7 Tips to Master Your Pinterest Strategy for Business in 2022

Marketing Tips

Apr 25

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Today I am going to give you seven, yes seven, tips for optimizing your Pinterest growth. Pinterest is an amazing platform for entrepreneurs and today I'm going to teach you the correct strategy to use it in 2022.

When you are using organic strategies, it is incredibly, incredibly important that you are focused on platforms where your content is going to live longer.

What do I mean by this?

When you're posting on Instagram or you're posting on Facebook, typically your content will live anywhere between five to 24 hours. Now, obviously with the introduction of Instagram Reels, which Instagram really wants you to use, your content can live longer. However, it's still not performing for months and years like Pinterest does.

In fact, the reason Pinterest is such a powerful platform for entrepreneurs is that it can continuously drive traffic to your brand and to your website for years to come.

I have multiple blog posts that I shared on Pinterest in the beginning of my business that still drive thousands of views every single month to my website without ad spend. Now yes, I am also using ad spend because I've been using Pinterest since 2017. I jumped on that bandwagon early, and I know how to use the platform to its greatest potential, which is why I do incorporate ad spend in my strategy.

However, what I'm going to share with you today are seven ways that you can use Pinterest to your advantage in an organic fashion, meaning you do not have to invest any money into that platform.

I've already shared that utilizing a platform like Pinterest is incredibly important because of the longevity that it creates for your content. But let's also talk about something else we're super passionate about here at Brandmerry and that is SEO, search engine optimization.

We often think about SEO when it comes to Google. This is essentially how your content, your website, is categorized on the Google platform. When we, the consumer, go to Google and look for something in particular, we get results that are relevant to our search terms.

Well guess what? Pinterest is the exact same way. As an entrepreneur, as a marketer, you should immediately be going, “Oh, this makes sense,” because not only is your content living longer but you can also tell Pinterest how you want your content categorized so that when your ideal customer searches for particular keywords, that are relevant to your brand, your business will come up.

That means that the type of consumer, the type of ideal customer, the type of traffic that you're driving to your website has a higher purchase intent than a different platform like Facebook or Instagram.

Traditionally Facebook and Instagram were designed to keep users on the platform. Pinterest has always been designed to take users off of the platform. I hope you see how powerful this platform can be for your business.

This is something that we teach in depth. We have an entire course dedicated to Pinterest growth strategies inside of my program, Brandmerry Academy. But today, you're getting a sneak peek at exactly what we teach inside of that program.

And I swear, I'm getting to the seven steps, but there's one other thing that I need to mention. Just like all platforms, Pinterest has changed a lot over the years and there are a lot of users who are using the platform incorrectly. They're using outdated and old strategies that aren't working for them and can sometimes actually get them in trouble on the platform. Pinterest, just like many platforms, likes to change without letting anyone know.

Actually in 2021, we noticed a giant drop in my monthly views and through digging, through reaching out to my Pinterest contact, through reaching out to my Pinterest ads manager, we were able to quickly change our strategy and get up to date with the standards.

This is what we teach inside of the Academy and we're always updating our trainings to make sure we're delivering the very, very best strategy to our clients. What I'm sharing with you right now is how you can use Pinterest to gain consistent traffic and consistent sales to your business in 2022.

If you're interested in all the changes that we've seen happen on the platform, how I've adapted over the years since first getting on the platform in 2017, you can check out this recent podcast that I did all about Pinterest growth.

All right, without further ado, let's get into the seven in ways that you can optimize your growth on Pinterest.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #1: SET UP A BUSINESS ACCOUNT

When you are setting up your account, it's incredibly important to set up a business account. This is going to give you the information that you want on the back end, including analytics, so you can start to see what is working well for your platform, what is performing well, and what's driving the most traffic. You can tap into that information and really duplicate that for your brand and your business.

It's going to help you optimize your growth. But one thing that people often forget when they're creating their account, are their boards.

Now, your boards are incredibly important. This is not the time to create fluffy board names. You want to make sure that your boards are optimized for the search engine that Pinterest is.

That means your titles and your descriptions on your boards, including the types of pins that you're putting on those boards, are incredibly important. We recommend that business owners choose five core categories that are relevant to their brand, relevant to what they teach, or what they offer, and start there.

Optimize those and consistently add new boards. You can have as many boards as you want and that's one of the cool strategies that we teach inside of the Academy to really understand how to create boards as your brand and your presence on Pinterest expands.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #2: CREATE WEEKLY CONTENT

The second thing that is going to make your life on Pinterest a lot easier is weekly content. Now the idea and the purpose of Pinterest is of course, to drive traffic to your website. So having consistent content on your website is really going to make your life easier on Pinterest because it's going to give you things to share.

