9 tips for using Pinterest to Market your Business

Is Pinterest something you’ve been considering for your marketing strategy? If your business is in an industry that would jive well with Pinterest (think anything visual - weddings, event planning, interior design, flowers, decor, clothing, design, photography, etc, etc) Pinterest may be a great place for you to be.

Pinterest is always evolving to offer new features to its platform. That’s why it’s so important to examine these changes and work to improve your Pinterest strategy.

So - here are some tricks for how to use Pinterest for your marketing in 2021.

1. Video Pins.

One of the newer features of Pinterest is Video Pins. I don’t need to tell you how popular video has become in recent years for social media. From Youtube to Instagram to Tik Tok and Facebook, video is everywhere.

Film and upload your own video or create one from scratch with video editing apps and tools. Canva is a great tool for creating video pins.

Here are some of the ways you can create video pins with Canva:

• upload a video to Canva and add it to your pin the same way you would add a photo (if you’re a food blogger you can film a video of the food you made or a part of the process, if you’re a DIY blogger you can film the finished product, etc.)

• or use one of the videos that Canva has in its library

• turn your image pins into a video pin with animations (to do that click on the “animate” button in the top left corner and pick one of the animation options. Then just save your pin as “mp4”)

• turn your image pin into a video pin by adding stickers (go to elements > stickers)

Canva has lots of different fonts, images, videos, animations, stickers you can use to create your pins. It’s the perfect tool for creating your pins (and other graphics for your blog and social media).

Make sure with your video pins that you don’t give everything away in your video. The point of a pin is to get people to click through to your website, so a video pin should be more of a teaser than a complete video someone watches in the preview. Use video pins to draw people's attention so that they’ll click to find out more.

For example, if you’re a food blogger, don’t make a video where you show all the steps and all the ingredients. If you do that, people won’t have a reason to click through to your post. Make a video just showing the finished product (e.g. how you’re pouring it into a glass and assembling it, or how you’re cutting it) or a part of the process. Never show the whole thing.

No matter what your niche is you can create video pins. Even doing something as simple as adding an animated arrow creates a “video” pin.

→ Pinterest prioritizes video pins and pushes them in front of the people. That’s why it’s a good idea to try them out.

But you don’t “have to” create video pins if you don’t want to. If you prefer static pins and if they perform better then stick to them.

Different things work for different accounts and audiences. That’s why you need to try different things and stick to the ones that work for you.

2. Pinterest Visual Search

Pinterest is very smart and uses so many different things to figure out what a pin is about. There’s keywords, visual search, hashtags and so much more!

That’s why the actual photo you use is SO important. Be sure that the photo you use and the keywords and hashtags you use are related, otherwise you may confuse where to put the pin or what it’s about, making it harder for people to find.

For example: If you want to promote a pancake recipe choose a photo of pancakes and add relevant keywords and hashtags.

3. Use Hashtags On Pinterest

Hashtags are another tool for Pinterest to determine what your pin is about so the algorithm can understand your pin better. They’re also very helpful for Pinterest users who can search for hashtags.

How to use hashtags on Pinterest:

• use 2-4 relevant hashtags

• don’t use too broad hashtags, instead, find some specific ones

• don’t use too many hashtags and be spammy

4. Use Keywords Correctly

Now let’s talk about keywords.

We all know by now that keywords are very important and that you need to use them on your profile and your pins but the way you use them is incredibly important.

Do not do keyword stuffing! Pinterest doesn’t like that.

For your pin description, pick a few keywords that best describe your pin and write 1-3 sentences around them.

Remember, you’re writing your pin description for users, not Pinterest.

Think of writing your pin description as if you are texting a friend and telling them what your post is about.

I like to start my description with a question as that’s a great way to grab people’s attention AND include a keyword right at the beginning.

So if you’re struggling with writing your pin descriptions and don’t know how to start, try asking a question.

But keywords aren’t only for your pin descriptions.

It’s important to use them everywhere on your profile, not just on the pin itself.

5. Create Fresh Pins Often

Creating fresh pins often and maintaining your presence on Pinterest is very important. Pinterest loves fresh pins and will reward you for this. Regularly create fresh pins for your posts and schedule them to your best performing boards and then let it be.

For your best performing posts create fresh pins weekly to keep the traffic coming!

6. Repin Less

Pinterest wants its users to create fresh pins. They want to see new, fresh, content on the platform. And that means they want to see less of the old content. By “old content” I’m talking about pins that are already on Pinterest. Those are the pins that Pinterest already “knows” and has seen many times before.

7. Pin To Most Relevant Boards

Another important thing to do is make sure you’re pinning your pins to the most relevant boards only. What does that mean? It means that you shouldn’t save a pin to every board on your account that is somewhat related. Instead, choose 2-5 boards that are the most relevant to that pin and only save it to those boards.

Pinterest loves fresh pins. If you pin the same pin to 15 different boards it’s not a new pin anymore. A pin is considered fresh only the first time you share it on Pinterest. Saving your pins to boards that are most relevant to it is also important for SEO. It helps Pinterest to better understand what that board is about.

For some pins you’ll have 1-2 boards that are most relevant while for others you might have 6 and that’s okay. But you’ll see a lot better results from saving a pin to 2 really good and relevant boards than saving it to 10 that aren’t.

8. Clean Up Your Pinterest Boards

Go through your Pinterest boards and see which ones perform great and which ones don’t bring any value. You can also click on each board to see all the pins you’ve added to that board and see how many repins each pin got.

If there are any boards you haven’t pinned to in a long time or that don’t fit your niche anymore, archive those as well. Now that you’ve gotten rid of those boards, go and create some new boards!

9. Optimize Your Pins For Mobile

The majority of Pinterest users are on mobile, and this is incredibly important to keep in mind. It means that most of the people who see your pins are looking at them on their phones, not on desktop. That’s why it’s so important that your pins look good on mobile. Make sure your font size is big enough, that the important words stand out. If you use Canva to make your Pinterest graphics you can download their app and check how your graphic looks on your phone while you’re editing it. I always have my phone next to me while creating pins and go back and forth to make sure it looks good on my phone.

And there you have it. 9 tips for using Pinterest to Market your Business!