Mastering Pinterest Marketing: A Guide For SMEs

When advertising a small-to-medium business online, a few social media platforms likely stand out — namely Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) — but one tactic that doesn’t have quite the same level of recognition is Pinterest marketing. 

Pinterest may be an underrated social media platform, but it is one that can, indeed, help improve your brand’s online visibility and drive sales; since its founding in 2009, the site has come a long way, garnering billions of impressions and views from a wide range of daily users. 

At Galactic Fed, we’re dedicated to finding the best marketing channels to help businesses like yours thrive, and with that in mind, we’re here to show you just how Pinterest is a not-so-hidden gem you can use to gain an edge over your competition in the otherwise oversaturated social media market.

What is Pinterest?

If you’re wondering how to do Pinterest marketing, you first have to learn what the app is all about. Calling itself “the app for inspiration,” Pinterest works to help its users find relevant ideas and bring them to life, and to that end, the platform is big on visuals. Some users don’t have anything specific in mind browsing Pinterest content (known as “Pins”) until something interesting catches their eye.

Therefore, as part of a business that plans to use Pinterest as a marketing tool, your job is to create compelling Pins that cause potential customers to stop their aimless scrolling. They should be equal parts visually appealing and educational, not just drawing users in but giving them something of value that they’ll save to their own Pinterest board and go on to share with others.

On the subject of sharing, you can share Pins and save content from other accounts on your own Pinterest board, allowing your business to engage with its customers and vice versa. By making your brand accessible to customers on Pinterest, you stand to build strong connections and generate more sales.

Who Uses Pinterest?

While marketing with Pinterest has largely flown under the radar compared to its social media counterparts, that doesn’t mean it isn’t popular; by the end of 2023, the platform amassed a total of 482 million monthly active users worldwide, the most popular demographic of which comprised women between 25 and 34. 

That said, many different types of people use the app, which means advertising on it is a great way to attract fresh new audiences. The United States has the most Pinterest users — great news for business owners in America looking to market on the platform — and Brazil’s user base is a close second.

Marketing Pinterest Ads for Businesses

On Pinterest, you can have a personal account as well as one for a business. The difference is that a business account includes access to features and tools like analytics, ads, and exclusive Pin formats. It’s free to sign up for a Pinterest business account, and the site even offers a no-cost guide to help you get started. 

That said, despite the exclusive access to such tools, a business account only grants you that access for free; in other words, a business account may give you the ability to make ads, for instance, but you’ll still have to pay them to promote your Pins. 

Nevertheless, doing so is relatively cost-effective, and it can help expose your brand to new customers within your target demographic. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by taking advantage of marketing with Pinterest.

Benefits of Advertising on Pinterest

No matter the industry you operate within, investing some time and effort into marketing with Pinterest is a worthwhile endeavor. Given the site’s relative popularity and unique yet compelling format, there are many benefits to advertising your brand there, including the following:

1. Boosting Brand Awareness

A Pinterest business account can help you boost your brand awareness, a term that refers to how familiar people are with your company’s image. Consider a brand like Apple; whether you love products like the iPhone or not, you likely have strong memories associated with the brand.

When you post consistently on Pinterest using eye-catching colors, logos, and fonts that best represent your brand, you help potential customers familiarize themselves with your products. In turn, strong brand awareness can enhance customer loyalty and build trust, recognition, and equity.

One example of a company that built significant brand awareness in a short time on Pinterest is Crumbl Cookies, which saw a surge from 7,000 to one million followers on the site in less than a year. Their brand is now more popular than ever, with over 250 bakeries (and counting!) spread throughout the U.S.

One of the factors that led to that remarkable rise to nationwide fame is that Crumbl makes use of branding that is not only very recognizable but also unique to them: pastel pink boxes with bold black fonts. These features help them connect with audiences and stick out in their mind among other cookie businesses; you can leave the same impression on your followers by weaving consistent branding into your Pinterest page.

2. Building a Loyal Community

Community builds brand trust and elicits a sense of belonging; when people see your business as a friendly face in an otherwise cold consumer market, they’ll be more likely to buy from you. Pinterest, in that sense, is a highly effective platform in that it allows you to engage with others and build a loyal client base as a result. 

The more authentic your Pins are and the more approachable your brand portrays itself to be, the better you’ll be at making connections and building an online community, which can go a long way in improving your bottom line. With a group of loyal followers reading and sharing your Pins, you’ll drive more clicks to your website and boost sales. 

3. Bringing Leads to Your Site

Ultimately, you want your marketing strategy to generate a consistent flow of visitors to your website that, in turn, increases your sales, and Pinterest can help you accomplish that. You can link to a page or specific products on your site within your Pins, driving more traffic. 

