Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing in 2021
This article comes from a formal interview with Jess Coleman, owner of Root & Bloom Social. Root & Bloom Social is a social media marketing agency based in Charlotte, NC. While they specialize in SEO-based services such as website copywriting and Pinterest marketing, they offer full-service social media management, consulting, and digital content creation. Follow them on Instagram!
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Photo via Southern Lens Photography
A Complete Guide to Pinterest Marketing in 2021
How did a visual inspiration board meant for saving casserole recipes and color palettes soon turn into one of the most powerful marketing tools in the world? Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest has grown their average monthly followers to 367 million. Source
We sat down with Jess of Root & Bloom Social to get the lay of the (Pinterest)land in 2021. Join us for what might be the most comprehensive Pinterest guide ever, or skip to the section you want!
Table of Contents
What is Pinterest and Why Should My Business Use It?
Key Pinterest Statistics: Understanding the Platform’s Reach
Pinterest Platform Architecture: What is a Pin vs. Board?
What to Pin? Identifying Content Pillars
Measuring Success: Which KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to Track
What is Pinterest and Why Should My Business Use It?
Most people confuse Pinterest as a social media platform, but it’s actually a visual search engine. Pinterest helps users visually capture ideas and resources primarily during the Planning Phase of their customer journey.
Marketing on Pinterest does not make sense for every type of business.
If you have an essential, service-based type business which depends solely on the patronage of local customers (say, like a local dry cleaning business), Pinterest may not make the most sense for you. Pinterest makes the most sense for businesses that have photography and design at the forefront of their content strategy.
Types of Businesses That Perform Best on Pinterest
Food Bloggers
Lifestyle Brands
DIY Blogs
E-commerce Brands
Interior Designers
Graphic Designers
“Pinterest makes the most sense for businesses that have photography and design at the forefront of their content strategy.”
The Planning Stage vs. The Execution Stage
Pinterest is intended for a certain type of user, just like it’s intended for certain types of industries. The Pinterest user is in either the Planning Stage or the Execution Stage of a customer journey. A customer journey represents an end-goal or on-going personal project, and can involve a number of topics, such as:
Planning for a Baby
Renovating a Kitchen
Planning a Bachelorette Party
Starting the Keto Diet
Once a customer incorporates Pinterest as part of their journey, it’s up to you as a business to create pins that are not only helpful but that guide the customer towards making an informed purchase.
Example Customer Journey: Planning for a Baby
The Planning part of a customer journey comes in two parts: the information side and the product side. For this example, a parent will be looking for not only the best baby products like “Safest Baby Strollers” but will also be looking for advice on topics such as “Weaning a Baby”. Each of these topics can be its own board on Pinterest.
Information-based Boards
Nursery Design Inspiration
First Baby Parenting Tips
Product-based Boards
Baby Cribs
Wood Teething Toys
Once the customer completes the Planning Stage of their journey, they’re ready to execute. The execution stage looks different depending on the industry, but in this example, the user would either click the link to buy a specific baby product, sign up for a mommy blogger’s newsletter, or even add products to a baby shower registry.
Primary Users vs. Secondary Users
The person you’re creating your content for is considered your Primary User, but there is another type of user who still interacts with your content.
The Secondary User will save a pin strictly based on its face value and will likely never engage with that pin beyond saving it. This type of user is seeing your content through the lens of Pinterest’s original intention of being a visual inspiration board. They may love a lifestyle image you created for the color of the walls or the way the sofa is arranged in a living room, but they’re not actively in the Planning Stage of redesigning their home.
The Primary User is utilizing Pinterest’s search tool and related pins to seek out specific content that helps them along their Planning Stage. They are actively bookmarking your content to revisit later and are most likely going to click through to your website and enter the Execution Stage.
“It’s up to you as a business to create pins that are not only helpful but that guide the customer towards making an informed purchase. ”
Key Pinterest Statistics
Before diving in to marketing your business on Pinterest, it’s best to get an idea as to who uses the platform and why. Here are some eyebrow-raising stats we pulled for 2020 that give insight into the platform’s primary demographic and why they use Pinterest. Source
42% of American women are Pinterest users.
