How to Use Pinterest for Brand Awareness and Conversion

Published on 15.06.2026 by Chizoba T

When thinking of platforms to drive conversion, many marketers and business owners consider Google Ads, Instagram Shoppable Stories, TikTok Shop, and other major platforms. One of the most forgotten platforms is Pinterest. This is despite Pinterest's popularity increasing in recent years, with over 600 million daily active users in 2026, and Gen Z now accounting for over 50% of the platform's users.

While the huge user base is an important factor, what makes Pinterest more effective for conversions is that people use it to learn, plan, and shop. That means it can help you reach a high-interest audience. If you want to turn casual browsers into buyers, Pinterest is a powerful platform for doing so. In this detailed guide, we show you how to use Pinterest to drive conversions.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a visual social media platform that enables users (commonly referred to as pinners) to find, save, and share pins with descriptions, images, and links on different boards for later use. The platform acts as a visual search engine where users can find images and videos in organized, thematic, or shared collections, commonly referred to as boards. Therefore, instead of traditional social media platforms, Pinterest functions more like a visual search engine.

When they get ideas on Pinterest, users are encouraged to organize them into board names to ensure navigation ease. Unlike on traditional social media platforms, Pinterest users don't care whether the projects they archive or tag include clothes, since Pinterest isn't meant to exchange information or generate discussion.

In fact, Pinterest users can create Secret boards that are private and visible only to specific people with access. Therefore, Pinterest's core function differs and should not be compared to that of traditional social media platforms.

How Effective is Pinterest For Driving Conversion?

There are several reasons to consider Pinterest for brand awareness and conversion.

A High-Intent Audience

Pinterest is highly effective at driving conversions, especially for brands in visually oriented niches such as fashion, home decor, and DIY. Statistics indicate that 85% of users on the platform have made a purchase. The platform is filled with high-intent audiences and receives more than three times as much referral traffic as platforms like LinkedIn and X.

When pinners visit the platform, they aren't there to scroll passively. Instead, they visit with high intent, searching for products, services, and ideas. For instance, someone can visit the platform to look for a mid-century living room idea, while a business leader can go to find effective ways to visualize data.

A report by Pinterest Business suggests that 96% of the top searches on the platform are unbranded, meaning users aren't just there to discover new brands but also actively seek them out. That means whether you are a Saas business or a fashion store, you can use  Pinterest to provide users with the solution they are searching for. Your content stops becoming an interruption and becomes a welcome answer.

Great for Product Discovery

With over 600 million active users, Pinterest is often ranked as the 7th-largest social media platform. Additionally, over 1.5 billion pins are saved on Pinterest each week, with most people using them for product discovery. As noted earlier, the platform is a visual search engine where users visit to get inspiration for their future purchases. Through its highly personalized, actionable visual content, the platform effectively drives engagement.

Long-Term Value

As a visual search engine, Pinterest pins remain visible for a long time and continue gaining traction for many months or even years after they are posted. That means it can be a great source of long-term high-intent traffic. Unlike other social media feeds, Pinterest usually rewards the timeless, useful content that adds value to users, such as product guides, tutorials, and DIY content.

Shoppable features

Pinterest offers shoppable features that help turn inspiration into direct purchases. These include the Catalogs. Shop tab, and product pins.that enable businesses to display important details such as stock availability, real-time pricing, and a checkout link. This is in addition to features such as visual search (Lens), product tagging, and curated shopping lists.

How Pinterest Differs From Other Social Media Platforms

On traditional social media platforms, people often share what has already happened in their lives. On the other hand, Pinterest pins are usually about the things people want to do or to achieve. That's why one of the words you will commonly find on Pinterest is the word “dream,” especially in the board titles. For instance, you will find words such as dream vacation, dream wedding, dream man cave, or dream wardrobe.

Boards are used by pinners to collect pins for short- and long-term inspiration. Since people dream of turning their inspiration into reality, they are prospective feature customers who will begin buying these items. Boards with recipe pins, gadgets, or DIY projects could become a reality soon, leading to purchase. This is why visibility on the platform can be quite important.

Businesses can also use Pinterest for planning, especially those in the service provision and consultancy sectors. For instance, a graphics designer can create a board with a desired logo or web design, and can be easily hired when the right person comes across it.

How to Create a Pinterest Marketing Strategy

To effectively use Pinterest for marketing, follow these steps:

Determine Your Pinterest ROI

When using Pinterest for brand awareness and conversion, start by determining whether it's the right fit for your brand. This is an important step, as the platform works well for categories that require visuals, such as lifestyle, home decor, and parenting. If you are a service-focused or niche business, it can still add value to your brand, but you need to be very specific about it. 

You can use the platform to find the topics that your audience is interested in, or use affiliate content or test paid content to reach people with related interests. For insurance, a travel agency can target people seeking adventure by creating a pin on financing their next adventure.

