With the ever-growing list of social media sites available to start marketing on, it’s often difficult to choose which ones you want to actually prioritize. Facebook is almost always a given for brands to start with, and Instagram and Twitter are normally ranked high too.
Pinterest marketing has also been skyrocketing to popularity amongst marketers.
This step-by-step guide to Pinterest marketing is going to provide marketers and businesses with everything they need to build a strong content marketing presence on the platform—including how to get your individual pins noticed.
In our January 2017 update, we’ve added sections on getting your pins noticed, Facebook and Pinterest integration, buyable pins, Pinterest’s Promoted Pins- and more!
If you are here just for the tutorial on Promoted Pins you can click here and go straight to the point! But why don’t you take a coffee and refresh your memory going through the whole guide?
Why Pinterest?
Pinterest functions a little differently than any of the other social media sites listed above; for many pinners, the idea isn’t necessarily so much to broadcast images or ideas to followers, but it’s to save ideas, products, or content for later. This makes it a perfect marketing platform.
One of the key ways Pinterest is different from other social media sites is that it serves a different function; as mentioned above, the focus of Pinterest isn’t primarily to post your own ideas or content, it’s to save content that you find valuable for later. For businesses looking to have their content or products purchased, Pinterest is a great tool to have in your arsenal. I’ve saved products I liked to Pinterest and gone back and purchased them later, and I’m far from the only one.
Another key difference: Pinterest displays content differently than any other social media site, and it does so in four ways. Users can view your pins:
On their homefeed, if they follow you or the pins are deemed to be particularly relevant to their interests.
By searching for a keyword relevant to your pin.
In relevant categories (like “Food and Drink” and “Health and Fitness”).
On your actual profile, under themed/categorized boards.
This means that relevant, interested users can find your content organically, whether they’re following you (or even know anything about you) or not.
Finally, the biggest and best reason businesses should be on Pinterest: research has shown that large amounts of Pinterest users actually use the platform to research purchasing decisions before buying, and with many buying something they’ve found on the site.
If that’s not a good reason, I don’t know what is.
Setting Up Your Pinterest Profile
When I first got a Pinterest back in 2012, you had to wait at least a few days to be allowed to create an account. Now, it’s much easier—and instantaneous.
#1 – Creating an Account
When you go to create an account, you’ll see the option at the bottom of the sign in box to “Continue as a Business.” If you miss it, you can still convert your account to a business later, but it’s easier to do it now.
When you create your account as a business, you’ll be asked to fill out the additional fields supplying the information of your business’s name, what type of business you are, and your website (though this is optional).
Once you’re done, hit create account.
You’ll then be asked to follow 5 topics that interest you. This doesn’t really matter, since you’ll be using this to promote your content instead of following others, but it never hurts to select topics that are relevant to your business.
Once your account is created, your home page will look like the screenshot below. This is just what you see, not what anyone following you will see. Click on the red thumb tack in the top right-hand corner to get to your profile.
#2 – Setting Up Your Profile
Your profile starts out looking like this—blank and ready to be filled in. To do so, first click the “Edit Profile” button.
I’ve seen some businesses make the mistake of not filling out all the information here, and that’s a mistake.
Give as much information as you can—users will see this, and the more info, the better. Choose an image that best represents your brand; for many, this is a logo. Make sure to add your website so users can visit you through it. Locations matter if you’re a local or brick-and-mortar location, and always, always try to use keywords in your “about me.”
Once your profile has been set up, you can start creating your boards.
#3 – Setting Up Boards
You can create a board from your profile page. You’ll be asked to name it, describe it, what category it falls under, if it’s secret, and if you want to invite collaborators.
When you name your board, keep keywords in mind, and make sure it’s a relevant title. If you’re creating a board with candy recipes, for example, you could name it “Sweet Treats,” but this could also include cakes, cookies, and pies; adding “candy” in the title as a keyword could help your search results and help you connect with more relevant users.
Having numerous, specialized, detailed boards can help increase the visibility of your pins
The description matters just as much as the title; again, keywords matter, and describe it accurately.
This is a great example of an accurate description that’s detailed and features some keywords
If you invite collaborators, keep in mind that they can pin to and edit the board.
Once you add pins to the board, you can choose which image you want to represent the board. You’ll go to “edit board,” and then choose to change your cover image.
You can scroll through the images selected and choose your new cover image.
# 4 – Viewing Analytics
Pinterest has their own analytics program, available only for business accounts. You can view the analytics by clicking on the tab on the navigation bar in the top left hand corner of the page.
