Pinterest Marketing Tips for Beginners

January 2, 2020

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If you talk to anyone who’s worked with me or just knows me personally, they’ll tell you how obsessed with Pinterest I am – and for good reason! When I had my travel blog, my #1 source of traffic was Pinterest. It’s one of those platforms that if you learn how to master and put some work in upfront, you’ll see traffic to your site every month without having to do much at all!

Doesn’t that sound enticing?

I thought so. That’s why I’m going to give you some Pinterest Marketing Tips for Beginners. You deserve to know the power that Pinterest can have for your blog or business too.

Before I dive into some of my personal tips, I want to share a few stats with you, so that you can see the power Pinterest truly has for your blog / business.

Pinterest Stats

Pinterest has almost 300 million monthly active users
As of 2019, 79% of Pinterest users are women and they make 80% of buying decisions
50% of millennials use Pinterest every month
Only 27% of marketers are already using Pinterest (so much opportunity!)
The average time spent on Pinterest is 14.2 minutes

**All stats found on Sprout Social.

So, there you have it. So much opportunity for bloggers / business owners on Pinterest! Only 27% of marketers have tapped into its true power. I’m here to tell you that it does have lots of power. We’re talking free, ORGANIC traffic to your site. Sure, you can absolutely utilize the ads platform on Pinterest and run campaigns. However, this blog post will be primarily focused on getting started and generating organic traffic to your site! I’ll do a follow up post on the paid aspect.

I think that’s quite enough for an introduction, no? I hope I’ve gotten you a little bit pumped as to what Pinterest can do for YOU! Let’s dive in to some:

Pinterest Marketing Tips for Beginners

Pinterest SEO

If you want your Pinterest profile, boards and pins to take off – you absolutely need to be implementing SEO tactics. The greatest myth there is about Pinterest is that it’s a social platform. It absolutely is not, it’s a search engine. That means it operates very similarly to Google. The good thing with Pinterest, is that it doesn’t take long before your pins start taking off.

Unsure of where to start when it comes to implementing SEO on Pinterest? I got you, don’t worry.

Profile Setup

First, ensure that your profile name & bio are set up properly. Meaning, you want to be found!

I’ll use my profile as an example. I recently rebranded my blog to be not only travel, but also lifestyle and marketing. So I’ve added that to my title, where I have 65 characters to play with. What keywords regarding your blog can you add to yours?

For the description, you have 160 characters and I’d highly recommend this be the place you use more keywords. For mine, I reiterate that I’m a travel, lifestyle and marketing blogger.

Key ingredients of an optimized profile

Utilize all 65 characters of your title to include: keywords about your blog or business, brand name, etc.
Utilize all 160 characters of the description, emphasizing it with keywords and hashtags. Also add a link to a popular post or download, if you have it, as this will entice users

Keyword Research

If I’m being honest with you, the only downside to Pinterest is the manual keyword research. There’s no quick hack, as far as I’m aware, when it comes to researching relevant keywords for your pins/profile. However, keywords are key on Pinterest, so it’ll take some research to get this just right.

For example, if you’re sharing a pin on “How to Save Money,” research the keywords associated with that phrase on Pinterest.

Keyword research in practice:

You can see that I’ve typed into the search bar on Pinterest, “how to save money.” Just like Google, you are able to see other search queries users are typing in. You can utilize each of these in your description or when you’re crafting your content.

Next, you’ll see the keyword bar at the top of the page on Pinterest after you’ve searched for what you’re searching for. So for “how to save money,” you’ll see the coinciding keywords that people often pair with that statement, such as: for teens, living paycheck to paycheck, on a low income, etc.

These are all great indicators of the kind of popular content that is associated with saving money on Pinterest. Now, I’m not saying that you have to use all of these keywords and search queries in this ONE pin that you’re about to publish, but it can be a good pre-post idea to check out what’s popular on Pinterest in that topic and write around that. So for example, if you were already going to write a post on “how to save money” then you could turn it into a series or incorporate some of these keywords in it that you know users are searching for.

Basically, you want to be as helpful as possible when it comes to your posts. I’m not saying don’t write about whatever it is that you want to write about, but you want to be sure that you’re addressing people’s concerns/questions as well. So it’s a great idea to do some research ahead of time that you can then incorporate into your posts.

Images & Descriptions

This is a big one. You have 500 characters to utilize for your pin description, but the first 50 are what show up in people’s feed. Those are the ones you will want to make sure stand out.

Remember earlier when I said that you will want to put keywords in your description as well as hashtags? The time is now! Start using those descriptions to the fullest extent and you know the best, most useful example of doing this? Recipes!

I’m not even a food blogger, nowhere close, but one of the absolute BEST ways to get your food/recipe pins noticed is by including the recipe within the description.

An example of this is:

Talk about convenient! Right there in the pin for a recipe, it has the actually recipe!

Pin popularity & Google

Now, I know, this may or may not lead to an increase in your traffic to that specific page – but, it is extremely useful when it comes to Pinterest SEO and also Google ranking factors.

Stay with me…

If this pin begins to heat up and drives a bunch of viewers to your page, it will also increase your ranking factor on Google. Why, you ask? Because I’m convinced, as well as others, that Google favors Pinterest articles because of their high SEO value.

So this pin, for example, could actually increase traffic to your page coming from Google! Which would be a turn of events because while it’s popular on Pinterest, from a visual standpoint, it’s driving traffic to your page from a Google standpoint.

You hear what I’m saying?

Pins that are crushing it on Pinterest often get quite a bit of favor, depending on the type, on Google.

