In today’s post, we’re going to cover best practices for how to use the new Tailwind integration with Canva batch editing for fast pin creation and scheduling. Tailwind recently released a new feature where they have integrated their tool into Canva making this process faster and more fun! If you have been wanting to better streamline your organic Pinterest marketing strategy, you’re in the right place, just follow this step-by-step guide. 

In a little bit I’m going to walk you through the process that I’ve been using with this to spend about an hour a week creating roughly 30 pins. Now, in today’s example, I’m working with 22 URLs because that’s all the time I had to do for this tutorial. Just know that the more URLs you want to use, that’s fine. 

You can do however many you want with the Canva Bulk Create to my knowledge. But I do suggest working in smaller batches because that’s how you’re going to have more control over the end product in a speedier way.

Setting up your Canva template

Before we can use the Tailwind integration with Canva, the design has to be made. First thing, choose a pin template that will work for all of the pins you’ll be making in a batch. That’s the only way Bulk Create will work is by duplication of the same template. Apply that template to a blank canvas in Canva. 

If this is your first time and you don’t have a ready-made template you’re going to:

1. Click ‘Create’ in the upper left corner of Canva.
2. Select/search for ‘Pinterest pin’ and select it.
3. Click ‘Design’ in the left menu. 
4. Navigate to ‘Templates’ that will pop up in the secondary left menu.
5. Choose which template you want to apply to your single pin design. 

In mine, for this example, I wanted an image frame, and two blocks of text. 

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Preparing your pin copy in a Canva sheet

Now when you are ready, you are going to then create your pin copy based on the URLs that you want to create pins for. Have it all in a spreadsheet in advance. You can see I already have the titles, the pin text overlay, and the pin description already prepared here.

You will want to make sure that all of this is either imported into a spreadsheet like Google Sheets, Excel, or inside of Canva Sheets. I brought my sheet into Canva for an easier bulk CSV file import. This is what I recommend. 

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Uploading and importing design images in Canva

But before we get going, you will want to make sure that your imagery is also ready to go inside of Canva. I use a lot of brand photography and stock photography when needed, so I have all of that organized really nicely inside of my Canva folders. 

I personally prefer to do a bulk creation where I insert the imagery later, not through the spreadsheet. However, you can insert an image inside the sheet and then import it, but I want to show you what this is likely going to look like. 

I tested this through Google Sheets and compared it to a sheet directly inside of Canva. I inserted the image into a Google Sheet, brought it into Canva Sheets, and I created a pin image and it was very low quality.

Then I created the same exact sheet and inserted an image from inside of Canva. In fact, it was from my photos already uploaded from my brand folders. Then I created an image using Bulk Create and the quality is much better. You can see the comparison.

So just know that it’s better if you go ahead and upload all of that imagery to Canva before you get started. Insert those images into the Canva sheet where they go into the row and then do the Bulk Create steps.

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Connecting your pin data to your template

Now that you’ll have all your data and images ready to go, from your template design, you are going to go to ‘Apps’, and then go to ‘Bulk Create’. Bulk Create is usually down in the ‘More’ section in the left menu, but you can search for it and it will show up too.

Next you have a data source selection. You can choose from Google Sheets, Canva Sheets, and you can upload the data manually, which pops up a Canva sheet and you fill it out right there. So a few different ways to get your data with your pins.

You can enter the data manually is what I meant to say. And you can upload the data from your computer. We’re going to do the Canva sheets because I had this already imported into the tool. Select your data file and it’s going to bring that data in.

Now we need to tell Canva where to connect our data to our template. So from the data columns on the left, click your title and subtitles (however you’ve designed your sheet and template) and connect them. They’ll turn purple and highlight each other between the list and your template images. and it’s going to turn purple over here. Then go to your next box and connect the second one.

After you click ‘Continue’, it will display a list of the title for all your pins from your data sheet, it’s going to say ‘Generate’ however many designs you decided to do. If you check ‘Select all’ it will include your entire sheet. But you can remove of that you don’t want to make if you wish. Then click ‘Generate Designs’ and it will go to work with fast content creation.