If your business caters specifically to women, you should be marketing your business here.
Millennial Pinterest users spend 17% more ($$$) than non-users of the same age.
This demographic is buying more on Pinterest than older and younger audiences.
98% of Pinterest users have tried something new they discovered on Pinterest.
Do you have a new product in a saturated market? Pinterest can turn your product into a must-have.
61% of Pinterest users have purchased something after seeing a promoted pin.
Organic Pinterest is powerful, but Paid Pinterest is magic. We’ll spill all the deets.
85% of female Pinterest users use the app to plan life events.
Life events can include engagements, weddings, and parties. We’re talking to you, photographers, stylists, destinations, food caterers and food bloggers, and fashion retail brands!
48% of US Pinterest users use Pinterest primarily to shop.
Pinterest is no longer just a place to save inspiration. It’s a visual marketing search engine with users who use the platform solely to make purchases.
84% of users use the platform when they are undecided on which products to buy.
Your content should lean into this part of the customer’s journey. More on that journey and how to best capitalize on this below!
“Pinterest is no longer just a place to save inspiration. It’s a visual marketing search engine with users who use the platform solely to make purchases.”
Pinterest Platform Architecture: What is a Pin vs. a Board?
Before you get to pinning, there’s platform-specific jargon you’ll need to become familiar with. Jess helps break down the basic architecture of the pin as well as terminology completely unique to Pinterest.
The first thing to know is that there are two ways a user will see your pin, as well as there being a three-step process that takes them from your pin to your targeted URL.
The Lifecycle of a Pin
Home Feed > Close Up > Save to a Board > Click through to a Targeted URL
When a user scrolls through their Home Feed, your pin is shown within the feed with automatically rounded corners (a Pinterest design choice), as shown on the left below:
Once they click on that pin (as long as it’s not a Promoted Pin), they will then go to what’s called a Close Up (shown above on the right). The Close Up is a new page that shows a more detailed version of your pin atop a whole new feed of pins recommended to you based on this pin. Pinterest works organically that way; using what you click on as a starting point to saving similar pins to a common board.
Now that you know the ways in which someone can see your pins, let’s break down the various types of pins.
The Different Types of Pins
Pins are vertical images that when clicked take the users to a designated URL. There are several different types of pins:
1. Static Image
As it sounds, this is a static image uploaded with the intent of driving traffic to a custom URL once the user clicks again on the “close up” landing page.
2. Video
A newer feature to Pinterest, video pins are a vertically-oriented video that plays without sound and acts identically to a static image.
3. Product Pin
Product pins allow you to add merchant information to a pin, such as Product Name and Price. This requires linking your business Pinterest account to an e-commerce platform.
4. Promoted Pin
These pins have ad money behind them and take the user straight to the desired URL upon clicking, skipping the “close up” landing page all other pins have.
5. Story Pin
Story pins are a new way to share multi-media pieces of content with your Pinterest audience, much like you do with Instagram Stories. Users can stitch photos and videos together with overlaid text as users tap through to view. At the end of the story, users can react with a range of positive reactions, like “Wow” or “Love”.
What are Pinterest boards?
“Users intuitively group things to reflect where they are in their planning journey.”
Once a user comes across a pin they like, they save the pin for later by categorizing it into a board. Boards often have a common theme, such as:
Fall Outfit Inspiration
Farmhouse Kitchen Ideas
Places I Want to Visit
The boards can be as broad or as niched down as the user desires. Users intuitively group things to reflect where they are in their planning journey. For example:
Very Broad Board Title: Cute Small Breed Dogs
Very Niched Down Board Title: Schnoodle Puppies
But when it comes to creating boards as a marketer, there’s only one rule: the specificity of your boards can only be as specific as your content allows for.
