Lesson 2 – Pinterest Essentials: Small Business Marketing for Beginners

What features make Pinterest a good choice for your business? How do you go about using it to promote your website or company?

Many people will use Pinterest primarily for researching ideas and getting inspiration. If they enjoy interior design, graphic design, fashion or fitness, they’ll likely have lots of boards relating to that topic. What’s more, they’ll probably be following some other boards created by big brands in those niches.

As a brand, your objective is to be ‘one of those brands’ that people follow, and to use this as an opportunity to show off your products, your services, and your website, so that you get more visitors, more leads, and more business.

This is easy, if you should happen to work in one of the industries that is particularly popular on Instagram. If you create wedding decorations, for instance, then all you need to do is to create a board dedicated to wedding decorations and then let people pin the items they find there or browse your site for ideas.

The more people you can get to follow you, the more people will see your products, will be exposed to your brand, and will convert into leads and buyers. This ultimately means that you can get a lot of traffic and engagement from a well thought-out Pinterest board.

What will help here is the ability to easily add links to your website, specific articles, and blog posts. If you choose a ‘Pin From the Web’ extension, such as this one in Chrome or Firefox, you can then visit a URL and select an image from that website to go along with it.

Under the pin, it will read ‘Pinned from,’ and you can click that link to visit the blog post or article where it was originally posted.

This means that people can follow your boards to stay up-to-date with your new articles and blog posts as well, which they may choose to do if Pinterest is their preferred platform.

Beyond the basic features, there are also some more advanced options and tools on Pinterest that are going to be especially useful to marketers.

One example is ‘Rich Pins‘. These have been around since September 2013, and they have adopted the concept of posting links to blogs and articles and then building on that information.

The advantage to Rich Pins is that you can add extra information about the article you are pinning, such as the title, the site name, the description, and the author. This makes your blog and article links considerably more appealing and it encourages people to click on them.

There are three types of Rich Pins. The first, ‘Article Pins’, show the title, the meta description (snippet), publish date, and sometimes the author’s name.

A second type of Rich Pin, that is particularly interesting for marketers, are ‘Buyable Pins‘. As the name suggests, Buyable Pins are pins showing products that are for sale.

If, for example, you are browsing Pinterest and see an item of clothing, a desktop accessory, or maybe a piece of furniture that you like, then you can simply click to buy it.

In the iPad and iPhone apps, the ‘Pin It’ button is now accompanied by a ‘Buy It’ button that lets users immediately purchase products they’re interested in. By the end of the very first month of its inception in June 2015, there were already 2 million of these pins on the site.

Pinterest has long been popular as a tool for window shopping. When users are skimming through brand boards for ideas about wedding decorations, things to wear, or things to decorate their house with, they will often follow the links to buy the products or may later search for the product on their own.

However, with Buyable Pins, they can purchase the product directly through Pinterest. This turns your Pinterest board into an eCommerce store, meaning that anything on your website can now easily be purchased through Pinterest.

If someone has amassed a selection of items they find inspiring for their wedding, they can eventually whittle that selection down just to the things they want and click to buy. This removes the barrier to sale and creates a much thinner line between a ‘product discovery’ and a sale. It’s very simple and easy and it’s the ideal option for selling products or services.

The third type of Rich Pin is a ‘Recipe Pin’. These pins make it easy to see exactly what a recipe calls for without leaving Pinterest. Recipe Pins can include title, ingredients, cooking times, serving information, and ratings.

Finally, Pinterest also provides a large amount of analytics data. To get access to this, you’ll need to convert your personal account to a business account and, at the same time, you’ll need to verify the domain linked to your account by either uploading an HTML file or adding a piece of code to your website.

From there, you’ll then be able to see what pins are getting pinned from your website or blog. This, in turn, lets you curate content that is really performing well and engaging your audience.

Can you promote your blog or business with a personal account? Of course you can… to an extent. But, there are some considerable advantages to making the switch.

To start, Pinterest actually requires you to make your Pinterest account a business one if you intend on using it to profit.

While it’s unlikely they’ll clamp down on you for posting links to your website, you should switch if you want to tow the official line. Their statement on the matter is:

“If you’re using Pinterest as part of how you make a living, whether by driving traffic to a blog that makes you some money or to build your personal brand to find customers for your products or services, you should sign up for a business account and agree to our Business Terms of Service.”

Once you have a Pinterest business account, you’ll be able to display your company or brand name as the title of your Pinterest profile instead of your first and last name, you’ll be able to get insider tips and strategies from Pinterest (there are many free educational courses teaching beginners how to make the most of Pinterest), and you’ll be able to verify your website.

As mentioned, it’s this latter step that enables you to see which of your photos and images are getting shared on Pinterest, getting repined, and getting commented on.

Verifying your URL also has another benefit – it adds your hyperlink to the top of your profile. This now means that anyone who discovers your Pinterest account will be able to quickly discover your website as well, and that means more traffic, more clicks, more leads, and more sales for your business!

Business accounts are also allowed to host contests through their Pinterest, a great boost to marketers, which is something we’ll be looking at further in this series.

First, we need to understand how the Pinterest 2021 interface works.

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