What is Pinterest marketing, and how can it help me grow my small business? This is the question that I am going to be covering today.

I am going to explain how a Pinterest marketing strategy can benefit your small business this year and every year moving forward.

There are three things that you need to know, and they’re exactly what I would tell my friends about their own Pinterest Marketing Strategy.

1. Pinterest isn’t a sloppy seconds platform
2. Before you get started, you need to find your ICA on Pinterest
3. Optimize your profile before getting started

Key #1 – Pinterest isn’t a sloppy seconds platform

Pinterest doesn’t  want to be an afterthought in your marketing strategy. In fact, their users are not using this platform for sloppy seconds.

They use it as the first line of defense when looking for inspiration, planning life events, and even something as simple as looking for something to cook for dinner tonight.

They are going to Pinterest first. Why?  Because Pinterest is, in fact, a search engine. Did you know….

📌 Pinterest has 463 million active users

Not as much as Facebook, but nothing to shake a stick at.

📌 97% of Pinterest searches are unbranded

That means people aren’t going to Pinterest and looking for specific brands like Nike shoes.  They are going to this platform and searching for sportswear, or cute athletic outfits, and things like that.

📌 Pinners spend 80% more in retail than their non-Pinterest using counterparts

So little plug for if you have a brick and mortar store, or even an e-commerce site.  Your Pinterest audience is looking for places to shop!

📌 Pinterest users are the decision-makers in their households

Would it change your business if you were able to get in front of decision-makers in households? How much of a difference would it make in your business if you were to get right in front of the person specifically searching for items to purchase, or inspiration for their home or business?

Let’s move on to some tactics now.

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Key #2 – Before you get started, you need to find your ICA on the platform

ICA stands for your ideal client avatar. That is, the exact representation of a single person in your audience that your products and services are the best fit for.

Who is your ICA, and how to find them?

Before you get started on Pinterest (before you publish a pin or even develop a Canva template for your brand), you need to think through who your ideal client or customer is.

You need to consider how they are using Pinterest to fulfill their needs, which your business or service can solve.

There are a couple of different ways that you can do this. I teach this method quite often on Clubhouse and YouTube.

• Take a piece of paper and make a line right down the middle. On the left side, write down all the questions that you are asked regularly. They can also be the most popular questions that you get asked.
• On the right side of the line, write down all the products and services that you sell in your business.  If you are a content creator and don’t have any products or services, you can use affiliate products or sponsorships. If you are an influencer, then it is the same deal. Who is paying you for sponsorships? Write down those things as it relates to the questions that you get asked.

This process is as relevant for a make-up artist or lifestyle influencer as it is for someone selling leather handbags.

So for the tactical piece of this, take a look at this example.

You are going to use the search bar on your computer. Open another window while you’re reading this now, and I walk you through this process.

Or follow along in the video below of my computer screen to see exactly what I mean.

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The example I’m going to use is for a resume writing coach. I was inspired by someone in my Clubhouse room recently, so I am using her example.

So if I were her, on the left-hand side of my paper, I would write down the questions that get asked most often, and that is:  How to write a resume that stands out?

Then on the right side of my paper, I would write down:

• Resume and CV writing services
• Resume and CV review and editing services
• Interview coaching services, etc.

So I have my services and the burning question that people ask.

For the service piece, we are just going to plug it into the search bar on Pinterest.  We are going to type ‘how to write a resume’ and search.  Ignore what’s going to show up in the autofill suggestions for now.

Look at the search results on the screen. You will find that there are plenty of results for how to write a resume. There are many people creating pins on skills, using resume power verbs, formatting, and any other thing you can think up on resume writing is on there.

That’s the first thing I want you to pay attention to.

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Use your keyword search bar

The second thing I want you to pay attention to when finding your ICA on Pinterest is to put your cursor in the search bar again, and hit the space key after your search terms from before.

Now look in the auto-fill. What are people looking for related to the term you put in the box?  These are all kinds of other suggested words and phrases that people are looking for related to resume writing tips. Such as:

• resume writing for teens,
• no experience,
• free templates,
• for your first job,
• profile

So that’s clue number two about how your ICA is looking for you on Pinterest.  Pretend as if you’re them, sitting in their seat, and doing this exact search.

Now let’s take it to the flip side of the paper, the services side, and search for those things.

When we type “how to write a resume” in the search bar, to me, that could be considered a product or service-based keyword. So, you can use that keyword or phrase to promote your products and services.

If we were to type “resume writing services” in the search bar, you could see that it is the third option being suggested. If I click that and just look at the search results, I will see several Pinterest images from people who write resumes for others as a service. You can actually click through and hire them to write your resume.

