How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business: 5 Best Tips to Success

How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business

If you want to find a fast way to start driving traffic to your site, whether a blog, product or service, Pinterest is your new best friend! Navigating and growing a Pinterest account can be a little different than other social platforms, so we have put together our best Pinterest strategies, for your small business, with these five tips to success.

It is a common misconception by many businesses (large or small) and bloggers that Pinterest is a “just for fun” social platform, used for searching for home decor ideas, holiday recipes or crafts. If you’re one of those who think Pinterest can’t benefit your business then I’m here to tell you that’s about has true as a cat who loves water. Basically, think of Pinterest as a visual search engine and a powerful one.

In this post, I am going to show you how powerful and beneficial using Pinterest to market your business can be.

In fact here are 2 facts about Pinterest that may surprise some of you.

1. Nearly 75% of pins on Pinterest come from businesses!

2. Pinterest is the easiest and quickest way you can rank in the top 10 search results on Google! (Yeah, I bet I have your attention now!)

If you still believe that Pinterest is just for personal fun things then sadly you are missing out on thousands of website views, email subscribers, and so much more, which by the way is all FREE.

In this post I am are going to share with you 5 ways to become a Pinterest pro quickly, so you can quickly grow not only your Pinterest account, but also your website, business, clients, and email subscribers.

Before I go over the the best Pinterest business marketing strategies I want to share a couple motivating facts about how Pinterest can grow your business unlike other social platforms.

Your Google Ranking

Remember that juicy carrot I dangled a moment ago about Google rankings? Not only it is totally true but very achievable. Let me show you an example of what I mean here.

See what happens when I go to Google and I type in ‘blogging for beginners?’ On the first page Pinterest has curated its top 25+ pins for blogging for beginner ideas. You might ask, does this mean that I have to rank as the top 25 pins only on Pinterest? The answer is no!

See how is say 25+? The plus means it’s going to show you the top pins BUT it will also show you pins that are below the top 25.

This is also good because with the release of Pinterest’s smart feed when anyone interacts with these pins Pinterest will put similar pins in there home newsfeed. Giving your pins a chance to be seen even if you don’t rank super high yet on Pinterest yet!

Take a look at our gif image below, which is Pinterest’s results when I click on its google URL for blogging for beginners. As you can see it goes way beyond the 25 top pins, proving how invaluable Pinterest can be to ranking on the first page of Google.

 

Just so you can see the proof in the pudding take a look at my search results for these other topics.

• Farmhouse decor ideas

• Paper flower crafts

• Styled stock photos

Your Email List

So now we see that Pinterest obviously can be a valuable traffic source, but did you know you can grow your email list with Pinterest?! Yeah, you totally can AND you can do it on autopilot, once set up.

You can use your pins and your profile URL to have them sent to either a landing page (which is recommended by me) or to a specific page on your site. It’s key to provide either a coupon or a attention grabbing opt-in on these pages you are linking to ensure capturing your readers/customers emails.

So now that I have you excitedly convinced that Pinterest is a must for your marketing game let me give you a crash course of the five best strategies to use.

Keep reading for our 5 Pinterest strategies

1. Convert to a Business Account

Converting to a business account is important if you are planning to use Pinterest for anything other than personal pinning.

Here are the main reasons why:

• Pinterest requires it

Pinterest actually wants to know who is using them for personal use and who is using them for business. So you will see in their terms they want small businesses to be using the right accounts.

“Commercial use of Pinterest: If you want to use our products for commercial purposes you must create a business account and agree to our Business Terms of Service.”

• Special features

Business accounts come with certain perks that personal accounts do not. Rich pins, promoted pins, ads manager, and showcase just to name a few. You also are presented with the option of entering a business name instead of just your first and last name in a personal account.

• Your brand will be presented professionally

You want the social medias you use for business to always look professional so your followers and customers take you seriously.

So how do you create a Pinterest business account? It’s really easy. Here are the guidelines from Pinterest.

2. Group Boards

This point is an exciting topic for us personally, not only because we are apart of and operate many group boards, but because we also have taken the time to create a massive list of group boards that you can apply for!