This account is new, so it doesn’t have any analytics information yet, but Pinterest’s analytics can tell you how many views and how much engagement your pins and boards are getting, along with information about your followers or those who viewed your pins.
For more information, we’ve got a full post about Pinterest Analytics that goes over everything you need to know here.
How to Get Pins Noticed
While setting up your profile in a way that’s optimized for success is important, your actual pins will be what matters most. Your pins need to be visually striking so they stand out against the others, whether that’s in a page of other search results or under a general category.
There are several ways you can get your pins noticed and increase their visibility, in addition to choosing the right keywords to describe them. These include choosing the right image size and following best image practices.
Best Image Size
Choosing the right image size on Pinterest can help your pin stand out from the rest, regardless of where users are viewing it.
Image on Pinterest will be scaled to fit the platform, with the width being scaled to 236 pixels.
By Pinterest’s own recommendations, the best aspect ratios for Pins fall between a 2:3 and 1:3.5 (width to height). The minimum recommended width is 600 pixels. Having Pins that are taller than they are wide can help your pins have enough space to stand out, but pins that seem to go on forever and are too long don’t get nearly as much engagement.
Best Image Practices
To help get your pins noticed, there are several best image practices you can use to increase views, repins, and engagement. These include:
Tasteful branding. This comes from Pinterest’s own recommendations; according to Pinterest, including “tasteful branding” in the image can help increase repins and engagement, which can lead to purchases. Whether this is featuring the packaging of your product in the image or just a small logo or watermark, they recommend adding it in where possible.
Add lifestyle images. While images of your products alone can be effective, adding in lifestyle images where users are actively using your product can help it get the attention of users. Avoid overly user-generated images, but having high quality images of someone using your product in its best use case can be effective.
Text overlays. This isn’t Facebook; there’s no 20% rule. Adding text overlay to your image can help get your point and your ideas across quickly.
List images. Lists and listicles are big in content marketing right now; Pinterest is no different. Having an image that demonstrates the list your pin will take you to can be a great way to stand out and increase engagement.
Pinterest Promoted Pins
Promoted Pins rolled out for everyone last year, and businesses in all industries are using the platform.
Since its rolled out, it has provided businesses and brands of all sizes a major platform to connect with new and interested users.
Promoted Pins: How It Works
Pinterest’s Promoted Pins is their paid ad platform. It works on a bidding system like the other social media ad platforms we’re familiar with.
You pay to have your pin placed in front of your target audience. Your pins will show up in relevant category feeds and relevant searches, aided by the keywords that you choose.
You must have a business Pinterest account in order to access and run your own promoted pins campaigns.
How to Create Promoted Pins
To access the promoted pins platform, click on the Ads clickable tab and drop down menu, which can be located in the left hand corner.
This will take you to the dashboard, where you can see the total number of impressions, engagement, conversions, and ad spend on all your campaigns in the prior week. This information can be broken down by engagement campaigns and traffic campaigns.
To get started creating a promoted pin, click on the + in the top right hand corner of Pinterest’s navigation bar, and select “Create an Ad.”
You’ll first be asked to decide whether you want to boost engagement with your pins, which will focus on- and charge by- close up views, repins, and clicks, or send traffic to your site, which will charge by clicks.
Once you choose your campaign goal, you’ll add in information abut your campaign name, your daily budget, and the start and end date for your campaign.
The end date is optional, but I highly recommend it—keeping your pins updated and varied is as important here as it is on any other platform.
When you’ve filled out all of the information, click “Pick a Pin”
On the next screen, you’ll be asked to select the pin you want to promote.
When choosing a pin, you can search for a pin by the keyword or URL, or scroll through your pins. You can see the number of repins each has as you scroll through them. Pinterest also gives you the option of viewing your most clicked and most repined pins in the past 30 days.
On the next screen, you’ll give your promoted pin it’s name, which will be the visible title of the pin that users will see. You can also set a destination URL.
Promoted Pins Targeting
Below this, you’ll be able to select different interests, which are used as a sort of targeting criteria. These interests will help reach a relevant audience in their browsing and home feeds. They will also sort your post into the correct categories.
When you scroll down, you’ll be asked to choose keywords. I believe that this is the most important section in the entire ad creation process.
The keywords you choose will determine what searches your pin shows up in. You want to connect with users who are actively searching for content like yours. Pinterest automatically suggests searches based on their information about your pin, and they’ll provide a list of keywords for every search that you make.
Click on different keywords to add them to your campaign. Pinterest recommends using 20-30 keywords per promoted pin.