As you are developing your profile, this is a part of the exercise you are going to need to go through.  Not only to find out what boards you will want to create on your profile, but also what keywords you want to use in those boards, titles, descriptions and even in your pins.

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Other vital parts of your Pinterest marketing strategy

There are other essential pieces of Pinterest marketing strategy that you are going to need to think about.

Now let’s set you up for success with optimizing your profile at the beginning your Pinterest Marketing Strategy.

Now that we have talked about our mindset around a Pinterest Marketing Strategy, let’s talk about what you need to do before anything else:  start with your optimizing profile.

These are many things that you need to do before even getting to your optimized profile. These include creating your Pinterest account and getting it connected to your store or website.

Key #3 Creating Your Pinterest Foundations

There are other essential pieces of Pinterest marketing strategy that you are going to need to think about. Let’s run through them quickly.

• Optimized Profile
• Keyword Strategy – Your keyword strategy is going to feed into everything that you do on this platform.
• Image Strategy – You need to have a developed image strategy and publish pins consistently.
• Scheduling Workflow – This is how you are consistently going to show up on Pinterest. You don’t need to be on here every day because you can batch your work.
• Analytics – You need to be looking at your analytics to know what’s working and what’s not and continue to feed the cycle.

Optimize Your Profile

Before you ever get started, what do you need to do to have an optimized profile?

Make sure your profile account is also a business account. You need to be polishing your profile because this is what people will see when they look you up on Pinterest.

When they go to pinterest.com/heatherfarrisco, they see my profile, domain, business name, and bio. Those are the first few things that you want to make sure that you have present.

You need to go through everything in your settings, which is primarily claiming your domain, and then setting up your display name. Your display name is not just your actual name; you can actually put a search term in there.

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Business Terms and Topics

If you see here on my profile, I have the term content marketing strategy in there.  (Ironically that’s because I can’t put Pinterest Strategy in there.)  Your display name can actually have a keyword t or two that you want to rank for as well.

You next need to fill out your bio more thoroughly. Tell people who you are and what you do for them, even give them a call to action or some sort of transformation that will happen as a result of them finding you.

I help small businesses with Pinterest marketing strategy, create and develop traffic growth using Pinterest. So, that’s a quick bio that gets to the point and is clear about what your profile can provide for the viewer.

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Linking Other Channels

I mentioned claiming your YouTube domain briefly earlier. You are actually going to go ahead and claim your online store if you have one too. Shopify is the easiest integration with Pinterest for a store, but you can also use eCommerce; they have a plugin available that you can purchase. You can also claim your Etsy store.

Now is also the time to claim your social channels if you want to connect them.  You’ll be able to see the analytics for that side of Pinterest and how your social channels work together if you do. You can connect to Instagram, so that and any other channels you have just connect them all.

Pinterest Boards

So now that we have an optimized profile, next is developing your boards around the topics you talk about in your business and the products that you sell. You may have five or so buckets of content that you talk about in your business.

I have:

• Organic Strategy
• Paid Strategy
• Automation
• Graphic Design
• Content Strategy

I am going to create boards for each of these five. Then I will consider the other related things people are looking for that I can also talk about based on these.

So I have a board about Pinterest SEO, but I also have a board about Idea Pins, and I have a board about Pinterest Strategy. So I have three boards about Pinterest Marketing, and I have one about Pinterest Ads. Each one is inherently different from the next one but very relevant, and they fit together.

Similarly fill our your board descriptions like you have your profile bio, but more geared around that specific content topic of the specific board.

Create a content pinning strategy

The next piece in your Pinterest marketing strategy is the Pinterest Image Plan or Pinterest Content Plan for the platform. You need to audit your content. If you are an e-commerce seller and don’t feel like you have blog content, your content will be your shop item, what you are selling, and any blog content related to your shop, if you have it.

FOR EXAMPLE:  I used to work with a beauty seller, and she also created beauty products. They had blog content for very specific products related to skincare, on top of selling skincare products. So we had blog content and product content for this client.

Take a look at what you have in your business and if you need to create a board or pin for it.  This is literally anything you can share with your audience, whether it be

• information and images about a physical product,
• or blogs,
• interviews, and
• tidbits to go along with your products.

As I get started with a strategy for Pinterest business clients, I typically don’t create all my boards upfront. I create the foundation of primary topics based around their products and services to start, then if I’ll add more on as I go. This strategy makes it a little less overwhelming and streamlined.

Once we have our image plan in place, or what we know to create images for, we can start doing some additional keyword research to find relevant content that we could create as a result of our search.

Once we have that content plan in place, we will start looking for all the different tools available to us and how we can create or implement that content plan on Pinterest.

