Do you want to drive traffic to your website and capture new clients? Then you need to be using Pinterest for business!
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t Pinterest for recipes and craft projects? There are a lot of recipes, crafts, outfit inspiration, and home decor ideas on Pinterest. There’s also a ton of people. Over 77 million Americans use Pinterest every single month.
I love Pinterest. And so do your potential clients.
If you’re new to the platform or have only used it for personal purposes, I want to share my knowledge of Pinterest marketing, which is different than marketing on Facebook, Instagram, or other sites.
My Pinterest Package is my most popular offering because it gets results. I’m obsessed with what Pinterest can do for your business — here are five ways to make sure you’re using Pinterest effectively.
1. Create a Business Account (Or Convert Your Personal One)
The first thing you will need is a business account.
Just like with Instagram, you can have a personal account or a business account on Pinterest. If you have a personal account that you have used before for unrelated things (like pinning all those recipes you never made…), it can be helpful to convert it to your business account.
Pinterest’s algorithm is unfriendly to brand new accounts for the first few months. Your old account will gain momentum faster, even if you have never used it for business before.
As a side note, Pinterest has a new feature where you can add a business profile. Don’t do that! It makes things confusing. Simply convert your personal account to a business account. I don’t recommend having two, because it gets messy.
If you don’t have a Pinterest account at all, you can create a business profile from scratch by going here. Whether you create a new account or convert an old one, be sure to keep all personal boards private. You can mark any existing boards as private and even create new private boards for topics that are not on brand.
For example, I love pinning recipes and home decor, but that is totally not part of my brand. I keep those pins for my personal use in private boards so no one can see them other than me. That means everything public-facing is on-brand.
2. Build a Professional Profile
Your Profile Pic
Your profile pic is really important for setting the tone of your account. If you are converting from a personal account, your picture might be silly, blurry, or maybe not even a picture of you!
You are going to want a professional-looking headshot. Some brands use logos, but that can come across as impersonal. Unless you are a major brand, I recommend a headshot.
When I say a headshot is necessary to use Pinterest for business, I don’t mean that you have to get expensive photos taken. If that isn’t in the budget right now, have someone else (a friend, a spouse, a family member you can bribe) take your picture in a well-lit area. Make sure you can see your face clearly, you look professional, and the quality is decent.
The headshot I used for the first few years in business was literally a selfie, but I did everything I could to make it as professional as possible by setting up a tripod and using a remote. I used that for a long time, until I finally got professional headshots taken. Just use the best you have!
The Bio
The next part of setting up a profile is the bio. Make sure to add a descriptive bio with a link to your website. Include some SEO keywords into your bio if you can.
Confirm Your Website & Set Up Rich Pins
Go into the settings in Pinterest and look for directions on confirming your website. There will also be instructions on setting up rich pins.
Follow the instructions to confirm your website and set up rich pins. Both of these are crucial steps in setting up a Pinterest for business account. Without these, your pins’ discoverability will go down.
3. Leverage Your Boards
I’ve already talked about private boards, where you can keep any personal pins that are not on brand. All of the boards viewable to the public will be your business boards and the group boards you belong to.
The difference between a board that only you have and a group board is that a group board is a collaborative effort with multiple people on the board at one time. There can be hundreds of people all contributing to one board!
Group boards are really fantastic because only the people that follow you can see the pins to your personal boards. Whereas if you pin to group boards, all of the people on the group board will see it. They allow you to cast a wider net and reach more people when you post. Group boards are a super important part of any Pinterest marketing strategy.
Related: The Best Strategy for Promoting Your Blog on Pinterest
Creating Good Board Descriptions
I also want to warn you about board descriptions. I see a lot of people with group board descriptions that are a bunch of words jumbled together. It’s just a string of keywords that make no sense. I call it keyword soup.
Keyword soup may have worked back when Pinterest was pretty new and its SEO technology wasn’t very intuitive, but now Pinterest has SEO technology similar to Google. Just like you can’t throw a bunch of keywords in an unreadable format together in a blog post and expect to rank on Google, you cannot do the same on Pinterest. Maybe that worked 15 years ago, but readability is key now.