When it comes to the keywords you choose, think outside the box to help your pin show up in more searches. For example, instead of just having keywords like “beet soup” and “beets,” you can add “chilled soup,” “summer recipes,” and “liquid diet.” This gives you more diversity, expanding visibility.
When you scroll to the next section, you have the ability to have your pins only shown to those:
in certain locations
who speak certain languages
use specific devices
are a certain gender
Finalizing Your Campaign
Next, you’ll be able to set your Maximum CPC bid. This is the most you’re willing to pay for a single click to your website (or, in the case of an engagement objective, for a single measure of engagement). This must be at least $0.10. Pinterest will let you know if your bid is too high or low compared to what others are bidding.
Once you submit your campaign, it will need to pend approval. You can view your campaigns’ approval status under the Engagement campaigns or Traffic campaigns tabs.
Editing Your Campaign
At any point, if you want to edit your campaign, click on the name of the campaign you want to edit. You’ll be taken to the overview of its information, and you can choose “Edit Promoted Pin” in the top right hand corner.
From there you can pause your campaign, change your maximum bid, and add more targeting or keyword information.
Promoted Pins Analytics
Both as your campaigns progress and once they’re over, it’s important to monitor them through the promoted pins analytics.
You can find information about how your campaigns are performing on the home page of the ads platform, or find detailed information on each campaign by clicking on them.
Pinterest’s reporting shows you your total impressions, total engagement, total conversions, and your total spend over the past thirty days both for your campaigns as a whole and by engagement goals.
You can also see your highest and lowest performing promoted pins.
How to Use Pinterest’s Analytics
Most social media platforms have given us analytics to track our presence and impact on the platform, as well as our audience on it. We’ve got Facebook Insights (and Audience Insights), Google Analytics, and Twitter’s Analytics. Now, we’ve got Pinterest Analytics.
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Accessing Pinterest Analytics
First of all, there’s one thing I’ve seen causing confusion that we have to note: personal Pinterest users will be unable to get analytics for their profiles. You need to have your profile converted to a business profile in order to access the analytics. You can do this by either signing up as a business, or—if you already have an account—by converting it here.
Once you’re using Pinterest as a business, you can access your analytics from your profile Page. Click on the star in the top right corner next to “Edit Profile,” and it will reveal a drop down menu. You’ll see “Analytics” as an option to click on.
When you first access Pinterest’s Analytics, you’ll be taken right to your dashboard.
On your dashboard, you’ll be able to see a quick overview of what’s going on with your profile, including:
Number of average daily impressions
Average daily viewers
Amount of average monthly viewers
Average monthly engaged
Top pin impressions in the past 30 days (which will show you the amount of impressions, repins, clicks, and likes those pins have)
On the right hand side of the page, you’ll see a box that says “What to see more?” Once you confirm your website by installing a code they give you into your website index, you’ll be able to know what all of your content is doing on Pinterest—not just the pins you’ve actually pinned.
The dashboard is designed to give you a quick overview of what’s going on in a glance—the other tabs will give you a more in-depth look.
Your Profile
In the top of the analytics page, you’ll see different tabs you can click on: analytics, your pinterest profile, and audience.
Under the “Your Pinterest Profile,” you’ll be able to access detailed information about the activity on your profile. It is appropriately named.
The different tabs and information include:
Impressions. Under this tab, you can see your overall impressions within a certain range of eye (which you can adjust), your top pin impressions, and boards with top impressions.
Repins. You can see your average daily pins and repinners, the content that has been most repinned in the past 30 days, and boards with the most repinned pins.
Clicks. Evaluate the number of clicks to your website from your pins (daily clicks and daily visitors). You can also see the most clicked pins within the past 30 days, and the board with the most clicked pins.
All time data. This shows the best performance of your pins in the entire history that you’ve had your Pinterest. You can see your all time most repinned pins, the best in search, and power pins (pins with a high mix of clicks, repins, and “more”).
If you want to know how your content is performing on Pinterest, this will give you everything you need to know.
Audience Analytics
It’s no surprise that the audience analytics tab is going to give us information about the audience we have on Pinterest, which can be incredibly helpful, as we all know, for a lot of reasons. There are two tabs: demographics and interests, both self explanatory.
Under the demographics tab, you’ll be able to see:
Number of average monthly viewers
Average monthly engaged
The country of your audience
Metro
Language
Gender
Under the Interests tab, you’ll be able to see what your audience is—you guessed it—interested in. This will manifest in a list of topics and niches, accompanied by images, to show what other interests your audience shares.
You’ll also be able to see Pinner boards that have a lot of your pins on them, and other brands that your audience engages with (giving you a good look at your competition).