Say you sell kitchen goods, for instance. You can share a recipe on Pinterest featuring your brand’s pots and pans as the star of the show. If someone checks out your Pin and wants to learn more about the cookware used in the post, they can click on it to be redirected to a page where they can purchase the set right then and there. 

4. Creating Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is work that remains relevant for months or even years at a time. It can continuously generate clicks, seeing as it is non-seasonal and non-reliant on current trends, and because of that, you won’t have to put any additional work into it, save for the occasional minor update or tweak. 

Creating evergreen Pins will keep interested users engaged with your brand for months to come. For example, a rundown of your product features can be useful content that remains relevant for years at a time, and you can attract a loyal audience with the same post regardless of the trends that are currently coming and going. 

Other examples of evergreen content include the following:

• Case studies
• Glossaries
• Checklists
• Tutorials
• FAQs
• Guides

No matter how you choose to approach evergreen content, Pins don’t expire, so even if they’re a few months (or years) old, they can (and likely will) continue to generate clicks, shares, and traffic, positively impacting your brand with little to no additional work on your part.

5. Improving Your Online Visibility

You need to know where your website shows up on the page of search results when someone searches on Google for a product you sell, and if you want to be at the top, it’s crucial to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and your online visibility as a result, and Pinterest is the perfect social media platform to do that from.

Through the use of basic SEO principles, you can extend your business’s visibility on Pinterest, attract your target audience, and generate sales for your brand. Doing so also triggers search engines like Google to more thoroughly promote your business, as it’s clearly generating buzz on other large platforms. Soon, your brand will be at the top of both Pinterest and search engine result pages — a true win-win.

6. Driving Sales

According to Pinterest Business, 85% of weekly users in the United States made a purchase based on brand pins. You can ensure the same outcome by connecting your online storefront to your Pinterest business account and turning your product list into Pins; alongside that, you can embed your Pinterest account into your website, effectively driving users back and forth between the two.

How to Use Pinterest for Marketing

As is the case with all social media platforms, there are specific tricks and tips for Pinterest marketing that you can — and should — take advantage of to ensure you find and attract your ideal audience. 

If you’re looking to know how to market on Pinterest, these are the steps to take:

1. Create a Business Account

Creating a Pinterest business account is easy and free; all you have to do is head over to the site and follow its step-by-step guide.

With an account created, don’t be afraid to experiment, especially if you’ve never used it before! It doesn’t hurt to be creative and try different content strategies to see what works best; now is your time to test the content you already have and strategize what you want to write next.

2. Choose the Right Categories for Your Content

When marketing on Pinterest, you can categorize your Pins based on your industry and the kind of audience you’re trying to attract. Some of the most popular categories include the following:

• Home decor
• Entertainment
• Beauty
• Food and drinks
• Education
• DIY and crafts
• Art
• Fashion
• Gardening
• Event planning

Even if your products don’t fit into just one specific niche, you can select multiple categories to attract different audience demographics. From there, you can compare which categories generate the best results for your brand.

3. Design Eye-Catching Visuals

Using Pinterest for marketing is all about the visuals, as we mentioned earlier. Therefore, when users are scrolling through Pins, you want yours to stand out, so adopt a “show, don’t tell” approach to explaining what your brand is all about to potential customers.

It’s worth it to invest in quality graphic design and opt for customized images over unremarkable stock photos. Positioning your brand as unique can help separate your brand from competing content on the app.

4. Use the Right Keywords

Even though much of the act of advertising on Pinterest relies on visuals, that doesn’t mean keywords and other SEO components aren’t important. Once users click on your Pin, you want to offer valuable information that holds their attention; share your brand story to keep their attention and persuade them to convert.  

When you naturally incorporate relevant keywords throughout your profile, Pins, and boards, you improve your chances of organically appearing in the feeds of your target audience. 

5. Interact With Other Accounts

Interacting with accounts related to your industry can help you gain more exposure on Pinterest. If you engage with a popular user and they respond, their followers may check out your page.

That gives personality to your brand and humanizes it. It’s not just a random, quiet business sitting around waiting for people to find its products; it’s out there, interacting with others, showcasing its voice, and learning from other accounts along the way.

6. Share Your Pinterest Content on Multiple Platforms

Pinterest allows you to easily share your content to other social media networks as well. If you create a Pin covering your most recent blog post, for instance, you can share it on your business’s Facebook page. 

Sharing your Pinterest content on your other channels helps you grow your following; some of your audience may not even know that you have a Pinterest page until you promote it on your page, and they’ll make the leap over to follow you there as well.