Group boards are your meat and potatoes of getting traffic from Pinterest to your blog/site.

So why do group boards work so well? Several reasons..

1. You are exposed not just to your followers but all the followers on that group board. If the owner of that group board has 10,000 followers on that board then you have 10,000 people who can potentially see your pin! Sounds pretty good to us!
2. It helps tell Pinterest more about your pin by the type of board and the board’s SEO, so they can categorize it correctly getting you more of the right viewers.
3. You can get complementary repins. If you are apart of a group board with fellow pinners that take a few minutes out of their day to actually repin others content on the board chances are you will get some saves to kick start your newest pin.

Note: It’s important that if you are apart of group boards to repin others pins. It’s what you would want others to do for you right? This keeps board engagement high so EVERYONE benefits. Let’s be a community and support each other shall we?!

On that note click below and I will send you my list of 220+ group boards to join!

Click here to download your list!

3. Manually Pinning & Automated Pinning

A lot of newbies may wonder if it is better to opt for manual or automatic pinning on Pinterest. Our answer to this? There really is no exact right answer.

Both will work just fine.

If you are a very busy business sticking with automatic pinning may be a better choice. If you are just starting out you may want to stick with manual pinning for the first few months to really build up a good collection of carefully chosen pins.

There is one other alternative to this as well.

You can do both!

Now be sure that when you are doing both you are following any group board rules that have been set up. For example, if the owner wants you to only pin a couple pins per day or does not allow duplicated pins within a certain time frame.

There are 2 great ways to pin manually

The first is to save relevant but trending pins. Saving topics that are trending within Pinterest will get you more traffic by default because people are showing high interest in them.

 

Secondly, use your source board to pin your own pins to group boards. I learned the following cool tip from Carly at Mommy on Purpose. 

What is a source board? It’s this awesome page that stores all the images saved from your website. But not just by you, but by anyone who pins from your site. 

Why does this matter? Well, Pinterest recognizes pins differently when they are saved by a different person. While there isn’t a clear understanding why this is, we believe it has to do with the IP address of their browser, computer or device.

This is important because you can save those pins that pop up in your source board to your group boards (change the description and SEO a bit for variation).

As a result Pinterest will recognize it as a different pin and give you that many more chances of being shared and re-shared until it becomes one of the top search results for it’s category.  

Take a look at the screen shot below from one of our client’s source boards to see the difference between a pin that Pinterest recognizes as the same and one that it doesn’t.

You can clearly see the 2 pins above are the same, but Pinterest doesn’t think so. Save the one that says it hasn’t been saved to your boards before. This strategy is a great one to use when going the manual pinning route or if you are trying to do a little of both manual and automatic.

Your source board can be found at https://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain/

4. Stay on Brand

When you are filling out your Pinterest profile make sure that you not only communicate who you are and what you do, but also stay on brand with your business. This is especially important if you want to flood traffic to your site for the purpose of collecting emails.

In other words, you need to look like the same business when someone clicks from your Pinterest profile to your site or landing page.

Having a cute picture of you and your child might be special to you, but unless you are a mommy blogger it probably isn’t going to make sense if a follower clicks to your site and sees that you sell jewelry or blog about crafts.

You want your brand to stay on point and be professional.

5. Know How to Use Pinterest SEO and Do It

Oh no, more SEO is probably what you are thinking. Don’t worry, Pinterest SEO is really easy and kinda fun to set up.

There are 2 things you need to focus on with Pinterest SEO.

First, your boards. When you start a new board you need to make sure you have categorized it, given it a name that contains keywords to the boards subject and a brief description. Here’s a brief look below of where to accomplish this.

The second thing you need to do with SEO is make sure your pin’s descriptions have strong keywords that people are searching regularly on Pinterest.

The easiest way to make sure you are using good keywords in your pins description is by going to the Pinterest search bar. Start to type in a key word, for example “small business” and look to see what search results Pinterest naturally suggests. These are great to use in your pins descriptions and even your boards titles and descriptions.

There are many other powerful ways to use Pinterest but these are a few of the strongest Pinterest strategies to get started or step up your game. Tell me your thoughts or questions in the comments below!

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