10 Ways to Promote Your Online Business with Pinterest

Looking to grow online sales? Whether you're selling products or services, Pinterest can help you drive site traffic and online sales. You can do this in many different ways. Here are 10 Pinterest marketing ideas to get you started!

People sign up for your e-mail list when you offer them something in return. Most online businesses have a lead magnet on their website to market their business. If you have a freebie on offer, you can use Pinterest to promote it by creating an eye-catching Pinterest image for it. Add an irresistible message that makes people want to click to find out more. The pin can lead directly to a landing page where people can sign up for the freebie or to a related blog article with an embedded sign-up form.

Videos are a great way to grab people's attention in the Pinterest feed. Inspire people to take action by showing what you have to offer in a short video. This works really well for DIY, recipe and beauty video pins, but it can also be used very successfully in other domains. Unfortunately, videos cannot be scheduled with Tailwind, but they can be scheduled with the native Pinterest scheduler. Businesses using short videos on Pinterest have reported significant traffic increases.

Pinterest is a visual search engine, designed for discovery. People are actively looking for ideas or solutions for a very wide range of subjects. You can tap into this by anticipating the ideas and solutions your potential customers are looking for. Attract them by creating and publishing content on Pinterest that serves them the ideas and solutions they crave, either organically or through paid advertising.

Most searches on Pinterest are still done through keyword search. Even on a visual search engine like Pinterest! To optimize the chance of your content getting found, the titles and descriptions of your boards and pins should include actual search terms that people use to search on Pinterest. Do some research on Pinterest (and Google!) to see what keywords and key phrases they use to find the product/services you sell. Using the right keywords will help to get your content showing up in the search results of your target audience. The better your targeting, the higher your conversion rate.

A picture speaks a thousand words, especially on Pinterest. To attract attention, compelling images are key. To get clicks, your images need to stand out in the Pinterest feed and have a clear call-to-action. The promise of the pin image needs to match the content it will lead to when people click through. Click here to learn more about the basic principles of highly pinnable images that maximise your chances of conversion.

Rich pins can automatically include information like prices, availability, ingredients and reviews. They pull meta-data from your website that is then automatically displayed with your pins. They get a better search rank and are
more visible in Pinterest users’ feeds resulting in a higher click-through rate. There are four types of Rich Pins: product, recipe, article, and app pins. Install the pin type that is best for your specific business.

Searching on Pinterest is the first step when people start planning a project. The next natural step is to purchase the required products or services. If you have an online store, you should activate Product Pins (see section 6 just above). For all rich pins, data gets automatically updated whenever any of the meta information associated with that pin is updated on the originating website. In the case of a Product Pin, if the price changes online, it will also change on the Product Pin. Although, you do not necessarily have to sell via a platform such as Shopify to activate Product Pins for your website, this greatly simplifies their installation.

Organic pins have an extremely long life-span. Several pins that I produced over a year ago continue to pop up in Pinterest feeds and generate traffic. Pins are continually shared, especially those that remain relevant. As a business you should focus on creating relevant and evergreen content. On average the shelf life of content on Pinterest is 4 months. Average life-span of posts on other platforms: Blog articles - 2 years, YouTube - 20 days, LinkedIn - 24 hrs, Instagram - 21 hrs, Facebook - 5 hrs, Twitter - 18 mins. Need I say more? 😉

One of the secrets of success on Pinterest is to pin content on a daily basis! The more consistent you are and the more you pin, the higher you will rank on Pinterest. In the early stages, it’s fine to start with around 5 a day or so. Pinning consistency is more important than quantity. You can do this manually or with a scheduling tool. My preferred Pinterest scheduling tool is Tailwind. Tailwind is an approved Pinterest Partner and, besides scheduling, also offers great analytics. You can try it out for free for 1 month (affiliate link).

Once you are comfortable using Pinterest to drive organic traffic, why not run a paid advertising campaign? Pinterest ads get pins in front of your audience much more quickly and in a highly targeted manner. They help you get to the top of search results much faster than organic pins. A paid campaign gives you access to additional keyword information that is not available for organic pins. It also gives you detailed information about your conversions.

Did you know that after running a paid advertising campaign on Pinterest, the pin(s) you promoted during that campaign will stay on Pinterest and continue to drive traffic organically?