The Ultimate Guide to Organic Pinterest Marketing for DTC Brands

Pinning interests, or Pinterest, is not going anywhere. What initially began as a place to share inspiration for projects or ideas has evolved into a marketing machine. With over 463 million people on Pinterest, it’s an ideal place to find your customer before their next big (or small!) purchase. Additionally, 83% of weekly Pinners (a cutesy way to say Pinterest users) have made a purchase based on content they saw from a brand on Pinterest. It’s visual, it’s shareable, and it’s everything a brand should take advantage of to reach new potential customers. It’s not just about connecting with friends and family like most social media; it’s a visual discovery engine where users seek out products, services, and brands related to their interests and needs. 

Essentially, it’s a golden opportunity to showcase your brand in a visually appealing way to increase organic traffic and awareness for your brand. In this article, we’ll review how to set your DTC brand up for success on Pinterest, first by discussing exactly why Pinterest is so great to use for organic marketing. Next, we’ll describe how to create a Pinterest business account and integrate it directly with your Shopify store. Finally, we’ll review how to set up an organic marketing campaign to get those Pinners pinning and customers buying what you have to offer! 

Benefits of Integrating Pinterest With Your Shopify Store

Pinterest is one of the best ways to increase awareness for your brand, since it offers a seamless way to connect with a massive audience that is ready to shop. On Pinterest, people are looking for inspiration, and feel safe to try new things. Pinterest has their finger on the pulse of the next big thing, and 80% of the time over the last three years, the Pinterest Predicts list trends have come true. With people using Pinterest to plan for the future, many ideas are born there, and it’s a great place to search for inspiration for the next iteration for a product you offer.

By integrating your brand directly with Pinterest through Shopify, you can benefit from the following: 

1. Brand visibility: The visually-engaging format of Pinterest attracts millions of daily users, which can increase the exposure of your brand and products to a larger audience.
2. Website traffic: With strategic pinning of your products, you can drive traffic to your Shopify store, leading to higher conversion rates.
3. Revenue: Since Pinterest users are often browsing the platform with a shopping mindset, they’re more likely to convert when they come across your product than they might be on other social platforms.
4. Targeted Marketing Opportunities: With Pinterest’s advanced targeting options, you can reach specific demographics, interests, and behaviors to make sure your content reaches the right audience. 
5. Evergreen Engagement: Unlike some social media posts that fall off after a flash in the pan (looking at you, TikTok), Pinterest Pins have a long lifespan and ability to generate leads over time. Additionally, other Pinners can pin your products to their own boards, which increases the likelihood they’ll be found and pinned by someone else, and so on.  
6. Inspiration/Storytelling: Since it’s such a visual platform, Pinterest is excellent for sharing your brand’s values and mission. You can inspire users, showcase your brand’s personality, and build those meaningful connections with your target audience.
7. Organic Reach and Engagement: As Pinterest’s algorithm prioritizes content that resonates with users, this leads to more organic reach and engagement for valuable and relevant content. 
8. Insights: Pinterest Analytics provides super valuable data on how your Pins perform, which allows you to make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your strategy. 
9. Seamless Shopping Experience: With Rich Pins or Buyable Pins, it’s easy for users to shop directly from the platform (less steps = more conversions). 

Creating a Pinterest Business Account

Getting started with Pinterest marketing begins with creating a Pinterest business account. If you already have a personal account, consider converting it into a business account or creating a secondary one solely for your business. Setting it up as a business account is important because that will allow you access to analytics, ability to create Rich (Buyable) Pins, and the option to run promotions.  

To create a Pinterest business account, follow these simple steps:

1. Visit Pinterest for Business and click "Join as a Business."

3. Fill in your business name, email address, and website URL.

4. Select your business type and choose the appropriate category that best represents your brand.

5. Review and agree to the terms of service and click "Create Account."

Set Up the Shopify Pinterest Integration

Here’s how to connect your Shopify store with Pinterest:

1. Log into your Shopify account.
2. Search for the Pinterest app in the Shopify App Store.
3. Review permissions for installation, and if you agree, click Add App.
4. Follow the instructions to finish installing the application.

How to Plan an Effective Organic Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Know thy audience

The first step is to understand your target audience, like with any successful marketing strategy. Since Pinterest’s entire backbone is people searching for content they’re interested in, it’s very easy to hone in on your target audience’s preferences. 

Once you’ve collected data on your target audience, incorporate relevant keywords into your board titles, Pin descriptions, and profile bio to improve your content’s discoverability through Pinterest’s algorithm. Peppering these keywords throughout your Pins and content will help your content to get found by the right people. It’s important to stay consistent with posting content. It’s often the hardest part of brand management, but keep posting regularly! By keeping your content fresh, you can keep your followers engaged and keep your brand top of mind. 

