How To Use Pinterest To Help Grow Your Business Online in 2023
Last updated: April 2023
As an online business owner with a digital marketing background, I have used (or tried to use) Pinterest for marketing for over 9 years. Pinterest has changed a lot for marketers in that time, so in this article, I’m sharing the best up-to-date practices and pinning strategies I’ve learned, and that I’m using right now. See the date above for when this article was last updated!
Let’s start with having a look at what Pinterest is and how you can use it to grow your business online.
What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest isn’t really a social network, it’s more of a search engine but laid out in a much more visual way than other search engines. Most people use it to gather ideas for recipes, gifts ideas, living room design, weddings, seasonal décor, outfits, and so much more! The possibilities are endless; whatever you’re searching for, you’re bound to find something on Pinterest.
How Can Pinterest Help Grow Your Business?
Pinterest can be used as a powerful traffic generation and lead sourcing tool. Many businesses and blogger niches have reported that 50-90% of their organic traffic actually comes from Pinterest!
Who Uses Pinterest?
The majority of Pinterest users are women which is great news if your target market includes women, since women influence 70-80% of consumer spending.
In 2021, 32% of Pinterest users were 18-29 years old, 34% were 30-49 years old, and 38% were 50-64 years old. This trend looks set to continue through 2022 and 2023. You can find up-to-date Pinterest user stats here.
Popular Niches And Interests
In no particular order, here’s a list of some of the most popular categories on Pinterest.
- Home Decor
- Health and Fitness
- Women’s Fashion
- Hair and Beauty
- DIY & Crafts
- Animals and Pets
- Education
- Weddings
- Holidays and Events
- Food & Drink
- Entertainment
So if any of your products, services or blog content fall under one or more of these categories, then you know there’s an audience on Pinterest waiting to find you! It’s all about making the most of the huge number of people using the internet, and marketing your products in the places where these people are already showing up.
One up and coming category not always mentioned on lists provided by Pinterest is the business category. If you offer B2B services, there are growing opportunities to gain traffic from Pinterest – especially if you have a blog providing helpful info and resources.
It’s a solid strategy to have a blog, for SEO reasons and because educating your potential customers is one way of encouraging them to trust you enough to make a purchase!
Pinterest SEO
Before you pin anything, it is SO important that you conduct keyword research to ensure your efforts are not wasted. The keywords you find should be used in the titles and descriptions of both pins and boards.
To find suitable keywords, search on Pinterest itself – don’t use Google search term keywords (for example) as many won’t be relevant. Use keywords from the Pinterest search bar suggested keywords and from the pin descriptions and board descriptions of other accounts in your niche – but don’t copy descriptions word for word.
Create a list of suitable keywords relevant to your content and business. From your new list, only use your keywords when relevant for the content; Pinterest algorithms can detect keyword stuffing and this may decrease your reach!
Hashtags used to work but as they were being overused by spammers, they were removed by Pinterest. You’ll want to ensure you don’t include them as continuing to do so may have a negative impact on the performance of your pins – just remember, Pinterest is much more a search engine so hashtags have no place here anyway…
Pinning Strategy
New accounts should be pinning around 5-10 fresh pins every day and established accounts 10-20 every day. Be careful not to spam by pinning the same pin (same design, description and URL) too many times!
It can be a daunting task, but investing in a program known as Tailwind to schedule your pins really does make things a lot easier.
Tailwind schedules your pins at the best times for engagement and allows for interval pinning as well as providing awesome analytics to measure your results. And if you’re going to get the most out of your Pinterest account, you need to be looking at your analytics!
One of my favourite features on Tailwind is called Tailwind Communities; these are essentially pin sharing niched groups. With Communities you’re much more likely to get others pinning/sharing your pins as for them to work, every contributor has to repin from that community. This means your content will be seen by even more relevant audience members.
It’s a win-win situation because you get great content to repin (which helps your Pinterest algorithm), and your pins will receive shares too. Pinning others pins is the social sharing aspect of Pinterest.
Update: current guidelines suggest your repinning of others content should be no more than 10% of what YOU pin, e.g your own content. So please be aware that repinning excessively can negatively impact your account.
Pinterest Pin Design
Of course, an essential part of your strategy is creating attractive pins to catch the eye of people and encourage them to view your pins, save and click through to the landing page.
Batch creating large collections of pins for each page or post can save you heaps of time. For each URL (post or page I want to share) I create a set of unique pins where all I need to do is tweak the design a little (design elements, colors etc) to ensure Pinterest sees the design as a fresh new pin!
To get a head start on the task of creating fresh pins, you can purchase large sets of pins here – designed with several types of content in mind.
Pinterest Growth
If you where wondering how long you can expect to see growth, new Pinterest accounts can see results in 4-6 weeks.
On established accounts, when major changes are made to pins and boards, stats tend to go down the first 2-3 weeks then slowly pick up and build momentum once SEO kicks in.
This makes it a great way to build and continue to grow an online audience who are specifically *looking* for the content – and products or services – that you’re offering.
It’s worth remembering that posting organically on Pinterest is a long term strategy – worth doing in my opinion if a little on the slow side!
So in the meantime, why not have a nosey around my Pinterest account!
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