards for Your Blog Posts
Pinterest can be a great driver of traffic to your blog posts. Creating themed Pinterest boards and making them keyword-rich and optimised for Pinterest SEO will allow your target audience to easily find your content and in turn, visit your blog posts.
When creating both the pin and the board, ensure you are using as many relevant keywords as possible when naming your boards and creating the descriptions. You can take a lot of the same information from your blog for this to make it as relevant to the shared content as possible.
This can also help you decide what else to feature on your board. You could do a blog-specific board, a ‘round up of this month’s blogs’ or ‘everything you need to know on x’ or you could incorporate the blog into a themed board. If you’ve done a ‘what to wear this autumn’ blog, you could add this to a board showcasing relevant products and inspiration. As long as you keep your keywords relevant in the descriptions and titles, your board will reach the right audience.
Important Pinterest Terms Your Business Should Know
- Pinner – A Pinner is essentially the name of a Pinterest user.
- Pins – The term Pin refers to the visual content users share on the channel and comes in multiple formats (see above)
- Promoted Pins – A promoted pin is when a business puts some money behind a pin and launches it as an ad to a targeted audience.
- Repins – Repins are when a user pins someone else’s pin onto one of their own boards.
- Rich Pins – Rich Pins are a type of organic pin that automatically syncs information from your website directly onto Pinterest.
- Video Pins – A video pin is a 4-15 second video that automatically plays in a user’s feed.
- Carousel Pins – A carousel pin is a series of 2-5 static images that users can scroll through on their feed that can be used to tell a story or showcase multiple products at once.
- Collections Pins – Collection pins feature a hero static image and a series of up to 24 shoppable secondary images that show users similar or related products.
- Idea Pins – Idea pins are a story-like collection of up to 20 pins that users can click through. These can compromise of both image and video pins.
- Try on product Pins – Only available on the Pinterest app, Try on pins allow users to use their camera to virtually try on products. They are commonly used to try on beauty products or to virtually view home decor in your space.
- Boards – Pinterest boards are a page on a user’s profile where they can group and organise pins. They can be both private or public and users can follow other users’ boards if they are of interest.
- Group boards – A group board is a board with multiple curators. Although it will have one owner, they can invite other pinners to collaborate on a board, with each user able to add pins.
- Secret boards – As the name suggests, a secret board is a board that only the creator can see.
- Protected boards – Similar to a secret board, a protected board is hidden on a business’s profile, however, unlike a secret board, the pins on a protected board may appear in the feed. This kind of board is often used for ads.
- Audience Insights – Like most social platforms, Audience insights are where you can view what your current audience is interested in based on their Pinterest behaviour. Regularly reviewing your audience insights is vital to ensure your ad targeting and the type of content you are sharing are relevant to your audience.
- Pinterest Lens – Only available in the Pinterest app, the Lends lets users discover anything they point their camera at. If they point it their camera at an ingredient, Pinterest can show recipes including that ingredient. Or if they point their camera at some clothing, Pinterest can suggest shoppable alternatives.
- Pincodes – A Pincode is a code you can create to allow other users to find your profile. If someone uses the Pinterest lens over your Pincode, they will be directed to your Pinterest profile, where they will be able to view your boards and pins.
Never Underestimate the Power of Pinterest Marketing
Often overlooked as a gimmicky website with no real weight behind it, especially when compared to Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, Pinterest is, in fact, a land of abundant opportunity for those businesses willing to invest in it.
There, people are looking for inspiration and products that can help them achieve that dream look. Be it for their bathroom, their wardrobe, or anywhere where they want to make a visual statement.
At Embryo, we’ve never underestimated the power of the pin and have plenty of results to back that up. In a world where purchase decisions take longer, and are more random, it’s vital you’re on a platform, such as Pinterest, where your target audience is ready and waiting to buy your products.
Unleash the Power of the Pin Today
To really make the most of this powerful e-Comm platform (which is exactly how you should think of Pinterest), talking to our team of award-winning experts is the perfect first step. Ready to take the next step in your digital marketing strategy? Get in touch today.
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