How To Use A Pinterest Marketing Strategy To Generate Traffic?

We used Pinterest marketing strategy to generate over 15,000 new followers for this skin cream business across their social media platforms.

And these new followers contributed to a 22.32% growth rate leading to increased sales.

digital marketing case studies

Want to find out how you can leverage Pinterest marketing to make it a huge success for your business? Keep reading!

In this post, we’re going to talk about Pinterest marketing strategy.

We’ll be going over how to use Pinterest ads to drive traffic to your site and get those conversions.

Let’s get started!

Create Your Pinterest Business Account

Setting up a Pinterest business account offers a lot more features than if you were to use a regular user account.

Business accounts have access to unique pin formats and analytics to track your content’s success.

Your Pinterest business account allows you to create free, organic pins and paid advertisement pins.

You can tag your products and make your pins shoppable. This allows you to market your business no matter what your marketing budget is.

If you haven’t yet joined Pinterest, the process is simple:

Step 1. Make a profile

The first step in using Pinterest for business is to create your profile on Pinterest’s website.

If you already have a personal account on Pinterest, you have two options.

You can link a separate business account to your personal profile, or you can turn your personal profile directly into a business account.

If you don’t already have a personal account, or you don’t want your business and personal accounts to be linked in any way…

…you can create a brand new business account. Just go to the Pinterest for Business website and click “Sign up”.

Step 2: Claim your sites

After you have created your profile, you need to add your website, Etsy shop, or any other social accounts.

This will ensure that every one of your pins will link back to your business.

Step 3: Create pins

The next step is to start creating content. These can be pins that promote products, site content, or tutorials.

Every pin that you create for your business account will include an image or video, and it will be linked back to your website or store.

Now if you want to find out how the Pinterest algorithm works, here’s our post for that.

Step 4: Start running ads

After that, you can now start creating and running Pinterest ads.

Track Your Pins Success

Once you start creating pins and running ads for your Pinterest marketing strategy, you can start tracking their success. You will be able to track:

Your audience metrics

You will be given analytics on who your content is reaching, and what they are most interested in.

Your overall presence

You will be able to track all of your paid engagements coming from your advertisements.

Or your earned engagements coming from people repinning your pins.

And, your organic engagements coming directly from your organic pins.

Your most popular pins

You will be able to see which of your pins have been the most successful. This will give you insight into what content provides you with the best return.

Your conversions, impressions, clicks, etc.

You will be able to see specific analytics to see how well your pins and ads are doing.

All of this tracking is done through Pinterest Analytics, which is automatically made available to you for free when you create your business account.

Learn About Your Target Audience For Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Pinterest uses its precise targeting tools to make sure your content reaches the best audience, who will truly be interested in your business.

There are several ways that you can target your audience on Pinterest:

Automated targeting: Pinterest can automatically choose your best audience based on the details within your pins.
Demographics: Your pins can be targeted toward people with specific demographics, such as age, gender, or location.
Interests: Your pins can be shown in the home feed of Pinterest users that are interested in topics relating to your business.
Keywords: You can target specific search terms related to your pins, causing your pins to appear to users who search for the specific keywords.
Customer Lists: You can upload a list of your previous customers to your Pinterest Business account.

Pinterest will then be able to specifically show your pins to the people who have already interacted with your website, store, or Pinterest content.

Actalikes: This will allow you to target users who are similar to your existing customers…

…similar to Facebook’s lookalike audience if you’re familiar with that.

You’ll be able to get a better understanding of who is interested in your pins by paying close attention to targeting & demographics.

Check these metrics monthly and make adjustments to your content and ad targeting as needed.

Try Advertising For Your Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Now that you have created some pins, you can start promoting them. This will lead to even more success for your business.

Advertising on Pinterest has a 2.3x more efficient cost per conversion than ads on all other social media platforms.

Just this one statistic alone should be convincing enough to start using Pinterest for marketing.

The first step in creating your ads is picking which format you want your ad to be.

There are five different formats to choose from:

1. Standard

These are the typical pins that you see most often on Pinterest. Standard pins are used to showcase your product in a simple rectangular format.

2. Video

pinterest marketing strategy

You can also create video ads for your products. These video ads can be anywhere between four seconds to fifteen minutes long.

3. Shopping

pinterest marketing strategy

Shopping ads allow you to directly link and sell specific products to a pin.

If a user clicks on the pin, they will be directed to where they can purchase the product. We’ll talk more about these ads soon.

4. Carousel

pinterest marketing strategy

These ads allow you to include multiple images in one ad. Users can swipe through the images to view them.

5. Collections

pinterest marketing strategy

Collections are probably one of our favorite features of Pinterest marketing strategy.

They allow you to include a picture of the product in action, along with images of the individual products that are found in the picture.

This allows the users to see what the products look like in real life, just like if the user were to purchase the product in person themselves.

After creating some Pinterest content, you will start to figure out which formats deliver the best results for your specific business goals.

You should definitely experiment with all of the formats.

6. Story pins

pinterest marketing strategy

Pinterest also offers a story pin format, similar to most other social media platforms that now have stories.