You can also share content from your YouTube. I share my YouTube videos on Pinterest. You can also share from your Instagram, from your TikTok, from any different platforms where you want to drive traffic.

However, at Brandmerry, we are big believers in the power of a website. We want to drive consistent traffic to your website, where you control the narrative, where you have your offers, your freebies, and information on how to get in touch with you, you're going to create more consistent traffic that'll equal leads and sales. Rather than maybe sending someone to Instagram where they can very easily get distracted.

It's highly recommended that you create weekly content that lives on your website and this is why inside of Brandmerry Academy, we're talking to our clients and teaching our clients how to use blogging to their advantage.

Whether your blogs are written or you're transcribing a YouTube video or you're putting your show notes from a podcast, you have a piece of content every single week that you've created that you can then share and optimize for Pinterest.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #3: CONSISTENT PINNING

The third thing that is incredibly important about Pinterest is consistent pinning. One of the mistakes that many entrepreneurs make is they pin their blog posts once, maybe every Thursday, and then they leave the platform.

They're not showing up on Pinterest, consistently creating fresh content. As a business account, which is what of course you're going to create on Pinterest when you get started, Pinterest wants you to create fresh content because you are the brands and the businesses that are pushing fresh content on the platform that consumers can re-pin and click through and interact.

So Pinterest relies on us business users to create fresh content. And that means that you need to be consistently creating content on the platform so that Pinterest likes you. Let's be honest. So that they want to push out your content and show it to the people who ultimately need it.

Having a consistent pinning strategy is incredibly important.

Now, as I shared in a recent podcast episode, this has changed. This has changed a lot. We used to pin 30 to 50 pins a day. I know, it's crazy. There was a lot of re-pinning happening back then.

Now, luckily you can get away with very few pins every single day. Established accounts can do anywhere between one to five pins a day and newer accounts, we recommend five to 10. Now this doesn't have to be every single day but you want to create a consistent strategy for you and your brand. Maybe to start, you're showing up three days a week and you're pinning five to 10 pins on those three days.

One of the things that I recommend my clients do is invest in a platform called Tailwind. Tailwind will allow you to pre schedule your content, put your board name in, put your title, description, all of that and actually see when your content is going to be going out on the platform.

This is something that we do at Brandmerry. We pre schedule an entire month's worth of content and we teach our clients how to do it as well inside of Brandmerry Academy. Now you can schedule directly on the Pinterest platform, which is a great option if you are pinching pennies in your business. But we find Tailwind to be the best for longterm Pinterest growth.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #4: CREATE FRESH PINS

Now, number four, kind of piggybacks off of what we just talked about and it's in regards to fresh pins. If you've been following Pinterest for any length of time, trying to tap into the strategy or just listening to what everyone's been saying about the platform, you know that at around 2020, 2021, everyone was freaking out about fresh pins.

What did it mean?
What did Pinterest really want?

And essentially what Pinterest wants is fresh content on their platform. It doesn't mean that you have to create a new blog post every single day and then create a new pin for that. What they want are fresh pins, fresh graphics, fresh titles, and fresh descriptions. They can link to the same blog post but on their platform, they want fresh content for their users.

Remember, we are a business account so we're the ones creating the content for the platform.

What does this mean for you? This means that re-pinning is basically not necessary anymore as an established brand and business owner. In fact, you don't want to just go on the platform and re-pin a bunch of other people's content. That's just making you a user of the platform. You need to be the one creating the content. So fresh content is incredibly important and that means fresh pins on the platform.

We recommend that if you have one blog post, you create multiple variations of different kinds of pins for that blog post. Maybe you have pin number one, which has a really big image in the background and some text over it. Pin number two is a solid background with some different text on it. Pin number three, it's got a picture of you and some different text. They're different variations going to the same blog post.

This is a pretty in depth strategy. You can get real fancy with it, which is something that we teach inside of Brandmerry Academy because we're all about saving time. As you're listening to this whole fresh pin concept, it seems like it might take a long time. If you want to streamline that, I highly recommend you check out Brandmerry Academy but a quick little way to do this for you and your brand is to create templates in Canva and then every time you create a new piece of content on your website, you just need to plug in information, change out colors and change out pictures as needed.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #5: SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

My fifth Pinterest growth tip for you is to schedule your content at the appropriate times. This is again why I love Tailwind because Tailwind will actually tell you when your followers or when your users are on Pinterest. Which means that those are the times when they recommend pushing out your content.

