Put a Pin In It! How Pinterest Can Level Up Your Social Media Game
If you’ve ever planned a wedding, redecorated a room, or even searched online for new recipes there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Pinterest. This aesthetics-driven platform is designed to help you create digital mood boards, find and organize ideas, and spark inspiration. It’s a phenomenal app for discovery, without the social angle of other platforms, such as Instagram or TikTok. And while it’s always fun to fall down a Pinterest rabbit hole, what if we told you there was more to this seemingly simple platform?
Pinterest has more than 430 million users. But unlike other apps with more, Pinterest users are almost always shopping! In one survey, 83% of Pinterest users said they made a purchase based off of branded content from Pinterest. This is a big difference from apps like Instagram, where only 44% of active users use the app to shop on a weekly basis. This makes Pinterest a powerful tool for driving e-commerce sales and raising awareness of your product, but it can go even further than that, benefiting almost any kind of business.
In this guide, we’re breaking down the world of Pinterest, explaining how each Pin could actually be driving more traffic to your brand, increasing your sales, and helping your business thrive. So without further ado, let’s put a Pin in it!
1. Raise Your Profile with Pins
The main feature of Pinterest is, of course, the Pins. A Pin is essentially a bookmark you put on the content you like. Users can pin images, videos, or products, adding them to various boards, which help organize pins by type, aesthetic, or anything else. Naturally, brands hopping onto Pinterest will be more successful if they can get people to Pin their content—so what does it take to make an engaging, attention-grabbing Pin?
The first step is to make it eye-catching. With a near-infinite amount of content on Pinterest, it's vital that yours stands out from the crowd. We suggest using your brand’s existing style, such as your brand colours, fonts, and images, as a starting point. But don’t be afraid to tweak these visual assets according to the data you get from posting on Pinterest. If certain changes (like increasing text or image size, for instance) seem to get better engagement, it might be best to shift your strategy.
Besides the aesthetics of your Pin, you should also be focusing on optimization. This means using the right keywords and hashtags in your description, along with a detailed (but concise) breakdown of what your content is all about. Focusing on optimizing for visibility will help your Pins reach a more relevant audience, ensuring it finds the people most likely to be interested.
2. Make Pinterest Your Starting Point
Pinterest can be a great gateway for people to learn more about your brand. By putting products and aesthetics first, Pinterest users can discover your company by the work you do first. However, many people will still want to learn more about you before making a purchase.
Pinterest makes it easy to link your Pins to your website’s landing pages or blog posts, helping to bring them into your sales funnel and hopefully convert a sale. Even if they don’t purchase right away, it gives people an opportunity to familiarize themselves with your brand and what you do, which is never a bad thing. When creating Pins to get clicks, make sure you craft compelling, enticing calls to action. Think about having a sale or other promotion, or a special gift for the first 100 purchases. Any call to action that encourages people to move quickly will help you drive more traffic and boost your brand.
3. Keep Aesthetics in Mind
Unlike most other platforms, Pinterest is strongly geared towards appearance and aesthetic. That’s why it’s so important to create a strong visual brand identity that, you guessed it, actually looks good! Choose colours, fonts, and visuals that make sense with your brand, and stay consistent. By crafting and maintaining a cohesive, aesthetically pleasing look across your Pinterest boards, profile, and Pins, you’ll draw more people in.
Another great way to reinforce your brand’s aesthetic is with brand-specific boards. Make Pinterest a go-to resource for people who want to learn all about what you have to offer with boards for your products, services, or campaigns, making sure each one fits visually with the next.
4. Use Pinterest Ads
In a recent article on the BNL blog, we talked about the increasing costs of paid social ads on the top platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook. If you’re tired of paying top dollar for targeted ads on these apps, you’ll be glad to hear that Pinterest is a lower-cost option that could be just as effective!
Pinterest offers a few ways to do ads, including Promoted Pins and Shopping Ads. These are both great ways to get more eyes on your content, though one might make more sense than the other depending on your needs. If you’re a service-based company, Shopping Ads won’t be as useful as they are for an e-commerce brand, for example.
Whichever ad method you use, take your time to find and target the right audience. Pinterest offers in-depth targeting options, helping you narrow down things like demographics, interests, and search keywords to help you reach the right people. Of course, it takes a solid understanding of your audience to make use of these tools, so make sure you do plenty of competitor research to understand what works and what doesn’t.
After you’ve chosen your ad type and target audience, it’s time to launch your campaign. This means setting your budget, formatting your ads, and tracking performance as you go so you can make those essential tweaks as needed. One of the most important things to remember? Stay flexible—often, what you expect to work and what actually works are a little different (or sometimes a lot different).
While Pinterest Paid Ads may not always drive direct conversions, they excel at driving traffic to your website. This increased traffic not only introduces more people to your brand but also plays a vital role in retargeting campaigns. By capturing visitors’ interest through Pinterest, you can set the stage for future interactions and conversions with well-placed retargeting ads on other platforms. This multi-touch approach makes Pinterest an invaluable piece of a comprehensive paid strategy.
By staying nimble and prepared to make changes as you go, you’ll maximize the ROI of paid Pinterest ads and see more results for your business. If you’re ready to explore the power of Pinterest ads, let’s chat—we’d love to help you integrate them into your marketing strategy!
5. Give It Away Now!
Everybody loves free stuff, and they’re willing to promote your brand a little to get it!
Pinterest is one of the better platforms on which to run a contest or giveaway on, and the increased buzz your brand will get can make a big difference for your bottom line. Before you start, make sure you’re familiar with Pinterest’s rules about contests, as they’re a little different from what you might be used to. Once you’ve read up on the details, set up your content however you choose. You might decide to do a Pin to Win contest, which is the simplest type of contest. Users just Pin one or more images from a selection you provide, and then simply select one person at random. There are other options too, such as having people create a Pinterest board to enter, or running a user-generated content contest.
We could do a whole post just on running social media contests (maybe we should!), but just know that this strategy can work wonders for pushing your brand out to more people. However you decide to run your contest, make sure it prioritizes user engagement (Pins, comments, etc.) to increase interaction, get new followers, and generally create buzz and excitement around your brand.
Making Pinterest Work for You
Whether it’s through contests, branded Pins, or calls to action, Pinterest can be a surprisingly powerful part of a social media toolkit. As more conventional social platforms get noisier and noisier, it’s never a bad idea to diversify your presence and look into alternatives that let you get more of the spotlight.
Humans are a visual species, and Pinterest lets you tap into that by putting aesthetics at the forefront. Refining your brand visuals and presenting them through Pinterest can work wonders for your brand, helping you drive traffic, raise awareness, and elevate your brand. Of course, you’ll need to dedicate time to creating content for Pinterest, keeping your brand identity cohesive, and checking analytics regularly to change course when needed.
At BNL Media Consulting, we love Pinterest because it’s not just a traffic driver—it’s a strategic tool for supporting our SEO goals. While Pinterest visitors may not always convert into leads immediately, the platform consistently brings more people to our site, increasing visibility and reinforcing our brand authority. This steady influx of visitors strengthens our online presence and supports our broader marketing objectives, helping us reach more people in meaningful ways.
As your resident social media unicorns, we’ve come to love Pinterest as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. We’ve worked with countless clients to break onto the Pinterest scene, helping them develop new ways to reach their audience and do what they do best. If you’re looking for help in bringing your brand to Pinterest, staying up to date with trends, and making the right moves for growth, we’re here to help. Drop us a line today and discover a whole new side of your social media strategy!
