Pinterest for Business – Essential Guide

You might know Pinterest from that time you were looking for the perfect cookie recipe or when you were gathering inspiration for your living room redesign. While Pinterest has great value for individual users, it’s equally useful for small businesses who are trying to grow their brand and boost conversions.

Pinterest is full of opportunity in a way that other social media platforms arguably struggle with – that’s because users flock to it with a clear purpose in mind.

This high search intent makes it optimal to boost your conversion rates and grow your user base. Although Pinterest can yield lots of benefits to businesses from all types of industries, it works particularly well for ecommerce brands. Any business selling highly creative and visual products such as those in food, travel, and craft categories will feel at home on Pinterest.

Pinterest’s user interface and design is very unique, which is why we’ve put together this guide to help you navigate its boards, its ads offering, its search engine optimisation, and much more. By the end, you should feel that you can hit the ground running with your Pinterest marketing strategy.

Why is Pinterest a good platform for businesses?

When you think of the term ‘social media’, your mind might not instantly gravitate towards Pinterest. But, it yields high value for businesses that mark their presence on it.

Pinterest has a streamlined user journey for businesses, who can easily add links to their Pins. This converts a user searching for inspiration into an active customer in a matter of a few clicks. This is an important advantage over other platforms, as you can’t add links on Instagram descriptions.

Another reason Pinterest is great for businesses is that it drives high user intent. Users come to the platform actively seeking inspiration and ideas. This makes it an ideal space for businesses to connect with potential customers who are already looking for a specific product or solution.

Pinterest users can pin content to an inspiration board – say for a room refurbishment, or a wardrobe look. For the user, it’s a more creative, personalised user experience that other social media mammoths simply don’t offer. For a business, it gets your products in front of an audience ready to re-engage and potentially purchase. Boards are brilliant for facilitating product discovery and enhancing purchase intent.

Who are Pinterest’s users?

Pinterest’s user base is diverse, with a significant presence of younger users aged 18-24, constituting 55% of its users in the UK. A key demographic trend on Pinterest is its predominantly female user base, with approximately 72.6% of users being women.

This audience primarily uses Pinterest for inspiration and as a search engine. This means it’s crucial for businesses to optimise their content to appear higher in Pinterest’s search results. Nearly 9 in 10 users turn to Pinterest to plan purchases, so getting a high ranking can make a big difference to your sales.

Key ways to use Pinterest as a business

Pinterest can help build your business’s social media presence and boost your sales in a number of ways. Here are a couple to consider:

📍 Using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website: by creating visually appealing pins with direct links to your website, you can attract users interested in your products or content. Ensure that your pins are targeting the right keywords in the description so you can maximise visibility.

📍 Increasing brand awareness through Pinterest: consistently sharing high-quality, engaging pins that align with your brand’s image and values can help raise brand awareness. Showcase your products, services, and company culture through well-curated boards and content to foster a stronger brand identity and connect with your target audience. According to statistics, Pinterest trends take off 20% faster in the first six months than trends on other platforms. Therefore, if you find the way to launch a trend and keep your brand at the heart of it, you could supercharge brand awareness.

📍 Selling and generating leads on Pinterest: Pinterest provides a unique platform for selling products and generating leads. Use shoppable pins and informative content to showcase your industry knowledge and authority. By integrating call to actions and contact forms on your Pins, you can easily grow your user base and find high quality leads.

📍 Connecting with other businesses: Pinterest is not only about reaching consumers. You can also use it for establishing connections within your industry. Collaborate with other businesses and influencers in your niche to share content, cross-promote each other’s products or services, and tap into their audience. This can help you expand your reach and create long-term partnerships.

📍 Advertising on Pinterest: you can leverage Pinterest Ads to target specific demographics and interests, effectively promoting your pints to potential customers. Use features like promoted pints to boost visibility, engage with a larger audience, and achieve marketing goals. According to Pinterest, ads on its platform give a 2.3 times more efficient cost per conversion than ads on other social media platforms. They also claim to double the return on ad spend for retail brands, compared to other social media.

