Pinterest for Business Tutorial

There are currently over 150 million active users on this platform and is steadily on the increase. One fact that you may find quite surprising is that over 80% of the users are females while only 7% of men actually pin on it. While this is the case an impressive 87% of users that pin on this platform will purchase something because of Pinterest.

Now with those stats in mind, I’m going to help you understand how to optimise your Pinterest account and make it work for your business.

What is Pinterest

The best way to think about Pinterest is by comparing it to a notice board you might find in a school or an office. Every user has their own notice board and it’s up to them to populate it with information. Other users can then visit these notice boards and click on any information they find interesting just like someone passing by a real life notice board in a hallway.

For example, if you are a marketing business. You can go ahead and pin marketing related topics and ideas to your board. Other people can then view your board and even contribute themselves.

So now you’ve got a better idea of the format you’re probably wondering what people use it for.

  • Bookmarking ideas, recipes, tutorials etc.
  • Promoting your business
  • Advertising
  • Promoting products and services
  • Driving traffic to your website or blog

Next are a few terms that are used to describe certain actions within Pinterest:

Pinning – This is simply to bookmark something.

Pin Board – This is the board that all of your pins will go. You can separate all of your pins here and organise your boards in any way you’d like.

When signing up for Pinterest you have 2 options. A personal account and a business account. I’ll quickly explain the differences between the 2 account options:

Personal Account

  • This account is tailored more towards people looking to promote their blog etc.
  • It’s an account set up for just first and last name basis
  • It is used for sharing personal content
  • You can only enter a limited amount of information

Business Account

The business account is a little different to the personal account.

  • There is an analytics panel for tracking your conversion etc.
  • It is tailored more towards advertising things like brands services products etc.
  • You can name your account as a business name and not a persons.
  • You can further optimise your content with meta tags etc.

Setting Up Your Account

In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to make Pinterest work for your business so we’ll set up a business account. First, head to the Pinterest for Business.

This will take you to a little introduction page, which tells you a little bit about what features are available. Click on the “sign up” button.

Pinterest is a completely free platform, all you have to enter is your email address, password and name of your business. You can also enter your website URL here if you have one.

The first thing you’ll notice on your dashboard is the menu options running along the top.

The layout here is pretty simple, on the left-hand side is your business account features and the right is your profile settings.

Pinterest has a few main features:

  • Messaging – This is what users can use to interact with each other which acts as a private messaging system. When using a business account you can also contact target users which can come in handy.
  • Commenting – You can comment on pins that other people have shared and created.
  • Sharing – You can share any pins that you find interesting with other social accounts.

Live Home Feed

Your home feed is what you see as soon as you log in. This is based on categories that you would have chosen when you sign up. Categories are a bunch of different topics such as technology, health and fitness, food etc. You can follow as many of these topics as you’d like.

Before I get into the rest of what Pinterest has to offer, I’ll first go over the general settings.

Settings

This section is where you go to bulk up your account profile and can set the different notifications that you receive. Pinterest will automatically send out any alerts that you’ve set straight to your email address.

Above is a picture of a typical home feed that you might find on Pinterest. On the main feed is topics and information that Pinterest believe you will like based on the categories that you have chosen to follow. Along the top of the feed is a bar that contains everything you can do on Pinterest. On the left-hand side is the two options relating to the business account only labelled “Analytics” and “Ads”.

Next to this is a search bar that you can use to search for any topic you can think of. Then on the right-hand side, you have a little notifications icon along with the options relating to your account’s profile.

In the profile feed, you will also be able to see a few of your own stats including how many followers, likes and how many people you are following.

Creating a Pin

So before we can get into the advertising side of things, we need to first create a pin to advertise.

Creating a pin is just like adding a post to Facebook or creating a tweet for Twitter. The first thing that you’ll be asked for is a picture and a website URL. (If you want to promote your pin then it has to have a website to link back to so be sure to do this.)  After this section, you can enter a little information about your pin along with a title.

Once you have created your first pin, you will need to add to what is called a board. Your board should be relating to one or similar topics. It means that when someone visits one of your pins, they can then view your board and have topics which they will most likely be interested in. A board can hold up to 10 pins within it before you need to create a new one.

Now that you’ve got a pin up on your board and ready, you can go on to start advertising it.

Ads

The ads section is only available to business accounts. This doesn’t cost you any extra and your personal account can be switched to business pretty quickly. However, if you want to actively advertise within Pinterest then you will be charged based on a number of different factors.

Pinterest lets you run advertising campaigns within their platform which really helps people understand the level of work you can get. Now there are a few different types that you can set up here and Pinterest gives you quite a nice setup wizard to start.

In this example, I’m going to set up an engagement campaign for a fake coffee shop.

Once you click on the “ads” section, you’ll be made with a popup screen that will talk you through a bit of Pinterest advertising. First, you’ll need to enter your location(country) that you’ll be advertising from which then leads you to the picture above.

