How to use Pinterest to market your stationery business

So let’s be honest, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably have a Pinterest account that you use in some form or fashion (aka millions of recipes you’ve never tried). And you know you should be using it for your business, but just aren’t quite sure where to start?

In this post I am going to walk you through how I (a non-Pinterest specialist) uses Pinterest to help market my stationery business and drive traffic to my website.

As stationery designers, Pinterest is just begging us to hop on board. We have a huge advantage over some other industry professionals.

Our products can be sold on a national or even worldwide level without us ever leaving the comfort of our home.

That alone should be a good enough reason to start fully harnessing the power of Pinterest. Since I have started fully using Pinterest over the last 2 years, over half of my referral website traffic is generated from Pinterest.

Below are some steps and tactics that I take in my own stationery business to help Pinterest work for me. And I will say, I am no Vanessa Kynes (my go-to for anything Pinterest), but I do make sure I am using Pinterest to work for me the best I can!

Make sure you have a business profile

Yes – you heard me, convert your Pinterest profile from a personal page to a business page. You need to start fully utilizing it as a business profile.

Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you have to stop pinning your recipes or bathroom DIY inspo anymore, you’ll just do it in private.

You’ll want to convert all of your personal boards to private. Yes, all of them. Gone are the days where Pinterest only allowed 3 private boards, who remembers that!?

You will also want to make sure that you re-work your profile description AND board descriptions to be SEO/keyword friendly. Think of the terms that users will search when they’re on Pinterest.

You will also want to make sure that you “claim” your website domain through Pinterest and enable rich pins (pins that allow more descriptions than a standard pin).

Use your website and blog to your advantage

This one is going to be a little more time consuming, but this is where the bulk of your content is going to come from and once you get it out on Pinterest, you can keep re-pinning and recycling content.

You’ll want to go through your entire website and blog and make sure you are creating a pin (or two) from each blog post, as well as pulling from your portfolios, etc. You can use website backend plugins or even the Pinterest Chrome Extension to quickly create pins of your pages.

You will want to make sure that each blog post has at least one decent image that you can pull over to Pinterest with your description of what the blog post is about.

Again, think in terms of SEO/keywords when writing the descriptions. And bonus, if you have included a description for your image when you uploaded it to your website, Pinterest will pull that description automatically!

Also – if you have an Etsy shop, go right on over there and use their easy “pin it” button on each and every one of your listings.

And remember, you can pin the same pin to multiple boards if it falls under different categories (ie, one invitation may fall under all of the following boards “fall weddings”, “southern wedding” “burgundy and navy wedding”.

So from one “pin” you have really generated 3 separate pins.

Get a scheduling app and use it

Let’s be real – no one has time to sit around and pin all day while running a business, as much as we would love to! Just like with any other business platform you use, you can pre-schedule pins. 

Tailwind is the go-to app just for that. You can sign up and bring in all of your pins and set up Tailwind to distribute however many pins a day that you want (usually 5-10 per day) to all of the different boards that you have designated the pins to.

And remember – you can pin other people’s pins, too!  So if you have a “southern wedding” board – you can not only pin some of your work, but you can pin southern bouquets, southern designs, southern hairstyles, you catch my drift?

And honestly, you could have almost 60-70% of your pins be other peoples’ pins, and 30-40% your own. Because when you pin other peoples’ pins, you are widening your search audience and bring them to that board where your work is also pinned!

I hope these few Pinterest tips have helped! And that was really just a drop in the bucket. You can head over to Vanessa Kynes’ website for so much Pinterest goodness!

PS Did you enjoy this article? I sure hope so! You may also enjoy our mini-course on blogging + SEO for your stationery business!