This has been incredibly helpful for us at Brandmerry, as we have struck back the number of pins we're doing every day. Some days I'm only doing one piece of content on Pinterest but if I'm just creating one pin and I'm putting it out on the platform, I want to make sure that it's going out at the appropriate time.

We have found that Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are really, really effective days for us in terms of getting impressions and clicks and saves on our content. Using a tool like Tailwind can actually help you optimize your pinning strategy on the platform even more.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #6: USE IDEA PINS

Okay, I cannot do a Pinterest growth strategy video without talking about idea pins. Idea pins, which used to be story pins but quickly changed their name to idea pins on the platform, are essentially Pinterest's new big thing.

When idea pins were first launched, they were designed to live for 24 hours. They were little bubbles on our mobile devices. Anyone you followed, you could see their idea pins. But as Pinterest has been pushing more and more, idea pins have now become searchable and they have been what Pinterest is really wanting users to tap into.

Now, there are pros and cons to idea pins. One of the major cons is that at the time of this recording, you cannot click through on an idea pin. They're really there to create brand awareness, which isn't a bad thing, as you probably know, if you follow us here at Brandmerry.

Brand awareness is incredibly important. It's the first stage of a strong marketing strategy. But the negative is that what we love about Pinterest is the ability to click through, but you can’t do that yet with Idea pins.

Now, I think the ability to click through is definitely coming very, very soon but for now, what we have found works really well is to just put the link that we want to share in the note section of our idea pin and inform our audience that they can copy and paste and put that into their browser.

It's not perfect but you know what? It does work. And more than anything, we have noticed that idea pins drive a lot of traffic to our profile and they get way more views. In fact, if I post a video on Instagram Reels, I will repurpose it as an idea pin on Pinterest and I typically get two to three times the number of views on Pinterest that I do on Instagram. So this is just another way that you can use existing content to show up and create idea pins.

Creating an idea pin it's super easy. You just go to your mobile device and log into Pinterest or you can do it on desktop, choose create or the little plus sign on mobile, idea pin and create your idea pin. Integrating at least one idea pin a week in your strategy plays nice with Pinterest, increases brand awareness, and is really helpful for the growth of your account.

OPTIMIZE PINTEREST GROWTH TIP #7: REPIN WELL PERFORMING CONTENT

And that leads me to my seventh and final tip for your Pinterest growth strategy and that is to recreate content that's doing really well on the platform.

Remember all the way at the beginning when I talked about your business account and why it was so important? This is one of the reasons why it is so important. Every 30 days it is important to check your analytics and see what type of content is doing well. You can learn a lot by looking at your Pinterest analytics.

What type of pins do well?
What type of content does well?

What you're ultimately looking for are clicks to your website. If something is getting a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, that means that the type of content that you're creating is great but it's not enticing people enough to click through.

You could recreate those types of pins to have more call to actions on the graphic themselves. If something is not getting huge impressions but getting a lot of clicks, you might want to recreate that pin and test out some new keywords.

This is a great way to repurpose your existing content. As I mentioned, fresh pins are important and you can simply look at your analytics and create new pins for existing content. You can see why this is such a powerful platform. It's not 100% reliant on you constantly coming up with something new. You can use the data available to you to actually re engage your audience or test out new things to see if that will drive traffic to your website.

CONCLUSION

You can probably tell that I'm super obsessed with the Pinterest platform. We have seen just incredible growth in my business from harnessing this amazing free tool for entrepreneurs.

Now of course, Tailwind, which you can add on, has a fee and if you want to invest in ads, which I also highly recommend down the line, that is also going to be a fee. But if you are just getting started, you can start for free on this platform. And I am telling you, the sooner you start, the better. That is why most of the people who join us inside of Brandmerry Academy, love to start with the Pinterest module.

When you jump inside Brandmerry Academy, you're getting a plethora of content on copywriting, your website, branding, search engine optimization, blogging, video and of course, Pinterest. And many, many of our new members love to jump directly into this module because they have access to all of the courses at once. If you want to learn more about Brandmerry Academy, you can go to brandmerryacademy.com.

And if you want to learn more about my strategy when it comes to marketing, why I love evergreen content, and some of my top tips for you, you can watch my free class where I am teaching you my Build a Better Brand Method, which yes, includes how you share your brand with the world. You can go to brandmerry.com/class to learn more about our approach to marketing, how you can use it in your business and some more details on the academy to see if it's the right fit for you.

P.S. Ready to get your brand seen and paid without the pressure of social media? I'm teaching my top strategies inside of my new free class, "How to Build a Brand That Gets Seen and Paid!" You're invited to tune in and learn my signature 3-part framework for a sustainable 6-figure brand. Sign up to watch for free at Brandmerry.com/class