Now, when it comes to labeling your images in Pinterest, this is something you’ll do when you save your design. Going back to the “how to save money” example: if you save your pin as something totally random, like “pin1.jpg,” then it makes it a tad bit more difficult for Pinterest to crawl / understand what your pin is about. This does not negate the title and description – these will still help you when it comes to being found / showing up in people’s feeds, but labeling your image will enhance this power.

schedule your pins using tailwind

Now onto the fun stuff…

I absolutely swear by Tailwind, so please don’t think this is me trying to sell you on a product that I, myself, don’t even use. I ain’t that girl – OK. I’ve got your back and when I tell you that Tailwind will be an absolute game-changer for your Pinterest marketing, I mean it. It’s magic.

Tailwind is a Pinterest automation tool (they’ve recently introduced Instagram scheduling / smart bio to the product, but I’ll blog about that in a different post). It’s a partner of Pinterest, so to ease any fears you might have about your pins being marked as spam, etc. they won’t! It’s completely safe to use for your Pinterest Marketing needs.

Let me show you a few of my favorite parts and what Tailwind has done for my Pinterest growth in just the last month alone.

Tailwind Tribes

Tribes are just like a group Pinterest board but without having it show up on your Pinterest profile that you’ve joined that board. Tribes are a great way to expand your reach and tap into new audiences. Now, you do have to share other people’s pins, but I’ve often found that they re-pin yours in return. It’s a give/give type situation. Using Tailwind will automatically begin to increase your reach/impressions on Pinterest and utilizing Tailwind Tribes will only add to that.

2. SmartLoop

I will actually do a whole post on SmartLoops, so stay tuned, but essentially a SmartLoop is a collection of pins that are automatically scheduled for you / looped in that the most optimal times according to your preferences.

The two kinds of SmartLoops that Tailwind currently has is Evergreen and Seasonal. Why are these so nice to use? Because you’re able to schedule content that you know (and have seen) is popular and works all year around! Then, you’re able to schedule content that has a start and end date during a certain time of year. For example: Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Summer Travel, etc. How SMART is that?

You probably have historical content that you update on and around those seasons, so NOW you don’t have to worry about manually pinning that again in 2020, this time, you can have it set up as a SmartLoop and it will automatically pin for you! All you have to do is update the content. Magic.

The SmartLoop’s are just such a great way to have your awesome content that everyone loves rotating in and out of Pinterest at the most optimal times for YOU. You don’t even have to think about it. Set them up and let them do their thing. It’s THAT easy.

3. Scheduling

Let’s be honest…ain’t nobody got time for manually pinning 50+ pins a day or week (whatever your preference), am I right?! It’s just a lot. With Tailwind’s scheduling, you’re able to knock out all of your pinning for a week or month in less than an hour or two. What a freakin’ time saver that is!

The thing I love about the schedule, is that Tailwind has what they call a “smart schedule” that they’ve already added to your schedule. Essentially, these are just optimized time slots that are added based on when YOUR audience is most engaged. Convenient, right?

Then, you’ll notice that they’ve got a recommended time slot. This is to improve your pinning schedule and all you have to do is click the ‘+’ button if you’d like to add more slots than they’ve already recommended AND they’ve done the hard part by telling you a specific time that will work for you.

Alternatively, you can add custom time slots. If you don’t trust the machine learning quite yet and want to control your schedule / know your audience and their most engaged times – then you can set up your own custom schedule! Where it’s blue and says ‘Add Time Slot’ is where you’ll do that.

The most amazing thing about Tailwind? You get up to 100 FREE pins to schedule / post because they want you to be able to test and validate the tool before you decide to buy into it. Awesome, right?

Those are just a few of my favorite bits on Tailwind. I have another post on Tailwind that goes into a bit more detail but I also plan on writing a full guide to getting the most out of Tailwind as a blogger/marketer. It really has been a game changer for me and has completely taken the hassle out of manually uploading all of my pins to Pinterest.

How Tailwind helped me grow

Take it from me and my analytics. Before I utilized Tailwind, I was averaging about 1.4K monthly views on Pinterest. After creating a steady schedule and being more active on Pinterest / the Tailwind Tribes, my impressions over the last 90 days are up 576% and my engagements are up 426%. That’s insane!! I love it. I’m obsessed and I think Tailwind is going to be a really useful, beneficial tool for you to use for your blog as well.

Pin Design Testing

On to something slightly different…creative testing!

One thing you’ll always notice on Pinterest are the eye-catching pins, right? Often, people will have 2-3 different designed pins for one blog post and that’s really just to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s always a good idea to have differently designed pins for each post because you don’t really know what one person may like versus another.

That’s where creative testing really comes into play. Let me show you an example of where I started as a blogger vs. where I am now.

Such a difference. Back when I had a travel blog, it was called ‘Voyageur Kalee’. I started it when I was living in London and honestly, it was quite the learning experience. You don’t really have a clue what you’re doing or what does/doesn’t, so you just do the best that you can.

Now that I’ve been doing this for almost 5 years, I know what works with my audience / what people respond to on Pinterest specifically.

Key ingredients of great pin design:

Eye catching imagery
Vertical images (size of pin should be 2:3 aspect ratio)
Title of content
URL of pinner on the image somewhere
Brighter colors often work best – whether it be in the font or the image itself

If this is overwhelming to you or you’re completely new to Pinterest / graphic design, then one of my tried and true products that I use is Canva. I have been obsessed with Canva ever since I started my blog. I needed something that was newbie, graphic design friendly but also inspirational cause let’s be honest – sometimes we have no idea what to design or how it should probably look. Canva has really nice templates for you to utilize and make into your own (example below).

These tips will help you get started with your Pinterest marketing efforts. I want to bet you some kind of money, though I won’t, that if you begin implementing these – you will start to see positive changes to your Pinterest analytics. I am quite the believer in Pinterest as a marketing platform and I believe you too will see its power.