Taking a good look at the content you have to promote will help inform what’s called your Content Pillars. Here’s how Jess uses Content Pillars to decide what types of boards your business should be pinning to:
Using Content Pillars to Create Boards
So, what’s a content pillar? A content pillar is a “theme” or “bucket” of content that your business chooses to product content around. Here’s a few examples:
Business Type: Mommy Blogger
Potential Content Pillars:
Saving Money
Getting Pregnant
Healthy Eating for Kids
Homeschooling
Pro Tip: If you do have a blog, a great place to start looking for your content pillars is your blog post categories.
Business Type: Women’s Luxury Fashion Brand
Potential Content Pillars:
Fashion Trends
Outfit Ideas
Favorite Accessories
Brands You Love (Skincare, etc)
Business Type: Boutique Creative Agency
Potential Content Pillars:
Branding & Identity Design
Social Media Management
Website Design
Entrepreneurship
Think of your business as a channel on TV. What types of shows would you find there? That’s another way of thinking about the types of content that make sense beneath your brand.
Once you’ve identified your content pillars, it’s time to create boards. Now remember: you only want to create boards that cater to the content you already have; that is, the content you own that will drive traffic to your website.
90% of the content on each one of your boards should be your own. The remaining 10% should only be comprised of high-performing pins that rank well in search. Ideally? You’re creating 100% of all pins.
Let’s use the Mommy Blogger business as an example. Here is what their first few Pinterest boards might be based on their content pillars (in bold):
Saving Money
Extreme Couponing Tips & Tricks
Budget Family Dinner Ideas
Getting Pregnant
Fertility Nutrition
Midwife Practices
Healthy Eating for Kids
Bento Box Lunches
Hidden Vegetable Recipes
Homeschooling
No-Waste Crafts for Kids
Free-Range Parenting
Toddler Homeschooling
Again, all of this is great in theory, but is only effective if your website actually hosts the content to back these boards up!
“Ninety percent of the content on each one of your boards should be your own. The remaining ten percent should only be comprised of high-performing pins that rank well in search.”
Measuring Success: Which KPI's to Track
With any marketing effort, you want to identify the Key Performance Indicators that best speak to your own marketing strategy. Pinterest offers a ton of insight, but some of these metrics can be misleading. We call these Vanity Metrics:
Pinterest Vanity Metrics
Marketing platforms all come with their form of vanity metrics; that is, metrics that technically track activity but either don’t play into your profile’s success or act more as a generalized metric that combines too many irrelevant metrics to be a true metric of your performance.
1. Followers
While Followers in some ways act as an indicator of how valuable your content is (someone likes your feed enough to want to remember who you are), they don’t get you anywhere in terms of favored placement within their Home Feed. Your pins will show up just as often in a user’s feed as any other account would.
2. Monthly Unique Views
This metric is the one that gets users the most excited because it’s easy for a semi-dormant account to see numbers in the high thousands and even low millions. But truthfully, an account’s Monthly Unique Views includes the views on every single pin an account shares. That means that unless you strictly create and share your own pins, this number is not an accurate representation of the number of monthly eyeballs on your own content.
Pinterest Key Metrics
1. Clicks to Website
Regardless of your marketing strategy, driving traffic to your website from Pinterest should be at the top of every business’ list. It is best to drive traffic to a very targeted page on your website (like a blog post or product page) rather than the homepage.
KPI 1: Link Clicks
KPI 2: Impressions
2. Direct Sales
While this won’t apply to service-based businesses, Pinterest offers a very robust way of traffic revenue from your pins.
KPI 1: Link Clicks
KPI 2: Revenue
3. Brand Awareness
Pinterest is a powerful tool you can use to build brand awareness and clout as a business. Your marketing strategy here would be more so to keep users engaged with your Pinterest account and pins rather than focus on taking them off-site.
KPI 1: Impressions
KPI 2: Monthly Views
KPI 3: Saves (or repins)
Do you have a question specifically for Jess of Root & Bloom Social? Drop it in the comments below!