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Generating and editing your bulk set of pins

Once the Bulk Create does its job, you’ll see a little black bar at the top. Canva creates all the bulk designs into a new project. When you see that, click ‘View Design’ and it will open a new window. 

Now, all you need to do is go in and start tweaking around and editing just slightly. This is why I don’t really mind going in after and adding my photos manually from Canva. I already have everything uploaded anyway, and I’m going to have to go in and tweak the text boxes regardless. 

So never just download all the designs now without tweaking and looking at every one. Odds are, everything will need some tweaking. 

Big help you have videos in your designs to make video pins

If you have some videos you’ve inserted into your designs, that’s great, but I have a tip that will make this easier with using the Tailwind exporting integration. You’re going to need to know which ones are videos and which ones are standard imagery. 

Move all your video pins to the end of your whole bulk design just by dragging and dropping them while viewing them all at once. Then take note on which page numbers are the videos. So for mine, it’s images 19 to 22. This is going to make exporting to Tailwind so much easier and I’ll show you why next.

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Using the Tailwind integration with Canva to export designs

Once you have all of your edits completed on your Pinterest template, now you will want to export these using the Tailwind integration with Canva. If you don’t have the Tailwind toolextension in your left-hand Canva menu already, just go to ‘Apps’ to search for it. 

You need to be logged into your Tailwind account in your web browser. There’s no extra integration or logging in of anything. Because I only want the images, and not the video pins exported for now, I selected only 1-18 so they’ll come across all at once. Then you’re just going to click “share to Tailwind.”

Because most likely all your details are different for every pin, you can leave the pin details empty and edit them inside of Tailwind. But we’re going to click ‘Share to Tailwind’ and we’ll do all of the edits on the other side.

Then we’re going to repeat the process for the videos, but select the file type as MP4 videos for the 19 to 22 files. That way they’re sent to Tailwind in the correct file type. 

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Optimizing the pin details in Tailwind

Remember, we already prepped all of our pin copy and descriptions prior to even getting to Tailwind. So, you’ll be able to just plug and play all of that inside of your drafts editor. I’ll show you what that looks like.

Inside of your Tailwind pin scheduler you’ll find all of your drafts. Next you just have to assign a description, the title, the URL, and add a board. Then you can add those to your schedule. Now, you can also do some bulk generation for your pin descriptions with Ghostwriter, you could definitely do that as well.

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Notes on scheduling and time it takes

Once you hit schedule on all of those pins and they go into the queue, then you drag around and reorganize the pins in your scheduler how you like. I really aim for about three pins per day for Tailwind. This has been working quite well on top of what my team is creating and on top of what my content manager creates when she writes my blog posts. 

This entire process for these 22 URLs took me about 40 minutes, and that included: 

• the time it took to prep the URLs
• using my pinbot to generate pin copy
• slightly tweak that copy
• plug that into Canva sheets with you
• all of the process here with you in this post 
• tweaking the final templates that came from Canva
• then exporting those to Tailwind 
• putting the copy in and scheduling

All in all, I would say that’s pretty decent time for bulk creation and schedule. I could definitely multiply that out and save even more time over time doing more pins for later, up to scheduling out a whole month in just a few hours. Everyone should be applying the same or something similar with their Pinterest marketing automation.

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Bonus tips on saving time with the Tailwind integration with Canva

On top of using the Tailwind integration with Canva, if you utilize some AI it further speeds up your creation time. If you’re not using AI or a scheduling tool, then you’re probably spending more time on your pin copy and that’s okay. If you do want to write your own copy and not use AI tools, that’s totally fair, but I recommend it for saving time and that’s why I created the Pin Bot. 

I would say have a keyword bank as well as a description title bank where you can take previous pieces of copy, and you can speed your process along by having a library of your own work to pull from. This is a really easy way that you can speed the process up. 

As a Pinterest manager, I do this frequently, and I suggest it to save lots of creation time especially if you run a Pinterest marketing agency. It is totally fine to reuse your title and description. Pinterest is looking at the image when it’s looking to determine whether it’s a fresh pin or not.

See you next time!

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