Pinterest marketing, step by step for beginners

Through the article we will discuss Pinterest marketing step by step and current trends.

When was the last time you used Pinterest? The question may sound weird, but it’s not, as Pinterest is often underrated.

Pinterest was introduced in March 2010 by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann. Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp met while studying at Yale. Then Ben Silbermann started working for Google and Evan Sharp for Facebook. Pinterest was the fastest independent website in history, reaching 10 million unique monthly visitors.

In the first quarter of 2019, Pinterest was used by 291 million active users per month, including 206 million users outside the US. It is the third most used search engine that people visit mainly when looking for ideas for products or services.

You may have heard of Pinterest marketing, but don’t know exactly what is Pinterest?

Let’s take a look at it. If we explain it in a simple way, Pinterest is like a cork that you sometimes find in kitchens or maybe on the refrigerator door, to which we pin our ideas, recipes, shopping list … So, it’s the same thing, only in the case of Pinterest your “cork” is in a digital form.

Pinterest is a search engine that helps you find and organize pictures, ideas and other interesting things. Some say it’s an intertwining between a search engine and a social network. Content posted on Pinterest is called a pin.

Each idea is illustrated by a pin that Pinterest users can find and save. You can choose from a variety of pin formats – from still images to autoplay videos. Whichever format you choose, you will only need three main components:

The ability to connect between your pin on Pinterest and your site is very important to the business as it can lead tomore traffic and sales. Pins also allow users to find more information about the products they intend to buy. In fact, an incredible 90% of Pinterest users said that it helps them decide what to buy. In addition, 66% of users decide to buy something after seeing it on Pinterest.

Various studies show that women are the ones who make 80% of all purchases. And in fact, women make up 70% of all Pinterest users. Advertising your brand on Pinterest can therefore bring you a lot of potential purchases.

Pinterest users can save pins they like on different boards. In this way, Pinterest users save up to 2 million pins related to shopping searches each day.

Are you ready to pin? Let's start!

And guess what? It’s free! Also, Pinterest does not give business accounts a lower impression rank on users ’timelines. So everyone on Pinterest is equal, and the visibility and reach of your profile depends only on you.

To be successful on Pinterest, it is most essential that you are friendly, mention the source of your pin content, avoid self-promotion, and report inappropriate content (e.g., pornography).

Optimize your Pinterest profile

The URL of your Pinterest profile is determined by your username. To add a business name, you will need to upgrade your personal profile to a business one. After that, you will also get access to promotional pins, analytics and the ability to include a link to your website on your Pinterest profile and in your pins.

Pinterest gives you more space in this section. Place your keywords immediately after your business name to make your business visible. Then add keywords to the titles and descriptions of the pins.

Be careful not to act like a robot adding too many keywords to your titles or descriptions. Optimize and use a strong keyword in the right context. Less is more!

Optimize your Pinterest profile and increase its reach.

Only three steps are needed to create a personal Pinterest account. You need to determine your gender, language and country and choose 5 categories that interest you.

There are eight steps you need to take to create a business account. Once you’ve entered your email and created your password, click ‘Create business account.’ The following are the printscreens of the steps to create a Pinterest business account, follow them:

Creating a Pinterest business profile – 1st step

Creating a Pinterest business profile – 2nd step

For a better optimization of your profile add a link to your website.

Link your other media profiles to Pinterest (Instagram, YouTube,…)

Creating a Pinterest business profile – 5th step

Choose the topics you want to see on your timeline.

Last step – add a link to your Pinterest profile into the toolbar of the search engine.

A business account differs from a personal account in that it includes several functionalities:

How do you make your pins popular and more visible?

About 2 billion searches are performed on the Pinterest search engine every month. So keep in mind that you need to format your keywords and pin descriptions so that users can find you. Otherwise, they will not find your content or it will not be visible.

Knowing the most popular categories can be helpful in understanding which types of boards can (best) work for your business. According to a study from University of Minnesota, the most popular categories on Pinterest include food and drink, do-it-yourself categories, home decorating, and women’s fashion.

The optimal pin size, which is neither too small nor too large, is 736 × 1102 px. The most popular are clear, high-resolution graphics.

