The Learning Center

Once the platform for inspiration, Pinterest has now progressed to a platform for shoppers and advertisers. But somehow, not in an annoying way like on every other social media platform. Why? Because Pinterest has made advertising fun and subtle with its promoted pins that are easily pinned without a person even feeling like they are pinning an advertisement. For the most part, Pinterest promoted pins are best suited for product-based businesses or individuals but can also be used simply to spread brand awareness. These pins are just like normal pins, except that you pay for more people to see them. They work just like any ad campaign you might set up on Facebook—you create an ad, choose a campaign goal, and set a budget. But if you’ve never set up ads on Facebook before, don’t worry. Everything will be explained to you. If you’re unsure if using Pinterest to advertise is worth the money or not, check out these statistics and success stories posted on Pinterest’s business page. Otherwise, continue with these 9 steps to getting started with your promoted pins on Pinterest.

1. Create a Business Account

In order to promote pins on Pinterest, you must have a business account. You can choose to either turn your existing account into a business or add a second account to your existing one to be dedicated to your business only.

2.  Add Pins to Your Profile

Once you have your business account, start saving some pins to it (the pins you’ll want to promote). The best pins are vertical, high-quality images.

3. Establish Your Campaign Objectives

To start your campaign, click on the “ads” button from your business page then click “overview.” It will give you a list of three options depending on your goals for your campaign. Are you wanting engagement, traffic, or awareness? Whichever one you want, click on the Promote button next to the objective.

• Engagement: you pay per action, such as when someone saves or likes your pin
• Traffic: you pay per click that goes to your site
• Awareness: this option is currently available only to Fortune 500 companies but is meant to expose a brand to people.

4. Create Your Campaign

Start by giving it a name and consider that you may have other campaigns in the future, so be specific. Give the campaign a start date and a daily budget. An end date is not required, but consider that you may forget it’s running and end up paying more than you planned to spend.

5. Set Up Your Pin

You get to choose from all the pins you currently have saved (which is why you should have started out by uploading your pins) and have them be approved by Pinterest like any ad before running. You will give each pin a name and set a destination URL to the pin. It should link to a landing page, not to your business’ home page. If someone clicks on a product on Pinterest, they want to be led right to that product on your website, not to the homepage where they have to find it. For the most part, people will just go back to scrolling through Pinterest rather than dig through a website.

6. Apply Keywords to Your Pins

Pinterest allows you to add up to 150 keywords to promoted pins. These are meant to help Pinterest users find whatever you are advertising. You must think in broad, general, and specific terms. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think what they would search for if they were to want to find your product. Let’s say you are selling a pair of shoes.

Here’s a list of search words that come to mind:

• shoes
• heels
• black heels
• heels for work
• black shoes 
• professional heels
• women’s dress shoes 

What other words can you come up with?

7. Target Your Audience

Pinterest lets you target your promoted pins to a location such as a city, device (desktop, mobile phone, tablet), and gender. Think of who is most likely to be interested in what you’re selling and target your pins to appear in their feed. 

8. Enter a Max Bid

Pinterest promoted pins work just like most other ads—the bidding system. You set up a budget and let Pinterest do the work based on how much you give it and how long you’d like to have the pin promoted. Based on which objective you chose (engagement or traffic), you will be charged for either how many clicks/responses your promoted pin gets or how many clicks you get on your website.

9. Set Up Payment Info

The only thing left is to give Pinterest a way to charge you for the pins. Just set up your payment  info, and your pins will be on their way to gaining you leads.

Once your campaign is all set up, you can begin to use split testing to determine which pins are performing better. And try not to put too many pins into one campaign (no more than two, but try to stick to one). The more pins you put into the campaign, the more they have to compete with each other.