There are 4 options you can choose from, each of which helps achieve a different goal from your marketing campaign:

  • Brand Awareness – This method is quite similar to the likes of Facebook marketing or Google AdWords in which you will appear in popular parts of Pinterest for people to see. Pinterest will charge you a certain fee per 1,000 impressions
  • Boost engagement with your Pins – Here is where you can track how people are interacting with your pins and you can push any of your pins into the eyes of your target market.
  • Get Traffic to your Website – This allows you to advertise your website on Pinterest. You will get charged per click to your website.
  • Increase Installs for your Apps – This campaign is tailored to encourage people to download your app directly from Pinterest.

Once you select one of these, you’ll be asked to enter the name of your campaign and an optional maximum spend. This can come in pretty useful if you are setting this up for a client for example and have been given a certain budget.

After you’ve selected your campaign style, it’s time to set your target audience and budgets:

Ad group name – This is a name that best summarises your business and target group. In my case it would be something like “coffee shop for all ages”. This name will only be seen by you so there’s no need to overthink this.

Start and end dates – Here is where you set what kind of budget you’ll be running this campaign on. The two main options are to run it continuously every day or to choose specific dates that you want it to run.

Ad group budget – Each of these require you to set a daily budget and there is a lifetime budget option for the specific dates. If you have a weekly or monthly budget in mind then you could calculate and divide it into a daily budget. For example, if you only want to spend £100 over a 5 day week, then you could set your daily budget at £20 which means your budget has been split evenly and won’t run over your weekly allowance.

Interests – This is where you choose which topics your company falls into so that Pinterest can place your ads within the correct home and category feeds.

Keywords – The key words section helps you target people that search for certain keywords in their search bar. It also helps Pinterest understand the categories that you belong to.

Locations – Here you can select the location that you want your promoted pins to appear.

Languages – The default is set to all languages, but you can select ones that are only relevant to you.

Devices – You can choose which devices you want your ad to show on. This can come in handy for businesses that are looking to target people locally for example. In our coffee shop example, you can choose to only show your ad on mobile devices.

Genders – If your target market is gender specific then you can also change that option.

Maximum CPE bid – First of all, I’ll need to explain that you that you need to find a level of work that you can. This is different from your budget. The budget is your overall spent you have to spend per day(s) and your bid is the amount of money you’ll be charged per click. Pinterest will calculate how much you should be bidding best in your target market. It will then use a system to tell you which is the minimum amount to spend to be considered a strong bid anything underneath will be considered good or low.

Now that you’ve worked your way through this list and set your budget and bid price, it’s time for you select a pin to promote.

Above is a picture of the pin that we had created earlier, if you’ve been following this then you should see your own pin ready for promotion.

Next up is adding in your pin details. The pin name is the next important factor in your ad. It’s entirely up to yourself whether your pin has a promoted name, if not then Pinterest will use the original pin title. Under this is the “Destination URL”. Here’s where you choose the exact page on your site that you want the user to land on after they’ve clicked on your pin.

After you’re happy with your setup, it’s time to go live with your pin.

The next stage is adding your business information. What you need is a business name, address and Tax information. The tax info can be left out if your business doesn’t require you to register for VAT, just make sure that you check the box to indicate that is the case.

Finally, you add the billing details. Pinterest requires you to fill out a billing address and your card details. You will only be charged when someone clicks on your ad so you don’t need to worry about money coming out of your account as soon as the details are entered.

Read more: SEMRush Topic Research Tool

Clicking on the “Submit” button will send your ad for review by Pinterest. There is a set of guidelines that you can view here, which shows you what Pinterest expects from your promoted pin. The review process can take up to 24 hours before it goes live.

Analytics

Analytics is the other feature that is unique to a Pinterest business account. After you’ve promoted an ad, you can come to this section to see how it’s performing.

There are 3 main categories that this is split into:

  • Pinterest Profile
  • People you reach
  • Your Website’s Pinterest stats

Each of these main categories can tell you a good bit about how your Pinterest account and any pins that you’ve been promoting.

The Pinterest profile section is all of the stats relating to your profile itself such as views and impressions. It’s split into the following 3 tabs:

  • Saves
  • Clicks
  • All-time

People you reach is where you can see your overall views that you’re getting from all of your pins. You can view these stats over a week, two weeks or a month. There’s even a filter there that you can select which devices the users have used for example. You can also see what kind of demographics that your pins are reaching.

Lastly, your websites stats give you some insight into how many people are visiting your Pinterest using a button that you can easily place.

Pinterest provides you with some pretty straight forward instructions on how to add their button to your website. Once it’s there, Pinterest will track any clicks and what page it came from.

Read more: On-Page SEO Tools – Surfer, Cora, PageOptimizer Pro

To Sum Up

This is another social account that you can add to your list marketing avenues. The business account features make it very easy advertise for any type of company making Pinterest very appealing. While it’s not the biggest platform in the world and the demographics are very skewed in one direction, it can only help drive traffic to your business.

Need help with your social media, digital marketing, and SEO campaigns? Use the button below to reach out and find out how we can be of assistance!

 

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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.

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