Pinterest Marketing Strategy for Creatives

Pinterest marketing has been an incredibly powerful tool for our business—especially as we’ve shifted away from Instagram, Pinterest has taken an even more important role in generating leads for us.

At our peak Pinterest performance, we were seeing an average of 8 million+ impressions per month. 8 million.

That’s more reach than we could ever achieve on Instagram with our current audience growth trajectory. And even better than that? Content lives on Pinterest forever. It’s evergreen. Pinterest is one of the few media outlets where your content continues to gain traction over time, instead of disappearing into the algorithm abyss after just a few hours.

Through Pinterest marketing, we quadrupled our email list, doubled our website traffic, and booked some of our favorite clients! Want to do the same? Here are our best tips to help you drive traffic to your website via Pinterest!

1. Create an On-Brand Profile

First things first—let’s get your Pinterest profile tidied up and ready for your audience. Set up a business profile and then make sure your boards look cohesive with your brand. You can visit my previous posts here:

– How to Create an On-Brand Pinterest Profile: Part 1
– Creating an On-Brand Pinterest Profile: Part 2

Most importantly, stop using Pinterest for you, and start using it for your audience.

Your pins should serve not to inspire you, but to inspire your audience. Just like your brand, your Pinterest profile and content should be designed to appeal to your ideal client.

2. Create Valuable Core Content

Pinterest basically acts as a visual search engine. Each pin clicks through to a link. That means your pins all need to link back to valuable content.

You cannot convert a Pinterest audience unless the content behind your pins is valuable.

The good news is: you can get so much traction out of your content.

You can create multiple Pinterest graphics linking back to the same core content… which means that for any piece of content you create, you can generate unlimited traffic on Pinterest.

So, it’s important to start with a solid foundation. I recommend creating 3–5 pieces of solid content that provide value for your Pinterest audience.

Your content could be any combination of the following:

– Blog Post
– Website Page
– Email Freebie Opt-In
– Podcast Episode / Shownotes
– Product Offer (discount code, etc.)
– Resource Library Access

Need help coming up with content? Think about frequent questions you get from your audience. How can you help answer their questions before they even ask? What can you do to answer their pain points and give them a small (yet tangible) win?

3. Create a Variety of Graphics for Core Content

Once you have a few solid pieces of content that can appeal to your audience, it’s time to actually create the pins that link back to that content.

Like I mentioned above, you can create infinite graphics for the same post. We generally create about a dozen graphics per post (or more, if the post performs well!). Each graphic is designed in a long format, so it shows up nicely on Pinterest. You can always browse our Pinterest profile for inspiration!

^ These Pinterest graphics all link back to the same content: my free Typography Handbook. More graphics = more links back to my site!

You can custom-design your own Pinterest graphics, or you can purchase some Pinterest Templates on Creative Market if you need help with the design elements.

4. Make Your Graphics Clickable

Impressions (aka views) are helpful as you are building your audience and your brand… getting more eyes on your content can help reach new audiences and build brand recognition.

But you don’t just want impressions… you also want engagement. Engagement is the most important metric because it tells you how many people are actually engaging with your pin and clicking over to your website (where you can impress them and convert them into a client!).

Focus on engagement to encourage higher interactions with your pins and drive more clicks to your website. How do you make a graphic more clickable? Ask people to click!

Include a Call to Action (CTA) that prompts viewers to take the next step toward engaging with your pin. Here’s a list of some CTAs you can use:

– Click Here to Download
– Click Here to Learn More
– Click Here to Read More
– Click Here to Get Started
– Download Now
– Download the Freebie Here
– Learn More
– Read More
– Read the Post
– Grab Your Spot
– Unlock Your Free Access
– Grab Your Discount
– Save this Pin for Later

*Tip: include your website URL in the graphic too. It’s just one more spot where you can reinforce your brand and drive traffic back to your site!

5. Join Tailwind

Like, right now—click here to sign up. Tailwind will take your Pinterest marketing to an entirely new level. Tailwind is an incredible tool for scheduling Pinterest posts, so you can batch entire weeks of content at a time (we currently have content scheduled for the next 4 months!).

Upload all of those graphics you created, paste the corresponding link to your content, and write a quick description for each pin. Then, you can use Tailwind to automatically schedule and auto-post all of your graphics!

Next, use Tailwind to recycle your most popular pins via “Loops,” ensuring that your top-performing pins get refreshed traction on a regular basis.

To take it a step further, Tailwind has a “Communities” feature, where you can collaborate with other members to cross-share your pins. This helps get your content in front of new audiences!

6. Look at Pinterest Marketing Analytics

Every few weeks, go to www.analytics.pinterest.com to see how your pins are performing. Pinterest offers fairly robust insights into your content performance—so you can evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

Pay special attention to trends and patterns: what are the common threads among your top-performing pins?

• Is there one blog post or podcast episode that performs better than all the others? Make more graphics linking back to that post, and consider creating more content revolving around that topic in the future.

• Which CTAs get the most clicks? You might notice that free downloads get more engagement than podcast shownotes, or that graphics with a “Click Here” button perform well.
  
• Which design layouts get the best engagement? Maybe one of your pin graphics is more eye-catching than others, and tends to get the most clicks. For us, pin graphics with lighter backgrounds tend to be more successful than graphics with dark backgrounds. It’s the little things! Learn from the analytics and adjust your designs as necessary.

This will help you evaluate your content (and your graphics) for future Pinterest marketing.

7. Update Old Content

Lastly… It’s good practice to revisit your evergreen content every once in awhile and make updates for your newer site visitors.

Because Pinterest links live forever, you can still get new traffic to old content. Rather than delete any old pages or posts, it’s better to maintain your links and leverage them to work for your new audience.

For example—one of my most popular traffic sources is a blog post from two years ago: Dubsado vs. Honeybook: Which CRM is Right for You?

Since the date when I originally published the post, both platforms have released new features… so I’ve edited the post multiple times to include the latest features from each CRM. This helps keep the content feeling relevant for any new site visitors—even though the post is over two years old.

Whenever you notice traffic incoming to an old post, be sure to revisit the content. You can edit, make updates, and add new email opt-ins to make your old content work for you!

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What I love most about Pinterest marketing is that it leverages good, solid content. It provides evergreen traction for valuable content that truly serves your audience—and it ultimately drives traffic back to your website, which is exactly where we want your audience to land.

With this post in mind, it’s time to start driving traffic to YOUR website! Let us know how Pinterest marketing strategy benefits your business… and be sure to connect with us on Pinterest and Tailwind—we’d love to pin with you!