While keeping your target audience in mind, make sure you’re paying attention to Pinterest trends (or social media trends in general). Many brands have found success by attaching themselves to viral moments, so creating content that aligns with a trend is a way to include your brand in the conversation. Additionally, seasonal trends often get a lot of engagement. Lately, brands are hopping on the Taylor Swift influenced “August trend” by running along the beach with Tay Tay playing in the background. If something is relevant for your target demographic, don’t be scared to jump into the salty ocean with both feet!

Another way to build your following is to use an influencer to reach new people. Try partnering with influencers in your niche that have a big following to promote your content to a broader audience to increase your organic reach.

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Create branded content and boards

Ensure your brand identity is apparent throughout all of the content you share across platforms, and this means colors, fonts, and imagery. Since Pinterest boards are virtual bulletin boards where you can categorize and facilitate content discovery based on the content. Effective boards feature: 

1. Descriptive board names: stack these with keywords to make it easier for users to understand the content within them at a quick glance.
2. Themed content: Pins should be aligned with your brand’s offerings and the target audience’s interests, making them visually appealing and allowing them to showcase your products in a relevant context. For example, a brand that sells sustainable fashion products might create a board called “Sustainable Wardrobe Staples” to feature their products.
3. Regular updates: Although a Pinterest board can live (and deliver leads) forever, it’s great to continually update your content to keep your followers engaged and potentially reach new customers.
4. Call-to-action: It’s not all just pretty pictures! Make sure your boards/Pins invite browsers to learn more on your website to continue the journey towards a purchase.

Make Pins that are visually-appealing, engaging, and organically shareable

If you want people to pin your Pins to their board (and you do!), they will need to be visual works of art that capture the essence of your brand and products. Since Pinterest is a visual platform, the first impression is crucial! High-quality images, beautiful graphics, and a consistent brand aesthetic are essential to creating the eye-catching Pins that stand out to potential customers.

To maximize the discoverability of your Pins, optimize their titles, descriptions, and hashtags with relevant keywords. Craft clear and compelling titles that entice users to click and learn more about your product or content. The descriptions should provide additional context and details while incorporating relevant keywords for search visibility.

Once your Pins get discovered (since you so painstakingly ensured they would be found by the right people), they should have relevant links to your product catalog. When you use Rich Pins, you’re able to add information such as pricing, availability, and product details directly on the Pin. This is great for Ecommerce brands, as it encourages potential buyers to take action without having to leave the platform, which leads to higher conversion rates. 

Product tags are also an option, where you can tag specific products featured in your Pins. This is a simple way to guide customers to click on a tag to access your Shopify product page to make a purchase. 

Use Pinterest Analytics to refine your organic marketing strategy

Pinterest Analytics provides valuable insights into your account's performance, helping you understand what content resonates with your audience and drives the most engagement. The best way to evaluate your organic growth is to monitor key metrics like impressions, clicks, saves, and the number of people engaging with your Pins. Pinterest Analytics include metrics such as:

Overview Dashboard: the dashboard provides a snapshot of your account’s performance, including average daily impressions, average monthly viewers, and engaged audience statistics. You can also see top-performing Pins and boards.

Profile Analytics: here, you can see metrics regarding the overall performance of your Pinterest account. Such metrics as impressions, saves, clicks, and total audience engagement are available here, so you can identify patterns and determine which content resonates with your audience. 

Audience insights: View the demographics, interests, and behaviors of your audience to better tailor your content to meet their preferences  When you identify your top-performing Pins and boards, you can better understand the content that drives the most engagement to refine your content strategy and create more content your audience loves.. 

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Website Analytics: With the Shopify store linked, you can analyze the performance of Pins that are linked to your website and how the content is performing on Pinterest, including clicks, saves, and impressions. You can also analyze the click-through rate (CTR) of your Pins to determine how often users click through from your Pins to your website. 

Saves, Repins, Engagement: How many times your content is saved and repinned indicates users find your content valuable and might wish to revisit it later! Additionally, evaluating how often your Pins are seen (impressions) is important, as well as the engagement rate (engagements divided by impressions). A higher engagement rate shows that your Pins are resonating well with your audience. 

Organic growth takes time, on Pinterest or anywhere! Make sure to stay consistent and continually analyze the data at hand to adjust your strategy and capitalize on what resonates with your audience. 

Track Your Pinterest Growth With Triple Whale

The beauty of Triple Whale is that you can see where all of your website views and conversions are coming from, and often uncover some surprises you weren’t aware of. For example, MaryRuth’s discovered with a little more time and attention devoted to Pinterest, they were able to increase their ROAS (return on adspend) by over 400%! Once you’ve generated a solid organic strategy on Pinterest, you can move on to creating ads that convert to complement your other marketing efforts and watch all of your metrics grow on your Triple Whale Dashboard. 

Not using Triple Whale yet? Get familiar with Founders Dash, the forever-free dashboard with real-time data, web analytics, and blended metrics to simplify your life and maximize your ROI. What are you waiting for? Sign up here.