Now you have your boards, you have your profile developed, and you have your content plan. Say I have these ten pieces of content, or these ten shop items that I need to create pins for. Now I am going to look at the types of content that I can create for Pinterest and figure out which one will be the best fit.

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Use all of the tools available to you

Using all the tools you have on Pinterest can give you quite a variety of content on this Platform. Pinterest gives us all sorts of tools.

1. Video Pins

Video pins are a way that we can bring awareness to our followers natively on the platform. Video pins are different than our video pins. You cannot put a link on them to link off the platform, but there are exceptions.

We do have the ability to link our affiliate links on video pins. It’s a product tagging sticker, and we can link affiliate links. If you are an e-commerce shopper seller, you can link your Shopify or your e-commerce products to your video pins. You can also just link directly to your affiliate link.

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2. Static Pins

I am lumping two different types of pins in what I call static. One of them is your still images and the other one is your video pins.

So, in the static category, you can actually put an external link on these and link to your domain directly.

3. Titles, descriptions, alt text

This is all in the process of building a pin. It goes back to the types of pins we create, but not many people are very strategic with their pin titles or descriptions. They just kind of put whatever they want to in there without thinking about how someone would find that item and interact with it.

Use your pin titles and the description box to your advantage because they are a great place to optimize your pins with keywords and help people find them more easily.

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4. Boards

A lot of people are not very strategic with the way they create their boards. They are not strategic with Pinterest at all, which is why many people hire my company to implement strategy for them. They create boards like Christmas cookies, and they never actually stop to think about why they need that board and how people will find it.

You can even create boards on topics that are not necessarily something you do cover in your content strategy or sell, but it’s related enough to hook in the right viewer.

“Being strategic with your boards on Pinterest will be to your benefit.”

Let’s use the resume writing coach example. A resume writing coach may not talk about or provide services for job interview tips, but she can still create a board for job interview tips, and people can find that on Pinterest.

When they see that board, they can click over to her profile, and then the whole thing has come full circle. They were searching for job interview tips, and they found this board about job interview tips. They wanted to know what else the creator put on their platform, and now they have found someone to write their next resume. Or maybe tweak and edit their existing resume and make it even better.

So you can see where being strategic with your boards on Pinterest will be to your benefit.

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Ignore people who tell you about outdated Pinterest strategies

This is the last thing I want to mention:  I want you to put on your blinders and not pay attention to people telling you about outdated Pinterest strategies.

Ignore people teaching these things:

• that monthly viewers are the only metric you should care about
• that viral pins are going to “solve all your problems on the platform”

I want you to ignore the people who are promising you big results and flashy numbers. Chances are they are not getting those results, or if they are getting those results, they are not actually converting to sales, which is what we ultimately want.

We want sales, more leads, and more traffic. So monthly viewers are not necessarily going to get you the traffic that you want. Yes, we need people to see our content, but we ultimately have to convert them so they click through.

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Final Thoughts

Being successful on Pinterest isn’t just about creating pins for your content because it’s another platform you want to be on. It is also not just pinning when you feel like it and hope it works, that’s like throwing a dart at your target with your eyes closed.

You need to create and follow an effective strategy to be successful on Pinterest.

Now, if you could accelerate your Pinterest Marketing strategy by three, six, or nine months, would that be worth it for you? 

Pin Profit Academy is a paid community membership group that I have developed to get you the results you want with your Pinterest marketing strategy. It’s years and years of my Pinterest marketing strategy results and methods all put into one neat little box.

Inside the community, there is so much value that is very organized and strategic in the way that I deliver it holding your hand every step of the way. You get my entire Pinterest Strategy Course, courses about automation (with Tailwind) and courses about using Canva.

Pin Profit Academy

DOUBLE YOUR TRAFFIC & SALES WITHOUT SPENDING ANOTHER MINUTE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

I create templates for our members every month that are brand new so that you can just cut and paste with your unique brand, saving so much design time.

Being part of this community will

• accelerate your growth and implementation process on Pinterest by three months,
• give you the benefit of having one-on-one support,
• provide a community of like-minded peers that are doing the same thing as you.

Would your business and brand benefit from something like that?

I would like to invite you to www.pinprofitacademy.com. This is the page where you can go and learn all about my membership group, all about the community, and what you would get if you were to join for as little as $37 per month.

Besides what I’ve already listed above, you get access to ME. If you were to hire me hourly, my rate is $500 an hour. But in Pin Profit Academy, my time is included with your membership. 

I hope you have found a lot of value in this post. Even if you don’t join the community, you can still watch all of my free content on YouTube.

In the meantime, if you want more Pinterest marketing tips, you can head to my Pinterest for beginners videos on YouTube.

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