When we talk about social media marketing, we tend to spend a lot of time talking about a few big players -- Facebook, Instagram, and more recently, TikTok. But for bloggers, Pinterest can be an extremely powerful tool for driving traffic and increasing engagement, which is why so many bloggers out there swear by Pinterest marketing.

Why should you care about making your blog as pin-able as possible? There are actually several reasons.

Since its founding in 2000, Pinterest has made a name for itself as the visuals-first social media platform. With more than 450 million active users and super cheap advertising options, it can be a great way to break into social media marketing for your blog.

Convinced? Keep reading. We’re breaking down the how and why of creating amazing Pinterest graphics, including:

• Who is on Pinterest?
• What does it cost to advertise on Pinterest?
• Optimizing graphics for Pinterest
• How to make blog graphics pin-able
  

Get to Know Pinterest’s Audience

Pinterest is a huge platform, but before you dive head first into Pinterest marketing, it’s important to understand who, exactly, you’re marketing to on Pinterest. In general, Pinterest users:

• Skew heavily towards women with 42% of US women (vs. 15% of US men) using the platform
• Are all different ages, but the largest demographics include 18-24 year olds (making up 38% of Pinterest users) and 30-49 year olds (making up 35% of Pinterest users)
• Live in a variety of regions, with a pretty even split between Pinterest users in urban areas (30%), suburban areas (30%) and rural areas (26%)

What about the content on Pinterest itself? As a visuals-first social media platform, pins on Pinterest have a tendency to feature bright, clear, engaging visuals that are aspirational or motivational in nature.

Pinterest Marketing is Dirt Cheap and Super Effective

If you’re considering putting a little money behind your social media strategy, Pinterest could be a great place to start.

After all, we’re all trying to get the most bang for our marketing buck, right? If your audience is on Pinterest, Pinterest marketing is a great investment. Compared to other social media platforms, marketing on Pinterest is super affordable, and many bloggers consider Pinterest the biggest driver in traffic for their blog.

How much does it actually cost to advertise on Pinterest? It depends on your goals. Pinterest campaigns follow a Cost Per Click (CPC) model or Cost Per Mille (CPM) model, which means that you pay for the clicks or impressions (by the thousand) your pins actually receive.

The major goals you can set for your Pinterest marketing campaigns include building brand awareness, boosting engagement, and driving traffic. Here’s how much you can expect to pay for each type of campaign on average:

• Building awareness: $2.00-$5.00 per 1000 impressions
• Boosting engagement: $0.10-$1.50 per engagement
• Driving traffic: $0.10-$1.50 per engagement
  

When you consider how much similar campaigns cost on other social media sites, Pinterest becomes a very attractive option for bloggers trying to reach their audience on a budget. Here’s what those same goals will run you in the average Facebook campaign:

• Building awareness: $7.19 per 1000 impressions
• Boosting engagement: $1.07 per like, $0.97 per click, $5.47 per download
• Driving traffic: $0.97 per click
  

How to Create Gorgeous Pinterest-Friendly Graphics

As an advertiser, you can create several types of pins on Pinterest including standard pins, video pins, and stories. Since we’re talking about Pinterest-friendly blog graphics and not advertising on Pinterest as a whole, we’ll be focusing on standard pins because that’s what most blog graphics translate to.

When you’re creating your graphics, be sure to follow these best practices:

• Scroll through Pinterest for inspiration -- you don't want to copy someone else's style, but it's a great way to see what works and what doesn't in a Pinterest graphic
• Choose a high quality, vertical image with a 2:3 aspect ratio
• Be sure to attribute the creator of your image unless you’re pulling from a creative commons source like Pexels, Pixabay, or Unsplash
• Include your logo on all of your graphics, but keep it subtle
• Use the same colors, fonts, and text decorations you use across your blog to keep your brand strong and consistent
• Skew towards warm colors if you can -- they tend to perform much better on Pinterest than their cooler counterparts
• Pay attention to what’s trending on Pinterest
• Keep text concise so that it’s easily readable on all device sizes
• Make sure text is clear and legible against a high contrast background -- adding an overlay to your background image or putting your text against a solid color shape should do the trick
• Use keywords in the name of your image file to optimize your pin for search
• Keep your audience in mind -- Pinterest users love crisp, beautiful, inspirational content, so striking images and motivational or aspirational text tend to perform well
  