Create a Pinterest Business Account

If you are serious about Pinterest marketing, a good idea would be to create a Pinterest business account, as this often comes with additional features you will not get in a personal account, such as:

  • Pinterest analytics. This will show important metrics such as clicks, saves, impressions, and your audience demographics.
  • Ability to promote Pins and run Pinterest ads.
  • Generate rich pins that sync with your site and e-commerce features, and a verification badge to build trust.

When creating a Pinterest profile, add a clear profile picture, a keyword-rich description explaining your product offering, a verified website link, and links to other social media accounts. When you have a complete profile, you can increase your discoverability and be seen as credible by your followers.

Set Pinterest Goals

You need to determine what you want your brand to achieve by having a presence on Pinterest. When setting goals, ensure they align with your overall business objective. Some of the goals you may have include:

  1. Increasing brand awareness.
  2. Building a community.
  3. Driving website traffic.
  4. Lead generation.
  5. Increasing sales and conversion rate.
  6. Social media customer care.

Once you determine your social media goals, you can focus on tracking the results of your campaign.

Understand Your Pinterest Audience

Consider the Pinterest audience and whether these are among your target customers. For instance, statistics indicate that Gen Zs are among the fastest-growing audience demographics on Pinterest. That means if your brand is targeting a younger audience, it can be a good platform for you.

It also indicates that you want your Pinterest content to feel more authentic, vibrant, and culturally relevant. Consider the trends, social issues, and sustainability when creating content, as these are the issues the younger demographics focus on.

Conduct a Competitor Analysis

When creating a Pinterest marketing strategy, you can get ideas from what your competitors are doing on the platform. Pay attention to the theme of their content, how often they post, any influencer partnerships they engage in, and the shopping features they use. This will provide insights into what they are doing well and the areas you can improve.

Content Planning and Scheduling

A common mistake brands make in their Pinterest marketing strategy is creating a few pins without a plan and waiting for success. This shouldn't be the case, and it's important to be strategic in your pin and content creation to ensure they reach the right audience and convert.

There are two factors that should guide you in your Pinterest marketing strategy: the Pinterest audience and Pinterest SEO. This is why we said earlier that you will need to understand your Pinterest audience. Pinterest SEO involves optimizing your content for search engines by using the relevant keywords your target audience uses. We will discuss this in detail in the next section.

Remember that you will never go wrong with creating high-quality, consistent content on Pinterest. Instead of pinning 30 times a day and then going a week without pinning, you can create a sustainable rhythm of 5 to 15 pins a day, and spread throughout the day. Make sure you combine fresh pins and other users’ repins. 

Schedule your content to go live when your audience is most active by checking the analytics. You can also leverage automated scheduling tools such as Buffer. Remember that creating new pins will yield better results than just repinning existing content, so focus on using 3-5 original pins each week to showcase your blog posts, products, or resources. Therefore, go ahead and repin the relevant content from the other community of creators, add value to your audience, and maintain active boards.

Create Some Optimized Pinterest Boards

Pinterest Boards are ideal for organizing pins by topic or theme. They can help users find related content and improve visibility in search engines. When organizing boards strategically, you can create boards around themes and keywords your target audience is searching for, use board titles and descriptions to guide them, create board covers with your brand colors, and position the best-performing boards in your profile.

Make sure you combine the promotional boards that combine the products and content, and the inspiration boards that offer value without direct selling. A good idea would be to go with the 80-to-10 rule, where 80% of your content consists of valuable ideas and inspiration, while 20% consists of promotional posts. Having this balance can be key to gaining your audience's trust while achieving the desired business results.

Some brands also add collaborative boards, allowing creators to contribute and expand the reach with their shared audiences.

Make Use of High-Quality and Optimized Pins

The performance of your pin will depend on its design. You can improve performance by using visually compelling stop-scrolls and optimizing clicks. You can also try optimizing your pins for a vertical aspect ratio of 2:3 or 1000 x 1500 pixels, whichever works better. You can add high-quality images that remain clear and bright, even when scaled to thumbnail size, with text overlays that highlight the key ideas and benefits.

You can optimize the pins for different aspect ratios, such as 2:3. Add a bright, high-quality, and clear image, even when it's thumbnail-sized. You can use the text overlays to highlight key ideas and benefits, and use branded elements to increase recognition and add an attention-grabbing design that stands out.

Tools such as Adobe Express, PicMonkey, or Canva offer templates well optimized for Pinterest dimensions. You can add different pin versions for the same product or content, testing different image sizes, text designs, and overlays to determine what works best with your target audience.

Understand the Pinterest SEO

There are several aspects of Pinterest SEO you should consider. These are:

Keyword Research

As noted earlier, Pinterest is more of a search engine than a social media platform. That means in the same way you use keywords on Google, you will need to use them on Pinterest. Pinterest SEO starts with finding the relevant keywords people use to find pins, and optimizing your content for those keywords so it appears when they search.

One way to conduct research is to use Pinterest's autosuggest feature in the search bar.  The Pinterest Trends tool can also come in handy for showing seasonal search patterns, while the Pinterest competitor analysis and Pinterest Ads keyword planner can help you understand the keywords your target audience is using.

