How to Promote a Pin on Pinterest

What are Promoted Pins?

Pinterest defines Promoted Pins like this: Promoted Pins are regular Pins that you can pay for so that more of your desired audience sees them in relevant search results, category feeds and home feed.

I was beyond excited when I launched my new Pinterest strategy ebook “How I Grew My Pinterest Account to over 10,000 Followers.”

Not only was this ebook a great opportunity to share with everyone the steps I use to grow my Pinterest account, it was also a cool way for me to increase my email list. And as you know, as entrepreneurs and bloggers, one our greatest assets is our email list to build our community.

As I was working through my marketing campaign for my Pinterest strategy ebook, I decided to add Promoted Pins into the marketing mix. I was approved for Promoted Pins because I have a business account plus I was curious to test this out and see how the whole thing worked.

How Does this Promoted Pins Stuff Work?

Yeah, I had a lot of questions too.

Pinterest does an amazing job of giving you the steps to create and edit your Promoted Pin campaigns. They walk you through how to target your customers to how to set up an ad group to how to use that Promote button you’ve been seeing on your pins.

Even though Pinterest’s help section is pretty comprehensive about how the technical stuff, I know that you guys have more questions about how all this Promoted Pin stuff works.  I mean it’s one thing to get all the steps to do something. It’s another thing to learn more about how the whole experience of doing something is going to work.

If you want to know how to set this thing up right, hop over to Pinterest’s Promoted Pins help page and follow the steps on how to get more people to see your Promoted Pins. They do such a great job of explaining the process that I wanted to use my post to go deeper into how the whole program works and how you can grow your pin’s reach.

Instead of me just blogging a list of things to do, I’ll share with you about my experience plus some of the added research I did about Promoted Pins.

1. How long does it take for your pin to go from pending to running?

It usually takes a day to two for your promoted pins to get approved. If it takes longer than two days, there’s a good chance that the pin has been denied.

When I run my Promoted Pin campaigns, my pin get accepted immediately and go from pending to what they call ‘running’ in 24 hours. BUT the first time I ran a campaign, it took almost 5 days before my data in the Promoted Pins dashboard to show up.

I had to send a message to Pinterest’s Help section to kick this thing into action. Within a few hours of them responding to me, I saw something get processed through my bank { from the credit card number I set up with the Promoted Pin } and an hour after that, my data showed up in the dashboard.

2.  If your pin gets denied, why didn’t they accept the pin?

Pinterest has certain guidelines that they use to determine which pins will get accepted. It’s their goal to ensure that the Pinterest user’s experience is the best that it can be and they want to make sure that any paid pins are not intrusive to the Pinner’s feed.

Some of the reasons for a pin to be denied are:

• The link was directed to a real landing page, not a blog post.
• There was an end date associated with your campaign {since pins last for years they don’t want anything with an end date}.
• The image, pin and blog post had the word ‘free’ in them.
• Promotional copy like ‘50% off,’ ‘2 for the price of 1,’ ‘discount sale’ or ‘limited offer.’
• Posting the actual price IN the image itself.
• Using excessive symbols or hashtags in your pin description.

3. Pinterest says that we should use 30 key words in your campaign.  How do you come up with your key words?

The first place to start is to use the Pinterest Guided Search at the top of site. Start running a search to find the most applicable keywords that are already being searched on the site.

I use anywhere from 20 – 30 key words for each campaign that I’ve run. If you get stuck with what to use, Pinterest will also give you some suggestions in the key word section. You can type in a generic term like marketing and Pinterest will offer up suggested key word phrases like marketing ideas, marketing plan and marketing digital.

By adding in these specific key words into your campaign, it allows Pinterest to pull your pin into the home and category feeds when someone is searching for that phrase.

I also wanted to share this Promoted Pin nugget with you: when you’re ready to tweak your campaign, go to the Promoted Pin dashboard and click on the specific pin campaign name.

Next, look for a link in the top right called “Edit Promoted Pin.” That link will take you another screen where you’ll be able to add keywords, delete the ones that aren’t working or change your target audience specs.

Here’s an example of some of the keywords that I used for my Pinterest strategy ebook:

 

4.  How often should you tweak the campaign? And what elements do you change, the keywords, the copy?

Once everything gets approved and it’s up and running, it’s a good idea to monitor your campaign at least once a week. Mostly, you’ll be tweaking the keywords, but occasionally, you’ll add more info in the pin descriptions to give them more details about what they can expect when they click on the pin.

Once my campaign has hit it’s stride, I usually check into the Edit Promoted Pin section at least once a month. The first few months will give you some idea of what key words connect with Pinners and what phrases are not being searched for. I delete the ones that aren’t working and add in a few more based on Pinterest’s suggestions.

5. Would you say that your results came in drips and drops or did you hit a point where it started to flow and your list grew exponentially? If it just hit the flow, how long was your campaign running before you got into the daily flow?

My campaigns usually take off pretty quickly like maybe a week or so. After that, they’d start producing consistent clicks and conversions on a daily basis.

There are definitely days that are a little slower but for the most part my sign ups have consistently grown week after week, my list is growing every day.

Just look at these numbers after only two weeks when I first started running this campaign:

 

 

My list continues to grow and this pin has now been pinned to over 7,000 boards. It not only grows my email list but this one pin, this one piece of content has introduced me to clients who have signed up for my coaching programs. Take a look at this updated screenshot a year later with the same campaign:

 

 

So there you go folks … the details about how Promoted Pins work and how you can tweak your campaign.

I can honestly say that my Pinterest strategy ebook Promoted Pin is not just growing my website traffic but it’s filling up my email list with more qualified people.

It was easy. The results came pretty quickly. In two weeks, I saw results!  From this point on, Promoted Pins will always be a part of any marketing campaign I run to promote my business.

 

Want more tips like this to grow your Pinterest followers?

This post is a sample of what you’ll get with my Pinterest strategy ebook. Click here to grab your FREE copy of ‘How I Grew My Pinterest Account to over 10,000 Followers‘.