8 Pinterest Tips For Small Businesses

2020 may be considered one of the major shaping forces for digital business. Many segments of the online industry made a giant leap just in this one year. Many companies that were previously not prioritizing online markets are now joining and developing online at full speed.

The competition was already big before, but now it has extended to a new level. PPC prices are increasing due to the inflow of new players, and top converting keywords are taken by firms with big budgets. When you shift to organic traffic, the situation gets even more complicated.

Many companies with budgets for SEO and content writing are essentially fighting for top 3 positions in Google search results for their converting keywords. To make things even more complicated, if you dipped your toe in SEO, you would know that to get serious traffic, you will have to pick a strategy and stay consistent for 6-12 months to see any results at all.

But is there a way to get traffic to your business quickly and efficiently? Yes, here comes Pinterest.

Why Should You Be On Pinterest?

If you are already marketing on Pinterest at full speed, this post will give you a couple of insights that might help you grow even more. But some did not consider Pinterest as a priority platform for their business. For those of you who fall into the second category - we will help you reach your business goals.

Pinterest has over 320 million users; the vast majority are women, from the US, with a household income of over $50k. Hopefully, now we have your full attention as you will not find many other platforms with such a concentration of “buyer-intent” audience.

There is another differentiator that puts Pinterest above other platforms. Quick results. Pinterest is a visual search engine, and it works in a bit different manner than Google. Sure, there are similarities like keywords, description importance, CTR titles. Still, Pinterest will deliver you the results much quicker, and you can also get customer feedback right at the platform in the commentary section.

The prerogative of Pinterest is “good pins on good boards.” If you can strike this combination, you will receive results that will seem immediate compared to other search engines.

Let’s have a look at a couple of tips that will help you create another organic traffic stream that may outperform all the others.

Pick Your Niche Carefully

Due to the composition of its audience, Pinterest will always be more of a B2C platform. Some topics just work better than others. DIY, fashion, travel, self-improvement, personal finance, cooking, and other fields related to “personal use” will do better and are dressed for success.

But do not get discouraged If your product or service does not match the popular niches on Pinterest. You can find an appropriate angle for nearly any niche out there - it is just a matter of proper positioning.

For example, if you are selling pans, take the cooking and recipe angle. In case you are selling life insurance - create posts about important life events. The list goes on.

One sure way to estimate what you can expect from Pinterest is to look for companies selling the same products as you are. Look for them on Pinterest and see how many monthly views they have. The click-through rate may differ a lot, but the number of views will give you a slight idea of what is possible in that niche.

When you have found the right promotion angle for your business on Pinterest, it is time to move to the next step.

Get Your Pins Ready

You can pin pretty much anything on Pinterest, but the 1000 x 1500 px with an aspect ratio of 2:3, is what you should aim for. The vast majority of visitors browse Pinterest on their mobile phones, so all the images should cater to that audience.

If you have no experience with design and are far from Photoshop and similar professional tools, do not worry - services like Canva or Visme got you covered.

Canva specializes in Pinterest designs and has many templates that will help you get started. It also provides you with a wide variety of settings and options to create the brand style you are looking for.

As for the images, you can use the ones that Canva provides you in its library or, of course, work with your own. If you have a product or something that you would like to showcase to your audience, you can use that. But if you are looking for stock images that do not look like stock images - sites like Unsplash.com, Pexels.com, and Pixabay.com will provide you with free images for commercial use.

Set Up Your Pinterest Profile

Moving further on your path to Pinterest domination, let’s establish your presence on the platform itself.

Claim your domain. Go to Pinterest settings; in the left menu, click Claim, and verify your domain. Now your website is associated with Pinterest.

Validate Rich Pins. You want Pinterest to accept your images with metadata and other settings, so make sure that you validdate the rich pins.

Use Keywords. For your page name and profile, make sure to use relevant keywords. The Pinterest Trends can help you estimate the search volume.

Make Your Website Pinterest Ready

Now let’s have a quick look at what to do when you need to get your site ready for Pinterest and its audience. Before you get too nervous, it will not require any significant rebuilds of your landing page. Instead, it is just about adding a few features to make it easier to share and repin your content.

Share buttons. If you are using WordPress, install an appropriate plugin and activate share buttons on the side of your page and at the bottom. Make it easy for your visitors to share the content on Pinterest and other platforms.

Set Pin On Hoover. This will allow your users to pin the picture when they hoover with their mouse over it. Re-sharing and repinning images and pins from your post count towards your engagement and results in clicks.

Keep your pictures “Pinnable”. In continuation to the previous point - make sure that the images on your post are ready to be pinned. That means that they have the correct size and descriptions that will be moved to Pinterest when a visitor decides to pin them.