How to set up a Pinterest business account

It’s quick and easy to set up a free Pinterest business account. The great part is that you have a set of options.

If you’re new to Pinterest, you can create a new business account. However, if you’re already an existing user with a personal account, you can either create a linked business account or convert your personal account to a business account.

Personal and business accounts on Pinterest are similar, but business accounts include features that are handy for business owners and marketers. This includes access to the Pinterest Business Hub and Pinterest Analytics.

Creating a new business account

Follow these steps if you’re completely new to Pinterest or you just want to have an account that is completely detached from your personal account.

1. In the top right-hand corner of your screen, click Sign up
2. Click Create a business account
3. Enter your email address, create a password and enter your age
4. Click Create account
5. Fill in the fields to Build your profile, then click Next
6. Fill in the fields to Describe your business, then click Next
7. Select whether you want to run ads, then click Next
8. Select where you’d like to start, or click X to go to your new Pinterest business account

Create a linked business account

Follow these steps if you want a business account that’s linked to your personal account, so you can easily switch back and forth between the two.

This means you’ll use the same email address and password to sign into both accounts.

1. Log in to your personal Pinterest account
2. Click the downwards pointing arrow icon in the top right-hand of the screen
3. Click Add account
4. Under Create a free business account, click Create
5. Click Create a linked business account
6. Click Create linked account
7. Fill in the fields to Build your profile, then click Next
8. Fill in the fields to Describe your business, then click Next
9. Select whether you want to run ads, then click Next
10. Select from the list of options to Describe your business
11. Select where you’d like to start or click X to go to your linked Pinterest business account

Convert your personal account to a business account

This is for those users that just want to establish their presence on Pinterest as a business but have an existing personal account they’d like to convert into a business account.

1. Log in to your personal Pinterest account
2. Click the downwards pointing arrow icon in the top right-hand corner
3. Click Settings
4. Click Account management at the left of the screen
5. Find the Convert to a business account option, then click Convert account
6. Click Convert account
7. Fill in the fields to Build your profile, then click Next
8. Fill in the fields to Describe your business, then click Next
9. Select whether you want to run ads, then click Next
10. Select where you’d like to start or click X to go to your converted Pinterest business account

How much does it cost to use Pinterest for business?

Pinterest doesn’t charge any fees for selling on its platform. You can also set up your business profile and create pins for free.

The only expense associated with Pinterest is if you pay to advertise or run promoted pins on the platform.

If you’re looking to advertise on Pinterest and want to plan your budget, the average cost of Pinterest adverts is roughly $1.50 per click (£1.23).

Whether this sounds like a lot or not for your budget, keep in mind that shopping ads on Pinterest bring a 5 times higher return on ad spend and are 89% more cost effective than other platforms.

How to create Pinterest content that drives traffic and sales

When it comes to being a Pinterest mastermind, there’s a couple of factors to consider if you want to drive traffic and sales.

Here are a couple of best practices to integrate into your Pinterest strategy.

Know the types of content do well on Pinterest

Successful content on Pinterest thrives on innovation and inspiration. Users are drawn to content that feels actionable and enriching.

This includes a range of visually captivating posts such as scenic pictures, practical How-To and DIY guides, enticing recipes for culinary exploration, and anything unusual and creative that sparks their imagination.

The key is to offer ideas that can enhance their lives, whether it’s tried-and-tested healthy weeknight dinners for busy families, favourite self-care routines to promote well-being, or step-by-step guides on upcycling old clothes.

Create Pinterest-friendly images and videos

There are a couple of ways to create Pinterest content that fits the platform’s ethos but also helps boost your brand awareness.

We recommend you subtly brand your Pinterest images, prioritise aesthetics and design, create Pins with multiple images, create step-by-step guides, and join groups and community boards to help expand your reach.

Remember that unlike other social media platforms that drive on User Generated Content, Pinterest is about curating a certain aesthetic and fostering inspiration.

Write effective Pinterest descriptions

Think of Pinterest as another search engine. If you’re not targeting the right keywords with your Pins, it’ll be harder for your target audience to find you.
When you’re writing your description, you should include relevant keywords near the beginning, include your brand name in the first line, hashtags, and have a natural sentence structure (no keyword stuffing!), a call to action, and any other alluring details about the Pin.