How to Use This Information
It’s always good to know who your audience is and how your profile is performing, in the most amount of detail as possible.
By looking at your audience analytics and comparing it to your audience on other platforms, you can see who you’re missing. Sometimes the answer will be that a large percentage of that demographic just doesn’t frequently use Pinterest; sometimes, though, you’re missing them for another reason. You can either create new pins, boards, and content to try to engage with them.
Analytics can also help you to gear more content towards the audience that you do have on Pinterest. In a lot of cases, the audience you have on Pinterest may not be identical to the one you have on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube—and that’s ok.
Different people use different platforms, and you’ll want to adjust your content to that. If, for example, I noticed that my cooking site had an audience with a large interest in camping, I could create content about food to take or cook on a camping trip.
Pinterest’s Buyable Pins
Promoted Pins are doing exceptionally well, and buyable pins are driving major conversions.
Image courtesy of Pinterest.com
Pinterest alone, even without their ad platform, is a valuable marketing tool, allowing businesses and marketers to showcase their brand in a variety of different ways. Promoted Pins allow businesses to guarantee that users are seeing their pins. Buyable pins enable users to purchase directly off of a pin, without ever leaving Pinterest.
Here’s everything we know about Pinterest’s buyable pins…
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What Are Pinterest’s Buyable Pins?
Pinterest’s buyable pins are a simple, fast, and secure way for users to make purchases without ever leaving Pinterest.
Buyable pins are identifiable to users by a blue “Buy It” tag that shows up right next to the red “Pint it” button. Users can see the price of the item, and will be taken through a swift check out process, all on Pinterest.
If you’ve ever wanted a way to boost impulse buys, I think buyable pins just might be your answer. As users are browsing through Pinterest, creating their wishlists and getting ideas, they’ll be able to see your product, the price, and purchase it all with a few quick taps or clicks on their mobile device. They don’t even repeatedly enter in their payment information, making the process go swiftly—before they get the chance to talk themselves out of it.
With the assistance of Shopify and its store owners, Pinterest plans on having roughly 2 million Buyable Pins active by the end of this month.
Buyable pins are currently starting with testing just for iPhone and Ipad users in the US (users must have recently updated IOS systems). They just started rolling out buyable pins on June 30th, so apple mobile device users are just starting to get a glimpse of them for the first time.
After testing is completed, it seems that Pinterest fully intends to release buyable pins for Android and even desktop users.
How Pinterest is Keeping Buyers’ Information Secure
Right now, there is a simple, fast, and secure check outPintrest designed specifically for mobile users. Normally, checkouts and purchases on mobile can be cumbersome and exhausting tasks, so Pinterest made sure to change that.
Pinterest will never actually be a “middle man” for buyers’ financial information; they will use a secure checkout that will deliver the payment information right to the vendor, and not store the information themselves. Apple Pay is one option for users to make purchases securely on buyable pins, and Braintree is working behind the scenes to help with other methods of secure payment.
Long story short: Pinterest doesn’t store your information, keeping your payment information and privacy off as many platforms as possible. The payment process will be secure, but fast and simple. It will be easy for both buyers and merchants, and safe for both to use. Who can say no to that?
Why Pinterest’s Buyable Pins are a Game Changer
As far as I know, on no other social media platform has there ever been the opportunity for marketers to enable buyers to purchase directly off the social media platform (I’m not counting sites like Shopify and Groupon, where people purely go to purchase). Instagram has announced a competing “Buy It” button, which is proof that this could be a feature that’s here to stay (and potentially revolutionary).
Pinterest at its very core is a fascinating (and addicting) blend of wish list creation, window shopping, and recipe hunting. Especially when it comes to the wish list creation and window-shopping, a buyable pin could be a really powerful thing. Just imagine the revenue that could bring in at Christmas time alone, when people are desperately hunting for that last minute gift.
Even better—users can potentially continue on through Pinterest, making multiple purchases, encouraged to do so since they never leave the site and risk not coming back.
The benefits for marketers are huge. And here’s one of the biggest and best parts of buyable pins: Pinterest doesn’t take a cut of your sales. There’s no commission. You keep every dollar you make on the sales you get from buyable pins. Though that has the potential to change down the line if buyable pins see a lot of success, for now marketers are using them with no drawbacks.
How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic To Your Site
With Pinterest weighing heavily on many users when they’re making buying decisions, it’s essential to use best practices to drive more traffic to your site so they can make the decision to buy with you. Fortunately, there are 4 incredibly easy ways to help your pins stand out, driving traffic (and eager customers) to your site.
