Hi, my name is Meg and I love experimenting with Pinterest marketing strategies!
I’ve been running Frost + Sun for 5 years and Pinterest is a big reason why my blog continues to grow.
In fact, my Pinterest account helped me go from growing but profitless to still growing and profitable.
If you’re ready to work in a new marketing strategy for your blog, keep reading for my top Pinterest marketing strategies for success this year.
Take advantage of new pin styles
For many years, Pinterest only had 1 pin style: a standard image with or without text.
Over the past 2 years or so, they’ve slowly rolled out video pins and story pins.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if Pinterest adds even more pin styles!
Pinterest has publicly stated that they want to encourage content creators to spend more time creating unique content specifically for their platform.
Video pins are quite similar to standard pins, except instead of using an image, it uses a video clip as the background.
Story pins are similar to Instagram stories and slideshows: several pins strung together to help walk users through multiple points or steps.
Pinterest loves variety (as do its users!), so when a new pin style rolls out, I highly recommend including them as one of your Pinterest marketing strategies.
My favorite Pinterest marketing strategy: the Pinterest Trends tool
Pinterest Trends is a free tool for business accounts that tracks how well topics do over time.
If your content is clearly aligned with a certain timeframe, such as a season or holiday, you can easily determine when to promote it on Pinterest.
But if it’s not, you’re kind of left in the dark as to when you should promote it.
You might falsely believe a pin that doesn’t do well is due to the pin design or worse blindly blame it on “the algorithm.”
Pinterest Trends will help you avoid all of that by providing you with data to help you determine when you should and shouldn’t promote a post.
And if you do promote a post during a lull, you’ll know why.
BONUS: Pinterest Trends can help you come up with new blog post ideas that will do well on Pinterest, too!
It’s all about keywords
While Pinterest is a visual search engine, it still relies on text to help sort and rank pins, boards, and even your profile!
Make sure you use a mix of keywords anywhere there is text: your profile, your board names and descriptions, and most importantly, pin titles and descriptions.
Without keywords, Pinterest doesn’t have a way to tell what your content is about.
Now, this doesn’t mean just dumping keywords into any empty box.
You don’t want to abandon potential readers once you’ve stopped their scroll with your pin design.
Use your keywords in a sentence that helps Pinterest users understand what your content is about.
If they can’t quickly determine what your pin is about, they’ll keep scrolling.
Get rid of old Pinterest marketing strategies
As new Pinterest features are released, your Pinterest marketing strategy should be adjusted.
Keep reading for two strategies to avoid this year.
Pin intentionally and thoughtfully
A common Pinterest strategy used to be pinning up to 100 times every single day.
High volume pinning was thought to help circulate pins to new users on a frequent basis, thereby increasing the chances of pins going viral.
Except…that’s also a common spam tactic, so it never really worked.
Eventually Pinterest caught on to this strategy and shut down accounts with high volume pinning in order to prevent spammy content from flooding search results.
These days, pinning intentionally and thoughtfully is the way to go, rather than aiming for a set number.
In order to avoid being seen as a spam account, I don’t recommend pinning more than 20 times in a single day.
Ditch the group boards
Utilizing group boards is another strategy that has fallen out of favor.
In the past, it was recommended to join as many niche boards as you could to help circulate your pins.
Unfortunately, over time group boards became a hit-and-run kind of situation.
People would drop their pins and not return the favor by repinning others’ pins.
In addition, many group boards have so many members that getting repins from non-board members is next to impossible.
Group boards were intended for group projects, rather than a marketing tactic. I recommend ditching most group boards.
The only boards I recommend keeping are those that give you high engagement.
These are boards that typically have a small number of members pinning content.
This makes it easier to commit to helping other content creators by repinning their content.
It also makes it easier to ensure the board is filled with good content that your audience will enjoy, so you’ll be able to find good content to repin (and help out your fellow content creators).
Mix up your pin designs with a template collection
Infusing your brand into your pin design is something that I always encourage.
Branding your pin design helps Pinterest users recognize your pins more easily as they are scrolling through Pinterest.
But, what you don’t want to do is use a single template for all of your pins.
Instead, I recommend using a collection of templates with a similar look and feel.
When using only a single template, users might overlook content that is similar to something of yours that they’ve already viewed (and hopefully already repinned).
Pinterest users tend to scan pin titles as they are scrolling, so they might not stop every time they see one of your pins.
In addition, if you’re creating pins over time (especially as the years go on) for the same post, it will be more difficult to come up with fresh designs when promoting the same post.
But don’t stress – you don’t have to create all of these templates on your own! I’ve created some for you.
I have 3 done-for you Pinterest template packs available for purchase.
Each collection includes at least 20 customizable Pinterest templates for Canva.
Each collection is designed with a cohesive look and feel across all the templates so they can easily fit in with your brand.
Plus, the color scheme can easily be changed to fit your brand colors.
What are your favorite Pinterest marketing strategies?
Drop a comment below with your favorite strategies or any questions you have about Pinterest marketing.
And before you go – if you haven’t checked out my guide to Pinterest basics, make that your next stop.
With my Pinterest basics guide and the above Pinterest marketing strategies, your account will be growing in no time!
For more blogging tips, check out these posts:
About the author
Meg Frost is a Boston-based travel blogger that helps people embrace technology to make vacation planning and traveling wicked easy, affordable, and fun.
She holds an M.A. in Journalism from Northeastern University and B.S. in Communication & American Studies from University of Miami.
This post was originally published on January 10, 2021. It was last updated on October 16, 2022.