The more followers you accumulate, the more Pinterest will promote your content, so your goal is to show the platform that your business is popular and that people are interested in what you have to post.

7. Track Your Efforts

You don’t want to keep posting aimlessly with no idea whether your Pins are generating the sales you want them to, so take advantage of the analytics feature offered by your Pinterest business account to accurately track things like:

• Organic, paid, and earned engagement on your Pins
• How people interact with your Pinterest content
• Your most popular Pins
• What topics your audience is most interested in

Finding the above information is like striking gold; if you see that your current strategy isn’t working, you can make adjustments in real-time based on what the analytics say, ensuring you won’t have to waste too much time, effort, or money on creating Pins that aren’t converting. 

Even if you see that your Pins are doing well, you can still use that information to your benefit. For instance, if you sell jewelry and find that Pins about your bracelets generate more traffic than those about your necklaces, you can focus on the former.

8. Be Consistent

Consistency is the key to success on social media platforms, and Pinterest is no exception. In general, social media algorithms promote accounts that post regularly, and consistent posting shows your audience that you’re dedicated to providing them with the quality content they likely followed you for in the first place. 

If you want to be a top-tier Pinterest marketing strategist, you should post four to ten times a day; just be careful not to post too much. Ultimately, quality trumps quantity, and consumers are intelligent; they can tell if the brands they follow aren’t genuine or are posting solely just to make a sale. It may take a little more time and planning in advance to create consistent, high-quality content, but it’ll be well worth the effort. 

9. Grow Your Followers Efficiently

You can grow your audience on Pinterest by manually searching for and adding specific people by name or other identifiers, like their Facebook account. However, that process can be extremely time-consuming; it’s much easier to grow your follower account in the following ways:

• Promoting your Pinterest across your other social networks
• Following accounts you think will follow you back
• Learning from your competitors 
• Using relevant keywords
• Using influencer marketing
• Paying extra for a Pinterest ads account

The more followers you have, the more engagement you can expect, and that will boost your SEO and drive sales through the platform in the process.

Small Business Pinterest Strategies

As a small business, you may feel like a little fish in a big pond, but the good news is that you can find great success on Pinterest so long as you use the right techniques. Here are just some of the strategies that can help get you started:

1. Share Your Brand’s Unique Story

People don’t want to follow a company on social media that’s just trying to sell to them, but your business’s unique story and perspective can add a touch of humanity to your brand. 

Look at Wendy’s, for example; the brand interacts with other companies on social media, often roasting them as a means of promoting their own offerings. You don’t have to go that far to make an impact on Pinterest, of course, but a little personality does go a long way. 

2. Be Relatable

Connecting with leads means being accessible and relatable to your target audience. As a smaller business, you likely can relate to most of your customers, and even then, don’t hesitate to put yourself in their shoes. Identify their pain points and address them accordingly. 

3. Use the Content You’re Already Creating

You don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel when creating content on Pinterest. If you’re already creating blog posts for your website, you can share your work on Pinterest, which won’t just boost your efficiency and save you time but also enhance your online visibility and attract more high-quality leads.

That said, not every blog topic will translate well to Pinterest, so take the time to look into the backend of your web hosting site to see which blogs received the most reads in the past. Chances are that they’ll perform well on Pinterest, and all you’ll have to do is copy and paste the information. 

4. Showcase Your Knowledge

You’re an expert in your industry, so don’t be afraid to showcase your knowledge and experience in your niche. When you present yourself as an authority in your field, you show that your brand is trustworthy. Of course, you want to be careful not to come off too pretentious, though. It’s a delicate balance, but it’s where you can look to other businesses to see how they present their Pins. 

5. Learn From Your Competitors

You’ll likely encounter competitors while you browse through Pinterest, given its expansive reach, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can learn a lot from competitors by viewing their content and seeing what’s generating views and shares. Additionally, seeing the kind of content your audience Pins, as well as the brands they interact with, can give you crucial insight into what your target demographic is like.

Pinterest Marketing: A Powerful Tool Worth Mastering

As a small or medium-sized business, it’s easy to feel like your marketing messages are getting lost in the noise, and that’s why it’s crucial to take advantage of any effective advertising tools at your disposal. 

All of the above Pinterest marketing tips work by helping you attract and build a community of loyal customers; the more effort you put into your pins, the better results you can expect for your brand.

If you’re looking for help with social media marketing, including marketing on Pinterest, consider partnering with a reputable agency like Galactic Fed. We have plenty of resources available to help you get the most out of your Pinterest marketing and take your sales to new heights in the process.