Create awesome, popular pins with our tips

Posting and commenting on Instagram via desktop or laptop

If you for example run an e-commerce store, here are some tips for growing your business with Pinterest:

To get started, you should create 10 pins a day, or more.
Second: Publishing unique content is not a rule or obligation. On the contrary, pin all other content you find interesting to one of your boards. Just click the save button and attach the content to your profile. Add articles to your boards on topics that interest you and / or are related to the products you sell.
Third: When pinning content, you should try to link it to your own products or services (adding links, keywords, ...)
And to conclude: It is very important to engage with others. Without commenting and participating on other people’s boards, the number of your followers will not grow. If you don’t have followers when you add new content or new pins, they won’t have the desired reach and results.

So create re-pins of others (share posts), especially those in your target audience. This is an opportunity to get noticed.

You can also join groups. This is a great opportunity to increase traffic. So don’t forget to participate and become a part of the Pinterest community, which is fundamental for growth and gaining new followers.

GIFT! get to know the content of the book

Get the digital index of the book "Digital marketing from A to Z".

Optimize your pins, optimize your Pinterest marketing!

Traffic won’t come by itself, so it’s important to optimize your pins. According to the results of several surveys, the best times to post on Pinterest are between 20:00 and 23:00 in the afternoon and 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Friday and Saturday are the best days.

Include a PinIt button, with a link to your Pinterest profile, in any image on any website or portal (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, …), but make sure that these extensions do not slow down your website. Pinterest offers different types of buttons and widgets to use and promote:

You can then also link your Pinterest business account to your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. This will add buttons to your Pinterest profile with links to the mentioned profiles. To do this, go to the Network Section tab in your account settings.

It is good to know! You can only link a personal Facebook profile to a Pinterest profile, not a page.

Instead of waiting for people to find your pins, you can direct them to your Pinterest profile. How? By including your pins in the Newsletter.

Pinterest search engine with the popular, nicely designed pins.

Improve and increase your reach on Pinterest!

Once you know well how to create your favorite pins and optimize them, you can start using that skill to build strong relationships with your followers and influencers.

To follow or not to follow? There are three important factors that convince Pinterest users whether or not to follow a profile:

As we have already said, you will have to post (pin) the pins several times a day. Pin between 5 and 30 pins to your profile each day to gain more followers. However, be careful not to do this all at once. Distribute the pinning throughout the day.

Then engage your followers, answer their questions and comments, and invite them to pin to your boards. It is also very interesting to follow popular boards related to your industry or company. Because you can first learn from them which types of pins work best with them. If you comment on these popular pins, your brand can be noticed by a huge number of their followers.

Advertising on Pinterest

Although many consider Pinterest to be a secondary social network (we clarified at the beginning of the article that Pinterest is a search engine and not a social network), its importance should not be overlooked. Pinterest offers many opportunities and is a unique opportunity to improve your online business and enable better visibility and visibility of your brand.

As with all social networks, you need to create constant content and non-stop advertising campaigns on Pinterest if you want to achieve your advertising goals and connect with high quality users. This means ensuring that your pinned content is located where your target audience can find it easily, which in turn allows you to communicate with them more easily.

When advertising on Pinterest, the first rule is that the pinned content that you want users within your target audience to see is based on the interests and activities in which they have been involved so far. If this segmentation is not performed correctly, your pins will encounter “blind eyes”, as users on Pinterest can hide those boards that do not suit their interests.

By far the most searches on Pinterest, of course, happen in English, which means that Pinterest is primarily an opportunity for companies selling in the international market.

– 100 € discount

–100 € discount on all e-courses

The best way to start earning money on Pinterest

You can make money through Pinterest in many ways, and as the platform continues to grow, so will the opportunities. Don’t miss the opportunity to reach potential customers. Join Pinterest!

1. Trust your passion and sell it!

Do you have any passions? Because if people spend money on things that are your passion, you can make money. Imagine you are a gourmet eater and want to try food in new restaurants. Pinterest can help you with this.

You choose your target audience; example: women in their thirties who love to go out and discover new places. Then you just need to create a Pinterest account that will enchant them. Once your number of followers starts to increase, marketers can approach you with offers.

2. Sponsored affiliate products

Nowadays, many companies use the services of people who have a large number of followers (i.e. influencers) to present their products in exchange for the small sales commission that this type of marketing brings them. Identify companies that sell products that you can promote and contact them as a potential influencer. Promote their products on your board with affiliate links.