Optimise your Pinterest content for search engines

The Pinterest algorithm uses a combination of four factors to determine the order in which pins appear.

This is based on the perceived quality of the website your Pins link to, how much engagement your content is fostering, your account’s overall activity, and the topic relevance of your content based on the keyword.

To rank higher, we recommend you track Pinterest Trends so your content can stay relevant, create rich Pins with SEO-optimised descriptions, create relevant and discoverable boards and pin to relevant boards.

Pinterest analytics to track your results and improve your strategy

Pinterest has powerful analytics tools to help business users understand their performance on the platform.

Here are some of the most important analytics to track and how you can leverage them to improve your Pinterest strategy.

📊 Impressions: this measures the number of times your Pins were shown on a user’s screen. A high Pin impression rate is a good thing as it shows your brand is on trend or the algorithm is picking up on your content. If this is low, you’ll probably want to revisit your Pinterest SEO strategy.

📊 Saves: these tell you how many times someone saved your Pin to one of their boards. This metric is a pretty big deal, as it shows you how well your Pins are resonating with your audience. This also earns you high brand exposure as those saved Pins will show up on the feed of the followers of that account. If you’re not getting that many saves, look up the keyword you’re targeting and try to understand what competing accounts are doing better than you.

📊 Engagements: this measures the total number of times someone clicked or saved your Pin. In other words, it tells you how well your audience is connected with your content. Poor engagement might mean that you need to revisit your target audience and understand what they might need or want from your brand.

📊 Outbound clicks: this indicates the number of clicks to the destination URL in your Pin. This is key as a high outbound click rate indicates people are engaging with your brand and are potentially becoming high quality leads. Make sure it’s easy to reach your website from your Pin to streamline the customer journey as much as possible.

📊 Top converting Pins: you can measure your top Pins based on different conversion goals. This can be Pin clicks, page visits, add to cart, and checkout. This will help you identify which Pins are examples to follow within your Pinterest content strategy.

How to run Pinterest ads to reach a wider audience

Running an ad campaign to reach even more users can make a big difference on the number of sales you can drive. Here are the type of ads you can run on Pinterest:

Idea Pins

Also known as story pins, these are short video segments or up to 20 graphics, designed to draw Pinterest users in with immersive educational content. They’re usually DIY or How-to guides. They look quite similar to Instagram stories, and they let you tag users, add interactive stickers, add voice overs, and have text and graphic overlays.

Pinterest collection ads

These display only for mobile users. These are made up of one large, featured video or image and 3 supporting images. If someone taps on your ad, they can then access up to 24 supporting images, giving them more of a chance to explore your content. These are great for e-commerce brands as it facilitates product discovery. The best part? Pinterest can automatically create these for you.

Carousel ads

These look like organic Pins but contain a group of images that users can swipe through on mobile or desktop. When someone saves this ad, the entire carousel saves as well. These are great for showing products or ideas from different angles, giving users a chance to better interact with your brand.

Promoted pins

These are the simplest type to run on Pinterest, and are a single image or video that shows up on a user’s home feed. The only thing that sets them apart from normal pins is the ‘Promoted’ label at the top.

How much does it cost to advertise on Pinterest?

The average cost per click for a Pinterest ad is £1.23 per click. You can also set a maximum daily budget for your Pinterest ads. On top of this, you also have two options for ad group bidding.

• Custom bidding → you can set the maximum amount to pay for each action in each campaign. There are minimum bids, which vary depending on the ad format.
• Automatic bidding → Pinterest automatically adjusts your bids throughout the day, every single day, to get the most value for your money.

You can track your ad results using Pinterest analytics.

Pinterest for business best practices

Pinterest is a great platform to promote brand awareness and target an audience that has high search intent. Although you’ll have to make sure your content is authentic, inspiring, and optimised for Pinterest’s search engine, the rewards are high if you have a robust marketing strategy. To summarise, here are the main steps to take to become a Pinterest master.