1. Use Taller Pins
Choosing taller pins (but not too tall!) can make all the difference in how much traffic you’re getting to your site. While most pins will be slightly taller than they are wide, pins of a certain dimension are likely to perform the best.
You want your pin to be taller than it is wide. This focus of these dimensions is purely on the image, though additional text can help increase clicks, too.
On Pinterest, all images will be scaled to a width of 235 pixels (with an expanded width of 736 pixels once you click on it). The ideal ratio seems to be closer to 1:3.5 (or 600 pixels wide by 2,100 pixels tall, for example).
Taller pins stand out in the Newsfeed automatically, and can be quick to draw the eye. While you don’t want it to be much taller than 1:3.5, you can test out different lengths and see what resonates best with your audience.
2. Post at Peak Times
Posting at peak times will help more users to see and click on your pins. Most importantly, it will also encourage more repins, will which continue to cycle through the site. Peak times for Pinterest are 8-11PM, particularly on Saturdays.
Other high traffic times include:
Fridays at 3PM
2-4 AM and PM, every day
9 PM daily (which is considered to be the true peak time)
Even though you do want to post at peak times, space your content out, with no more than one pin per hour. Since Pinterest has traditionally had rules in place so that only one pin per hour per user will show up in a certain category, you don’t want to take any chances.
3. Add CTAs to your Descriptions
Some of the best advice you’ll ever see in any blog post about marketing is to slap a CTA on whatever it is you’re sharing, whether it’s a Facebook post or an email. The same applies to Pinterest, though they’re overwhelmingly underused on this platform for some reason.
While ending with a CTA is more common, you can also start your description with a CTA, too.
If you scroll through Pinterest, it’s a little surprising how few pins actually have CTAs attached. Encouraging users to “click to learn more” or “sign up now” can be enough to actually inspire action.
Don’t believe me? Call to action pins can increase engagement and conversions by up to 80%. If that’s not enough motivation, I don’t know what is.
Ending your description with a CTA can increase both traffic to and conversions on your site.
Add CTAs to the end of your descriptions, and keep them brief and to the point. You can also add your CTA to the image itself as text overlay if you choose.
4. Install Rich Pins
Rich pins give users additional information to capture their interest and make them want to click.
No matter what type of business you have, Rich pins can automatically help send traffic to your site from Pinterest. Rich pins are dynamic, and offer more information than a regular pin. The idea is similar to Twitter Cards.
There are different types of rich pins available for businesses to install and use. The types of rich pins currently available are:
Article Pins, which feature article title, a description, date of publication, and the author’s name.
Recipe Pins, which feature ingredients, serving information, and cooking times
App pins, which include install buttons and are currently available to iOS apps only.
Place pins, which are ideal for local businesses and include a map, address, and phone number
Movie pins, which include ratings, prominent cast member names, and reviews
Product pins, which include up-to-date pricing, and purchasing information
Product pins reflect current prices and availability; this product, for example, is currently listed as out of stock.
Rich pins are synced up with your site, and will continue to automatically update and provide the most accurate information. This means that product pins, for example, will update the price listed automatically; if your product goes on sale, that’s reflected in the pin.
The extra information from rich pins can help drive more relevant and engaged traffic to your site. They’ll have all the up-to-date information that they need before they even get there.
You can find more information about installing rich pins here.
Integrating Pinterest Marketing & Facebook Marketing
Facebook is a social network dedicated to connecting people from all around the world. Pinterest is visual discovery tool designed to link people with similar interests or projects. Together, they can be a match made in social media heaven.
While Facebook is clearly the king of social media, Pinterest can be used in conjunction with Facebook. Think of it the best of both worlds; you’ve got Facebook’s reach and engagement with Pinterest’s potential for discovery.
In addition, check out this data:
Although Pinterest doesn’t have Facebook larger reach, 55% of Pinterest users have engaged with brands through Pinterest. This is opposed to 48% of Facebook
43% of Pinterest users note that they use Pinterest to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify.” Compare this to the 24% of Facebook users who agree to the same use with Facebook
Pinterest users are more loyal than Facebook fans in terms of showing support
The above shows the following: While Facebook has the userbase, Pinterest has the engagement and the loyalty factor. Pairing the two together can provide you with some great results. So, what are some ways to combine the span of Facebook with the library of wealth Pinterest provides? You just have to follow a few easy steps…
Pin content from Facebook
The great thing about Pinterest is that you can “pin” or save a recipe, craft idea, DIY resource, and even how-to guides.
Plus, with over <a href="http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33732/Pinterest-vs-Facebook-Which-Is-REALLY-the-Better-Visual-Social-Network.aspx?__hstc=24209