These stories are multi-page pins that can stay visible on your profile forever.

Just like this story pin here, where a lady is teaching us a makeup technique.

Pinterest offers some simple tools to help you easily create your ads:

From both your mobile device and desktop, you can turn your business’s organic pins directly into paid advertisements.
Pinterest Ads Manager makes it where you can easily build and edit your campaigns. It also allows you to see how your campaigns are doing.
Pinterest Partners are the businesses and services that Pinterest has approved as partners.

These partners are experts at everything on Pinterest.

There are many different partners that you can choose from, and each one focuses on different specialties.

Some of these specialties include advertising, content marketing, and measurement.

If you want to get the best results possible out of your Pinterest marketing strategy, you should consider working with some of these partners.

Let’s look at some campaign specifics in case you’re not familiar with ads on Pinterest,

Pinterest Marketing Strategy: A Note On Ad Campaigns & Objectives

When advertising on Pinterest, just like many other networks, you break your ads down into campaigns.

These campaigns are organized into three levels: campaign, ad group, and ads.

At the campaign level, you choose the objective of your campaign and set an optional campaign limit.

Within a campaign, there are ad groups. There can be more than one ad group in a campaign.

At the ad group level, you decide where the ads will be shown, set the bid amounts, and choose the dates that the ads will run.

If there is more than one product line in a campaign…

…or if there are multiple regions or target audiences that you want to reach all within one campaign, ad groups are used for this differentiation.

Within each ad group is the individual ads. These are the individual pins that are shown on Pinterest.

In order to start an advertising campaign on Pinterest, you must choose a campaign objective.

The objective that you choose determines how you will bid in the ad auction and which ad formats you can use.

These are the five campaign objectives for your Pinterest marketing strategy:

1. Brand awareness

This objective is used to raise awareness for your brand and its products.

To bid for this objective, you set the max amount you will pay for every 1,000 impressions.

2. Video view

This objective is used to increase the average play times and completion rates for people who view your video.

To bid for this objective, you set the max amount you will pay per view when your video is viewed for 2 seconds or more.

3. Considerations

This objective is used to increase pin clicks on your ad.

The default way of bidding for this objective is through automatic bidding, although you have the option of paying cost per click.

4. Conversions

This objective is used to encourage users to take action, like signing up or adding to cart on your website.

The default way of bidding for this objective is also through automatic bidding.

Although you can manually set your budget and CPA that you are willing to pay when someone clicks on the ad and visits your website.

5. Shopping catalogs

This last objective is used to help users discover your products while they search through Pinterest.

To pay for this objective, you can either pay cost per click or you can set the max you’re willing to pay for every 1,000 impressions.

Now that you know about the campaign objectives, these are the three most important aspects of driving your sales:

Shopping Campaigns

You can increase your sales by running shopping campaigns. One of the best ways to do this is with collection ads.

Collection ads come directly from your product feed. We briefly mentioned these ads earlier…

…but as a recap, these ads show multiple products in one image, showcasing how they may look in a real-life scene.

These are useful in increasing sales because products can be used in multiple shopping ads, where the scene showcased may differ.

This allows you to showcase different scenes for different audiences, based on their style, interests, etc.

For example, let’s say you are selling a kitchen table. You may have two collection ads that include this same kitchen table.

One may be a more modern style scene, appealing to shoppers who prefer a modern furniture style.

The other may be a more classic style scene, appealing to shoppers who prefer a more classic furniture style.

Even though the two shoppers are seeing two completely different scenes shown in the collection ads, they may both want to purchase the table.

Dynamic retargeting

Dynamic retargeting allows you to show your product pins to users who have previously visited your site or have added an item to their shopping cart.

These users will be even more likely to purchase the product or products because they are generally further along in your sales funnel.

Automatic bidding

When paying for your shopping ads, Pinterest can automatically adjust your ad group bids to generate the best results.

Set Up Your Pinterest Merchant Account

While your business’s pins and advertisements can help generate awareness and interest in your products, and generate traffic to your website,

A Pinterest marketing strategy can also be used for eCommerce directly.

To get the full results from your pins and advertisements, you need to set up your merchant shopping profile.

66% of people say inspiration is very critical when deciding what to buy.

This means that Pinterest is the perfect place for people to shop because it is full of inspiration.

Pinterest recently updated its shopping experience in late 2020, so it is up to date with all of the best features and super easy for you to use.

This is what Pinterest has to say about its updated shopping experience:

“Selling your products on Pinterest feels a lot like selling products in the real world. Share a gorgeous catalog. Set up your storefront.

And then get to the good stuff, like tracking conversions and measuring results.”

We know what you’re thinking, “Hey, that sounds awesome!”

So let’s get into setting up Pinterest shopping for your business so you can start selling on Pinterest.

To be seen by shoppers as a trustworthy business, you should apply for the Verified Merchant Program.

These are the program requirements:

1. Meet Pinterest’s merchant requirements

This means that you must follow all of Pinterest’s merchant rules. We’re not going to go into a lot of detail about these, but we will list a few of them: