Pinterest Marketing Guide

Pinterest is a place to discover ideas for all your interests hand-picked by people like you. It is a web and mobile-based application that works as a photo-sharing company. It requires users to register and create an account for themselves to use the features offered by Pinterest. Pinterest is a place for good stuff, things that you want to discover and save for later.

And it all starts with a Pin.

A Pin is a visual bookmark. When you click a Pin, it takes you right to the site where it was pinned from so that you can know more about the pin.

You can look at the stuff that other people have shared in the form of Pins right on the Pinterest.

Anything on the web can be a Pin, It can be the photos of your birthday celebrations, your next adventure, or a delicious dish that you prepared and want to share the recipe with others.

Pinterest provides you with a board that acts as a home to all your Pins. The board helps you to combine and nest all the things by theme or topic so that all your collections are right at your fingertips.

Pinterest lets you follow people with similar interests. You can see their work and use them for your projects.

For creating a Pinterest account, you can log in with your Facebook or Twitter account.

The basic idea of Pinterest marketing

Pinterest is a great visual social platform that is increasingly becoming a powerful source of customers for online store owners.

Since it’s primarily a visual experience, it’s a great place for your product photos to shine. However, you must have a few creative bones in your body to get it to work. The effort is well worth it, though, especially considering that visitors referred from Pinterest are 10 percent more likely to make a purchase from you.

Pinterest is another web medium to share things of your likes and choices. All you have to do is just click the button “Pin It”. With Pinterest, almost every business can create their own board to display what they have to offer to the public.

Pinterest is relatively a new social media that allows users to create an online image collage, and then quickly share those with others Pinterest users through pinboards.

Pinterest is very beautiful and its users love it. It is fastly becoming the marketing tool for the brands and businesses. This is what we refer to as Pinterest marketing.

Product advertisement is a significant feature of Pinterest technology. The phenomenon makes up the Pinterest culture where boundless amounts of picture and photos are flooded onto the site by its users.

There are people who constantly update picture boards, uploading new ones, pinning, re-pinning and more.

The technology that allows Pinterest to be compatible with Smartphones is another feature that has catalyzed the success of Pinterest.

By allowing users to view and upload photos on-the-go, wherever they are, makes it an efficient social networking site that is fun, personal, and creative.

How to do Pinterest marketing?

Add Pinterest button “Pin It” on your website:

If you have a website for your business, then it is better to have a “Pin It” button over there. This will help the users to share/post the images of your products from your online store by pinning them and thus posting them on their Pinterest boards.

This will not only drive the brand awareness but will also help to drive the sales on your website. This is a great strategy as it is getting you a free third-party endorsement from outside your company and thus helping your company to flourish in the competitive market.

You can get the code to add the “Pin It” button here.

Create a Pinterest account for both yourself and your business:


Creating a Pinterest account for yourself has significance because, as a founder of your business, the people would be more interested in your social network and the things that you have to pin in and share.

Similarly, the account for your business is important because the people would like to see what products your business has to offer.

You can yourself pin the images of products from your business page to your pinboard and share it with other people who follow you.

Thus, this creates a 2-way marketing strategy for your business.

Create Smartboards:

You can create pinboards based on a specific theme and pin the images common to the theme to that board.

It turns out that when you assign themes to your boards, you tend to attract more interest of the users. To give you some ideas for your online store, you could create boards representing:

• Holiday gift ideas (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc.)
• Specifically themed vacations
• Clothing ensemble themes
• Gifts for your boyfriend

Add price to your pinned images:

For certain items that are always in stock, you might want to add a price to your pin of that image. To add a price simply adds the price with a “₹” sign and the corresponding value in the description.

We want to reiterate that it’s important that you only add prices to pinned products that are regularly in stock.

The last thing you want to do is have people coming from Pinterest disappointed that the items they so excitedly saw on your board is out of stock.

Marketing Strategy needs to be inspiring:

Getting people to discover amazing images, videos and products is a power handed to you by Pinterest.

Instead of just tiling up your Pinterest boards with product images, your goal should be to inspire potential customers with the products you sell.

If you’re an online fashion boutique, it’s all about presenting your clothing in a way that gives potential customers an idea for an ensemble they would want to create.

The above ensemble was designed to give fashion ideas to Pinterest visitors. Try creating groups of products that can inspire potential customers.