While you can’t edit other people’s group board descriptions, you can be conscious of keyword soup when creating your personal boards. In the board description, write a few sentences that bring out a couple of keywords. Keep it natural. Actually describe what the board is and include SEO keyword phrases that make sense. Remember, real humans are reading this!
4. How to Pin
Write Good Pin Descriptions
When you start pinning, you are going to want to follow the same advice for pin descriptions. Don’t use keyword soup or unnecessary sentences. I usually do the title of my blog post, the title of my business, and a couple of hashtags. That’s it!
Use Hashtags
Pinterest has gone back and forth on hashtags. They used them, got rid of them, and brought them back again. For now, hashtags are used on Pinterest and important to use so that your pins can be categorized.
You can search for what hashtags other people are using for your topic and use them. When you manually pin on the platform, you can see what hashtags are in heavy use and get ideas for what to use.
Design High-Quality Graphics
If you’ve been on Pinterest, you’ve seen the vertical images that are so popular. You are going to want to create Pinterest graphics that are 2×3. It’s important to get the right aspect ratio (2:3) so the graphic looks good on the platform.
You can go onto Canva and pick their Pinterest template; they have a perfect-sized Pinterest template that makes it really easy to create graphics.
In addition to the ratio, I always make sure there’s a text overlay on the image. You need a background image, and then on top of that, your blog post title or some sort of engaging headline that will make people want to click your pin.
The point is to entice people to check out the content you’re promoting, so make sure the text is readable. It shouldn’t be generic, but it shouldn’t be so ornate that it’s impossible to make out the words.
Stick to your brand fonts and colors when making the graphic so that all your pins reinforce your brand. Include your URL or an image of your logo on the post as well. This will result in professional-looking pins that are on-brand.
Pin Frequently
When you set up a Pinterest for business account, prepare to be pinning a lot. Of course, it’s important to pin your own content all the time, but also mix it up with other people’s content (also known as “curated content”).
This curated content should be items that will be of interest to your audience. This way, you keep your audience interested without having to come up with 100% new content and when you re-pin from a group board, the other members will really appreciate it.
Group boards are a great part of any Pinterest marketing strategy, but they take work. If you are sharing with a board, they are going to expect you to re-share their content as well. It’s a give-and-take relationship in which everyone wins. So be a good group board member and share! High-quality group boards don’t want members who don’t share other members’ content.
5. Track Your Analytics
Lastly, track your results. Using Pinterest for business is a long game, so don’t expect to see dramatic results in week one.
It can be too volatile to make sense of weekly statistics, but monitoring monthly numbers can be really helpful. You can track your numbers both through Pinterest Analytics and Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is the best one for tracking all the activity that happens on your website and it’ll show you in the referral traffic section how much you’re getting from Pinterest every month, as well as other platforms.
Monitoring your analytics is a good way to tell if your strategy is working. You can see whether your Pinterest account is steadily performing or going up. If it’s dipping down, that might be a signal to change up your strategy or try something different.
Related: How to Complete a Social Media Analysis for Your Clients
Keep in mind that Pinterest is a long game, similar to SEO, another type of organic online marketing. I tell my clients that it takes about 3 months before the traffic starts to kick in.
But over time, your pins will gain momentum and build a presence on Pinterest that becomes more powerful. The longer you’re on Pinterest and consistently pin high-quality content, the more traffic you will get.
I get tons of traffic from Pinterest, and it keeps going up! It can be a little disheartening if you are just starting out using Pinterest for business and expect a ton of traffic right away. That won’t happen unless you throw a bunch of money at paid ads.
While using Pinterest for business can take a little bit longer than paid ads, it is a really great, organic (read = FREE) way to get high-quality traffic and leads.
I use Pinterest for business and have been really successful with it. Once you have a system set in place, it builds upon itself. After just a few months, you are going to notice a difference in your traffic and in your leads!
I know what a powerful tool Pinterest can be — it’s where I get a lot of my clients! Are you ready to set up a business account and start utilizing this platform? Hit me up and let me know!