3. Share your knowledge

If you use the platform persistently and successfully for a while, you will become a master of Pinterest. So why keep all this knowledge to yourself? You can make money on this account. As Pinterest is constantly growing and evolving, people need to be taught how to make the most of this search network full of opportunities. For example, you can create video tips or e-books on using Pinterest in marketing

Share your knowledge in the form of e-books or video courses – you can make money this way!

How to reach new customers with the help of Pinterest marketing?

Pinterest offers several types of ads. Do you want to increase sales or visibility of your brand? Depending on your goal, you will be able to find the strategy that will bring you the best results.

1. Promotional pins

This is the basic form of Pinterest advertising. As usual, they come into play with the source and in search results. The difference is that they increase your reach and consequently your profile visit. Users can pin them to boards, share and comment.

The good news is that when sharing a pin, the “promoted” label is removed, and any further re-pinnings are considered an organic reach.

Specifications of standard and promotional pins:

2. Promotional image galleries (carousels)

They contain two to five images that users can view. They work the same except for dots, which emphasize the ability for users to swipe left and right between pins.

Each tab in a carousel ad can contain a different image, title, description, and landing page. So it’s a suitable format if you have multiple products or features available.

Image gallery specifications (carousels):

3. Promotional video pins

Promotional video pins are similar to regular promotional pins, except that the static image is replaced by a video clip. You can also choose where you want your videos to appear: in search results, in users’ timelines, or in the “related” section.

Video starts to play automatically when the video pin is at 50% visibility. But make sure you record a video that doesn’t neccessarily need sound to be understood, as many viewers watch videos on their timelines with the sound turned off.

For promotional video pins, you can choose between two sizes: standard width and extended (max width).

The standard-width promotional video is the same as a regular pin. Extended videos, however, spread to the edge on the mobile phone and can be more expensive to promote as minimum bids start higher.

Videos are perfect for campaigns that raise awareness of your existence and tell the story of your brand or product.

Promotional video pin specifications:

4. Promotional pins for applications (App Pin)

Promotional pins for apps only work on mobile phones. But that’s not a problem at all, because 80% of Pinterest search engine traffic comes from mobile devices. This way of advertising allows users to download the mobile application directly from Pinterest.

Application promotional pins are linked directly to the iTunes or GooglePlay store URL. This way, users can download the new app without leaving Pinterest.

5. Pinterest Stories

This is a new type of pin that is currently being tested with selected business accounts, which are currently only available on iOS devices (Beta version).

Each Story Pin has a cover image and title – people will see this in the form of an icon on their Pinterest timeline. They can be images, text and links and should have a minimum of 2 pages to a maximum of 20. Users can touch the title image, and thus open the entire Story Pin.

Pinterest Stories are a new way of pinning. They are currently still being developed (Beta version)

How to be visible on Pinterest in 2020?

The algorithm used by Pinterest to decide what users see on their timeline is called a “Smart Feed”. The content on your timeline is displayed using three different content groups:

Pinterest selects the appropriate pins from each of these three groups to appear on your timeline and show content that may be of interest to you.

So you need to think about an SEO (optimization) strategy if you want your pins to reach your target audience.

You need to research your keywords first. You can use a tool like: Google Adwords Keyword Planner. Or, you can use the search bar directly on Pinterest. As you type in your keywords, they will appear alongside the most popular and searched automatic suggestions.

Remember to use #hashtags, as they are the basis of successful Pinterest marketing for beginners!

You can also use #hashtags to optimize your pins. They act as keywords. Appropriate #hashtags are therefore another way to reach users who are interested in your content.

It can usually take a while for your keywords to appear in the results when you do the research and post your pins. But when searching with a #hastag, the latest pins with this hashtag will appear at the top of the feed. This also means you don’t have to update older pins with hashtags, as they already have a keyword-based reach. Not sure how to get started?

Check out the Hashtag Generator Tool and add appropriate #hashtags to your pins

You now have the tools to make the most of Pinterest and increase the reach and visibility of your business online! If you have ever used Pinterest marketing in the past, let us know your experiences in the comments.

I invite you to read another one of our articles on the topic of digital advertising. And for step-by-step video tutorials, check out our hands-on e-courses.

Find out more about them at https://www.martin-orange.com/e-courses/