7 Easy Ways to Promote Your Business on Pinterest

Pinterest is one of our most-recommended social media sites to get started with for all businesses, so knowing how to use it is important. Thanks to Pinterest’s continually growing user base and activity levels, it’s getting more and more important to promote your business on Pinterest.

Especially now, with the exciting new buyable pins coming out, Pinterest has proven to be an up-and-coming juggernaut in the world of marketing. To make sure you make the most of Pinterest as it’s available now, we’ve got 7 easy tips and tricks to promote your business on Pinterest so you can boost your exposure, client list, and profits.

1. Make Your Pins About More than Just Your Products

You have to think about your target audience on Pinterest and how to reach them. You need to make pins about more than just your products—they need to be completely audience focused, in a way that I think you could argue is more prevalent than other social media sites, including Facebook.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I love Pinterest, both professionally and personally (especially when it comes to the personal use!). If I’m going to spend my downtime on a social media site, it’s probably going to be Pinterest, and I’m not alone.

When you catch people in their leisure and they’re actively browsing in their categories of interest, it’s not necessarily difficult to catch their attention—if your pins are focused on them.

Some products are difficult to make appealing to Pinterest’s audience, so you have to find a way to make your products seem appealing to them. Lowes has done a fantastic job; understanding the large target audience of Pinterest, instead of posting pictures of their paint or floor tiles, they focus on how their products can improve your life and fit into your lifestyle. The offer organizational tips, all which link back to their DYI projects and their own products.

Similarly, few people will click on a Pin (or save a pin) of just an image of some of Publix’s products (for those who don’t know Publix, it’s a great grocery store in the South). Publix has taken care of this by pinning recipes, which takes you to their recipes online, which encourages you to add all the ingredients to a shopping list, which you can then upload to their app.

The pin from Publix…

And the site it takes you to.

How can your business successfully target the interests of the audience on Pinterest? How creative can you get? The more audience focused you are, the better—that’s what will get you the results here.

2. Pin in the Right Category

Not pinning your pin in the best category for it will do nothing but have your marketing efforts come up short. There are a lot of categories, so it can be hard to choose, but it’s pretty important.

I’ve seen Etsy sellers who advertise products like custom made Harry Potter lamps in the “home section,” when really they would be better placed (and ultimately find much more success) in the “books” category, where avid Harry Potter readers are more likely to stumble upon it.

Again, as we talked about in the section above, it’s not necessarily just about the category you think your product fits in—it’s the categories your target audience will be most likely to be participating in. If you can find a way to portray your business and product in a way that suits your audience and their category, you’ll be a lot better off.

3. Promote Your Pinterest on Your Website

At the bottom of the image, you can see the PinIt button that will allow Pinners to pin the image directly onto Pinterest.

While the idea of this post is to promote your business on Pinterest, promoting your Pinterest on your website can actually help serve this purpose.

Putting a button enabling users to pin your product or page directly to pinterest is a great way to encourage them to do so. And the more people pinning (and leaving their own comments and descriptions), the more exposure you get. Sometimes it’s even better when it’s a pinner spreading the word of mouth instead of you promoting your own products, and these pins can carry more weight.

Have a link to your main Pinterest profile, but also feature Pinterest buttons on each product so that users can easily share it and save it. Who knows, they may even come back later to buy again, along with the other pinners who see their pin.

4. Don’t Forget About your “About Me” Section

Any time you can promote your website, you want to take advantage of that. Not only does this mean having a link to your website not just in the individual pins, but also on your public profile in a place that’s easy to see and easy to click.

You can also write a quick bio of yourself and/or your business, and you can choose a profile picture. This is a great place to show the personality of your brand and your business. Keep in mind that while some people will know how you are when they find and follow you on Pinterest, some likely will not—this is where you can tell them.

5. Make Your Boards Interesting and Creative

You want to have more just interesting pins. Just like Facebook, it’s not just about the individual pins and posts, but about the entire profile overall and the impression it leaves.

Your individual boards need to be exciting for people coming to your profile. For each board’s main picture, you should choose a pin that represents it well but that has a particularly appealing image. Each board should also have a great description, in the voice of your business, explaining what it’s about.

Even if these are just small details, they add up quickly—it makes your profile appear more full, and it’s all about the small things to make your profile and your business stand out.

6. Keep it Relevant

While some pins will circulate for years on end (almost every time I’m on Pinterest I see the same Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup recipe, which yes, is delicious), when you first pin them, you’ve got a better chance of them being received well (and shared) if it’s relevant.

Seasonal pins work incredibly well, no matter what you’re pinning. Even if only the description is seasonal, it can work wonders.

For example, I saw a pin from Lowes showing how to build organized closets just in time for “spring cleaning.” Another example is the pin below, promoted by Fage, which is a recipe perfect for summer that features their yogurt, and is more appealing to pinners than just an image of the yogurt would be.

The more relevant your pin is to what’s going on right now, the more likely it is to get more responses, repins, and engagement at that time.

7. Use Promoted Pins

Promoted Pins are a great tool and, like Twitter, have a seamless integration with the rest of the site’s pins so that yours doesn’t stand out—but this is a good thing! You want your pins to stand out because of the great images and content, not because it stands out as an ad.

Promoted Pins help make sure that a lot of relevant users are seeing your pin, and it’s Pinterest’s paid advertising platform.

We’ve got another coming out soon explaining Promoted Pins and how to best use them, so keep an eye out for it!

Final Thoughts

Having great images and some catchy descriptions are a great way to get your pins noticed, but those factors alone aren’t quite enough to pull the weight of successfully promoting your business on Pinterest.

Like all social media platforms, when you’re marketing on Pinterest, a lot of thought has to go into how you’re going to connect with your audience, how to make your content truly stand out (and what the best way to deliver it is), and how to promote your business without it all seemingly like a cheap ad.

Pinterest is a great tool—if you don’t have it, we recommend all small and medium sized businesses get one. If you do have it, take a look at using it more. With buyable pins coming, Pinterest is making a big dent in the online marketing world and it’s here to stay.

Do you use Pinterest for your business? How do you use it? Have you tried Promoted Pins yet?

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