When performing keyword research, you should focus more on the long-tail keywords with a particular search intent instead of the broader generic terms. For instance, a keyword like “step by step home renovation checklist” will perform better in search volume, quality, and conversion potential than a main keyword like “home renovation,” as many pages focus much more on the latter than the former. Make sure you list the primary and secondary keywords for each content type or product category to guide pin creation and optimization.

Adding Keywords on Pinterest

Once you have found the right keywords to use, you can add them in various places, such as:

Your Profile 

Make sure you include a few relevant keywords in the profile name and the bio. This is important because these fields will appear in search results, helping users discover your brand.

Pins

While good visuals on Pinterest will capture the user’s attention, using relevant keywords in the pin will improve your discoverability on the platform and ensure a high click-through rate.

The keywords should appear in the title, description, and the alt text. When writing your descriptions, add relevant keywords in the first 50 to 60 characters, and explain the benefits users will gain after clicking. Add relevant hashtags to each of 3 to 5 pins, and include a clear CTA to encourage saves and clicks.

However, make sure they look natural and are clear without keyword stuffing. You are writing for humans first, not for search engines. Explain in your description the value users will get when they click. Remember that a strong description will also help you improve your Pinterest ranking and user click-throughs as you set expectations for the destination content.

Boards

The boards should have clear titles that match what people are already searching for. This can increase the chances of appearing in the topic searches. To add keywords to the boards, click on the three dots and choose “Edit”. Again, instead of just listing the keywords, add them naturally.

Product Pins 

Retailers can use the accurate product names in the phrases field with keywords. This data is used by Pinterest when producing items in the shopping feeds. Therefore, make sure you add keywords in the pin title, descriptions, and the image text overlay. Add rich pins that automatically display updated product information, such as availability and price.

Analyze and Adjust

Unless you are tracking it, it can be hard to understand what is working and what isn't, and keep adjusting accordingly. A good way to track is to use UTM parameters in links to determine which pins are driving traffic, clicks, and conversions.

This will provide important insights into whether users resonate with your content. Pay attention to the top- and bottom-performing content for the month and how you are tracking toward the goal.

Tips for Success when Using Pinterest for Brand Awareness and Conversion

To increase your chances of success with Pinterest marketing, use the following tips:

Set Realistic Goals and Be Patient

Your Pinterest growth won't happen overnight, so don't get discouraged if you don't see instant results. Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest is chronological, so even older pins can appear in trending searches. You can have pins created months or even years ago appear in trending searches as long as they match what users are searching for. Therefore, be realistic and patient with your target, but understand the right posting schedule.

Track Trending Keywords

Remember that pinners on the platform tend to plan weeks or even years before they act. You need to keep up with the trending keywords. You can leverage Pinterest Trends to determine which keywords will trend and what users will be searching for in the coming months. These insights can help you time your content to go live when demand is highest.

Be Strategic When Adding Website Links

Be strategic when adding links in your LinkedIn content. Ensure that the destination the pins are landing is the landing page, such as the email, sign-up form, product page, and more, to direct traffic to your site, where conversions will happen. 

Create Informative Content

Unlike other social media platforms where users go to network and engage with content, Pinterest users visit the platform to find ideas, tutorials, and solutions. Therefore, one of the content formats that generates a lot of interest is the how-to guide on the platform. Therefore, focus more on this kind of content. 

For instance, a fashion retailer can put together a styling guide with your products. On the other hand, a brand that sells wallpaper can create tutorials on how to apply it. The goal of Pinterest marketing is to meet consumers where they are.

Image Formatting

When creating content for a visual-first platform, add high-quality images. Otherwise, if you only pin the images from your website, it will not work. A good strategy would be to create custom visuals that make outstanding pins, improving the organic reach of your content and paid performance. This can be particularly important for ads, where it is necessary to create dedicated, high-quality pins that match the platform's preferred formats.

Plan for Seasons

Seasonal content is big on Pinterest because the platform helps people plan, which tends to drive strong performance. For instance, in January, users tend to search for content related to New Year's resolutions, such as fitness, healthy recipes, and money. When you understand what's on your users' minds during a given period, you can optimize your content to get the most views.

Keep Adapting

As with social media platforms, change keeps happening, so you need to stay updated on new content trends and features. There are also new features happening on Pinterest, such as idea pins and collages. This type of content is prioritized by different platforms, and you should always be ready to go out and experiment.

Consumer trends are also changing, which is why it is important to keep tabs on the platform's annual report, Pinterest Predicts, to stay updated.

In Conclusion

Pinterest is a powerful platform for driving brand awareness and conversions, thanks to its visual-first discovery engine. Users visit the platform when they are already actively looking to make a purchase, making it ideal for a high-intent audience and driving conversions. By following the steps above, you can develop an outstanding Pinterest marketing strategy that drives brand awareness and conversions.