If you’re good at creating these groups, you’ll strengthen your brand’s authority in your niche.

Find popular group boards:

Using Pinterest group boards is an excellent way to reach more users on the Pinterest to get more followers to your pinboard, traffic, repins to your products.

PinGroupie is an easy tool to find a good group, boards.

How to use PinGroupie?

Go to PinGroupie’s home page and fill in the search fields.

First, choose a category. These are the same as the categories on Pinterest. Then choose the order in which you would like to see the boards – you have the options pins, collaborators, repins, Likes and followers.

I recommend you go with the repins option as more the repins a board gets more engaging it is. If you are looking for a board with a specific title (board name) or description you can also add them.

Once you’ve filled in all your details hit ‘Filter’ and a list of relevant group boards along with their details will appear below.

PinGroupie presents group boards for you to analyze. To view any board just click on the name and you’re taken to it.

Drive Traffic With Blog Boards:

Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic to your blog posts, A blog board is a place where your followers can see all your blog posts.

Followers also automatically see any new blogs you pin on their homepage. Use relevant keywords to name your board so it’s easy for followers to find in search engine results.

After you publish a blog post on your site, pin it onto your board. Make sure to include a brief summary of the article, a relevant high-quality image, and a link back to the blog post itself.

Other Crafty Things You Can Do with Pinterest:

Create a testimonial board – If you receive handwritten testimonials from customers, snap a photo of them and pin them to a dedicated board for testimonials.

Use hashtags – Just like Twitter, Pinterest allows hashtags. For specific subjects, be sure to use hashtags. For example, if you run an online store specializing in women’s dresses you might use hashtags like #formalwear, #prom, #fall_fashion.

Host a contest – You can promote a contest where your fans and followers can create boards about your brand or around the products you sell. This is a great way to generate interest in your brand and get other Pinterest users involved.

There are probably a thousand or more ways to spin your Pinterest marketing to generate online sales. However, the best way to find out is to get your hands dirty and start pinning, start generating traffic, and the more visitors you get, the more likely one of them is bound to give you your first sale.

Advantages of Pinterest marketing

Platform for small business:

Pinterest is very much valuable to small businesses as it provides a capability to create boards that can showcase their work.

Small business can include people like graphic designer, photographers, interior designers and fashion designers. Pinterest provide them with the freedom to display their work in the form of images, videos, etc. using their creativity, personal style and personality by creating fantastic portfolios that can be seen and shared by other Pinterest users.

A tool for market research:

Pinterest can be used a market research tool for small businesses. You can get a basic idea about the kind of things people are attracted to and based on that you develop your marketing strategy.

You can manufacture the product in a similar way so that it gets more attention from the Pinterest users in the form of repins.

Keeping a track of interests by seeing how many of your “pins” have been “repined” by other users can help you in determining people’s interests, marketability and popularity.

Quick sharing:

Pinterest helps businesses to share the content quickly and frequently. Any business can quickly share the information about its new launches on the Pinterest.

Pinterest’s business account:

With Pinterest’s business account, you can direct an huge traffic to your company’s website. This helps you to spread your brand and ultimately increase your sales.

Official Pinterest page:

Just like Twitter, you can also have an Official Pinterest page which will be verified by Pinterest staff and help increase credibility.

Embed Board to your Website:

Pinterest’s own sharing and follow buttons allow you to embed these graphics on your company site to help visitors and fans connect with your business on this platform.

Increasing marketing reach:

By uploading high definition photos of your products, you can attract a huge number of users who may repin your photo and thus you get a free endorsement for your products.

Cost saving:

Pinterest marketing helps you to save the cost that incurs on the physical marketing. Also, it helps to remove the management and maintenance cost that is involved in the real world marketing.

Disadvantages of Pinterest marketing

Pictures can be harmful to businesses:

If the uploaded pictures of your products are not appealing enough, then it may put a bad impression of your company on your consumers and you may end up losing a valuable customer.

Also, it can lead to negative marketing wherein the users may highlight your company in a bad light.

Copyright issues:

Your business may fall under a copyright issue if you are using someone else’s images without their consent or permission.

More resources and time:

In the time when there already exists social media like Facebook and Twitter, using Pinterest demands more devotion of time and resources by the company which may not be feasible from a business point of interest.

Do you use Pinterest for marketing your Business?

What are your strategies to make the best out of Pinterest? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.