Pinterest Outlines How to Optimize Your Pin Marketing Approach

Are you considering adding Pinterest into your social media marketing approach?

You probably should. The product discovery focused app is now up to 570 million users, who mostly come to the platform with a level of shopping intent. Less a social media platform than an online mall, with ever-improving search tools, used right, Pinterest can connect you with a range of opportunities, and buy-ready shoppers looking for your products.

When used right.

That’s where this new guide from Pinterest comes in, providing a complete overview of the Pinterest business process, and how you can use both its organic and paid options to best effect.

You can check out Pinterest’s full overview here, but in this post, we’ll outline the key steps.

1. Upload your product catalog

Pinterest’s first key step is to feed your product catalog into the app, which will power your Pin listings.

“Merchants with Catalogs have seen 5x more impressions than those who don’t. This foundational step puts your products in front of potential buyers across the platform.”

You can learn more about Pinterest’s catalog ingestion process here.

2. Optimize your listings

With your catalog feed connected, you also need to ensure that all of the relevant metadata is listed with each of your items, including relevant keywords, high-quality visuals, and informative descriptions and titles.

Pinterest also suggests that brands monitor feed heath to avoid any errors that could restrict opportunities, while adding more products, if you can, improves performance.

“Upload more products for stronger performance. Feeds with more than 2,500 products have seen over 3x higher ROAS. By increasing the number of products in your Catalog, Pinterest machine learning has more options to test and choose from, helping it identify the best item to serve for each impression to each user.”

I mean, 2,500 products is a lot, but the point is the more variation you have available, the more options Pinterest’s system has to show your products to the right users.

3. Expand your opportunities

Pinterest advises that brands should look to maximize their opportunities by making all of their Pins shoppable, and adding products to themed boards.

“As over 25% of Pinterest’s SEO traffic leads to boards, adding your products makes them highly discoverable.”

Pinterest also notes that shoppable collages with price details, availability, and a direct link to your site will help Pinners take action.

“Notably, collages are saved at 2x the rate of other types of Pins.”

While Pinterest also notes that brands should claim their Instagram account in the app to facilitate expanded connection.

“With over 75,000 Pins coming from Instagram daily, tagging these Pins could drive traffic directly to your product pages.”

4. Pinterest ads

Once you’ve established your profile, you can then run Pinterest ads, with a range of evolving ad options to choose from.

• Pinterest continues to add more options to its shopping ads, including sales indicators that automatically highlight price changes. You can also import campaigns from Shopify into Pinterest Ads Manager. 
• Pinterest’s recently added Performance+ ads utilize AI matching to get your promotions in front of the right people.
• Catalog ads enable you to upload images and videos to build diverse ad types, including lifestyle, UGC, or influencer ads.
• Pinterest also offers mobile deep-linking, which brings interested users direct to a URL in your native app. “Advertisers using mobile deep links have seen a 235% lift in conversion rates and 34% lower CPAs.”

Once you’ve implemented your strategy. you can continue to measure your results, and iterate on each element, in order to refine and improve your Pin marketing efforts.

Some handy tips, including newer Pin ad options and tools, which you may not have considered.

There are even more tips in Pinterest’s full overview here.