With these best practices in mind, you can start laying out your actual graphics. If you’ve got a flair for design, creating an image in your favorite graphic design software will do the trick, whether that means Adobe creative suite, Affinity, or a free online option like Vectr.

For those with a little less design experience, fear not. There are tools out there that make designing Pinterest-friendly graphics a breeze.

Canva is probably the biggest name in the industry. With thousands of templates to choose from and a simple drag and drop interface, you can create stunning graphics for your blog posts in minutes.

Making Your Graphics Pin-able

Now that your graphics are optimized for Pinterest, it’s time to make sharing them a snap for your readers. Avid Pinterest users will be familiar with the Pinterest web browser extension, which allows them to save images across the web to their boards. But what about casual Pinterest users?

You may have seen blogs where hovering over certain images gives you the option to pin it. This can be accomplished a few different ways.

Pinterest’s Widget Builder Tool

The easiest way to integrate Pinterest actions into your blog is to rely on the experts at Pinterest HQ. Formerly the “Pin It” button generator, Pinterest’s Widget Builder creates customized code snippets that allow users to save content, follow boards or profiles, and more.

This option is ready to work out of the box as soon as you drop the code on your page. The Widget Builder includes a few customization options, but overall it sticks to Pinterest’s branding.

Custom Pin It Buttons

If you want to create a button that allows users to pin your page but also sticks to your blog’s brand, the process will be a little bit more involved. First, you’ll need to design what your pin button will actually look like and save it as a .png file with a transparent background.

How you actually implement your custom Pinterest save button will depend on what platform you’re using to host your blog. Here are solutions for a few common ones:

• Wordpress. Download this jQuery Pin It Button for Images plugin. If you need help setting it up, check out this video walkthrough.
• Blogger. To add custom pin buttons in Blogger, you’ll need to tweak your template. This tutorial walks through how to set it up.
• SquareSpace. Once again, this will take just a little bit of custom code. The tutorial here includes the code snippet optimized for squarespace, as well as steps guiding you through how to implement the code on your blog.
• Webflow. To add pin-able graphics in CMS blog posts in Webflow, you’ll need to add code snippets to a few places. First, make sure your pin it button has the ID “pinit”. Then add this jQuery script developed by Jeff S inside of script tags in the custom code that is inserted before the closing body tag on the CMS template page or individual page you’d like to run the script on

Case Study: Fashion + "BookTok" Blogs

Scroll through Pinterest for a few minutes and you'll quickly start to notice a few themes: weddings, fashion, recipes, home decor, books. Which means if your blog has content in any of these niches, you're going to see some results. Our project Adultist.org is a natural fit -- with advice, guides, and human interest articles for college students and young professions in spades, we had plenty of posts to choose from.

We decided to start with an article that organically got a lot of attention: 13 Fantasy Romance Books to Read if You Devoured ACOTAR and Need More

From there, we created two pin designs to test: one featuring the hero of the post, and another with a graphic we designed. As of this writing, the hero image option is winning -- and gets the blog an extra 10.67k impressions, 695 pin clicks, and 72 saves per month. Not bad for a set it and forget it marketing strat.

And it wasn't just a one-off win: pretty much every pin took off, with several raking in over 1k impressions per month.

As you can see, Pinterest marketing is a huge boon to any organic marketing strategy -- particularly if you choose excellent (and pin-able) graphics for your hero and body image.

There you have it! You should be all set to go forth and create beautiful Pinterest-friendly graphics for your future blogs. Good luck, and happy pinning!