Don’t Let Them Leave! Well, of course, do not hide the close button, but make sure that the visitors have a chance to make a small action that will make them coming back. If you are running a membership site, let them leave a lead and have a chance to peek inside, possibly prepare some kind of a report (or another form of the lead magnet) or at least ask them to bookmark your page.

Know Your Boards

Each pin has to be pinned somewhere. On Pinterest, you pin them to boards. There are two board types - personal boards and group boards.

Personal boards

Make sure to create around ten boards with keywords that are both relevant to your business and have sufficient search volume.

When starting, there is no need to go into long-tail keywords as it might be problematic to cover all the topics and products. Leave it to more advanced stages of your Pinterest growth.

Decide on your board names and create a fitting description that will have relevant keywords in it. Create a board cover, or just choose a pin that will take its place. After that, your board is complete.

To make your Pinterest profile look alive, start pinning your pins to the boards. If you do not have enough of yours - no problem, repin a couple from others. Aim for up to 10 pins for each of the boards before you may consider your profile filled.

Group Boards

Those are the boards that have multiple pinners in them. They were very popular a couple of years ago as they helped you grow your audience very quickly.

Now they are frequently a topic of discussion. Pinterest is saying that it decreased their importance, as they felt that they are misused. Pinners say that they still work.

Make sure to join as many group boards as possible. You can search through the boards and send a message to the admin (which is always the first account to show up when you check all the participants). Or, to make your life a bit easier to go to Pingroupie and search for the relevant boards there.

Automate Your Pins

For your business to grow, you will have to stay very active and consistent with your pinning on Pinterest.

Right from the start, you can pin your picture to around ten boards. This is great as it increases your chance of being seen by your potential customers. You can pin the same pin to more boards, but that can be considered spam by Pinterest, so keep it at a max. of 10.

So if you create 5 pins, you can repin them 50 times. But if you would pin them all at once, there is a high probability that Pinterest will mark your account as spam. To make everything run smoothly, you have to spread your pins and have sufficient “resting” time between reposting them again.

Some stand by manual pinning. With social media content templates, it can be done, but imagine the time you need to get those numbers. You could manually pin maybe 10 times a day, but 20 or 30 and more? Very hard to do. Keep in mind that you must pin in times that are the best to capture your audience’s attention. Automation is inevitable.

In our case, you will have to consider tools like Tailwind. When starting, you may go with ten pins a day, slowly increasing it. Top users pin anywhere between 25-50 times a day. The upper range is discouraged by Tailwind, giving you various suggestions on how to improve your pinning strategy.

Leverage the Holidays and Seasonalities

Seasonalities matter a lot on Pinterest. Whenever there is an upcoming holiday (or a beginning of a particular season), you may rest assured that users will be changing their searches by adding that holiday adjective, and holiday/seasonally related searches will skyrocket.

Make sure that your business takes full advantage of that. Think of every possible angle on how you can tie your product or service to a holiday/season.

Start pinning relevant pins at least a month in advance. As you can see from our point above, it takes some time before all your pins are published, and also, it may take additional time for the algorithm to start promoting them. So have a healthy reserve before the actual holiday kicks in.

Paid Traffic

As you hopefully see from this post, Pinterest may become a great source of organic traffic. But it's paid traffic is also worth mentioning.

First of all, you can get your clicks very cheaply. You can achieve a PPC as small as $0,10 per click for campaigns with the proper positioning. But keep in mind these minimal prices (as $0,10 is CPC minimum for Pinterest) can be achieved mainly in the popular niches we discussed initially.

But even for niches that would be very competitive on other platforms, you may get clicks with a discount.

Another reason to consider Pinterest paid traffic is targeting. While you will find all the usual categories, age, interest, and device criteria, an additional feature can be a crucial component for your business promotion.

Pinterest allows you to target your audience based on locations as precisely as choosing the PO box of the user. This comes as a great tool if your business is local and looking to attract only customers in your area.

Executive Summary

Pinterest is a fantastic platform to promote your business due to the nature of its algorithm. Since it is a visual search engine, the success of your pins will be measured by the engagement on the pin itself and the board that it is pinned to.

Compared to other organic traffic options, Pinterest can offer comparably quick results while still providing enough volume.

Paid traffic is another side where Pinterest shines. Ranging from low PPC to precise geo-targeting, it allows you to create campaigns that will become a pillar of your marketing mix.

The main challenge is finding the proper positioning of your product to make a perfect fit for a very lucrative but at the same time demanding Pinterest audience.

One thing that is the same about Pinterest and any other platform is that it requires consistency. While you may not strike the perfect combination of all the factors on your first try, stay at it, and with time you will see Pinterest becoming one of the primary traffic sources.