How to Advertise on Pinterest for Only $50

Want to advertise on Pinterest but not sure where to start? Even brands with budgets of $50 or less can create Promoted Pins to increase their reach on Pinterest. To learn how to make the most of your advertising budget on Pinterest, take a look at the tips below.

How to Advertise on Pinterest Without Spending a Ton

Choose Your Objective

On Pinterest, you can choose from a couple of different objectives for Promoted Pin campaigns - engagement and traffic. So you have to consider your business's goals and determine which is more important to you - getting more engagement on Pinterest or getting more clicks to your website.

Ideally, getting engagement like repins on Pinterest will eventually lead to more traffic to your website. But if you're promoting something specific or time sensitive, you'll likely want to set up a campaign where you pay for actual clicks to your site so that you can then direct users to your offerings or to a signup form for your list. Of course, you can also consider breaking up your advertising budget to do a few different Promoted Pins that fit with different objectives.

Promote Pins That Fit with Your Goals

Once you've decided on the overall goal for your campaign, you need to choose or create the right pin to promote. Your pin should fit with the goal that you are trying to achieve with your Pinterest ad campaign. So if you've decided to go with a traffic campaign so you can promote your new product line, you'll need a pin that showcases your products clearly and in a visually pleasing way.

Alternatively, if you want to increase your engagement through Pinterest ads, you might want to go a different direction. Instead of just trying to sell something, offer something of value like an interesting piece of content that your ideal audience is likely to interact with. It should still be at least somewhat relevant to your business. But if you can get people interested enough to interact with those pins, they might be more likely to interact with and click on more of your future pins.

Use Compelling Images

Regardless of what type of ad you choose, you need to really focus on promoting strong images. Pinterest is such a visually inclined platform. So if you create a boring image, people are just going to keep scrolling. Instead, go with an image that stands out through bright colors, contrast, text overlay or some kind of other unique style element that can set your pins apart.

In addition, pins that are long or portrait style, rather than landscape images, tend to do better since they stay on users' screens longer and take up more real estate. You don't want to pay a bunch of money to promote a pin if it's going to be tiny and difficult to see. So make sure it's going to look great and be easily readable in a thumbnail size.

Add a Relevant Description

Your pin description is also important in letting Pinterest users know what your pin is and why they should care. Try to use at least a couple of relevant keywords, but make sure the caption is also readable and offers value. In addition, hashtags don't have the same type of usability as they do on other platforms like Instagram and Twitter. So don't clutter your descriptions with tons of them.

Having a relevant and valuable description for your pins is important whether you're promoting a pin or not. But if you're paying to promote a pin, you need to show even more care in making sure you have a good caption. You don't want to pay to reach a ton of Pinterest users only to have them scroll past your pin because they don't really understand or know the value behind your post.

Include a Call to Action

Another great way to add some value to your Pinterest advertising campaign is through powerful and relevant calls to action. If you want someone to click through your pin to visit your website for some kind of exclusive offer, tell them! People often scroll through content and maybe save it when they see something that catches their eye. But if you want people to take a specific kind of action upon seeing your Promoted Pin, make it really easy for them.

Track Metrics

After you've launched a Promoted Pin campaign, you can access insights about the campaign's performance on the Pinterest Ads dashboard. From there, you can see your campaign's budget, the cost per engagement, and engagement rates and click-through rates.

Taking a look at those analytics periodically can help you determine what is working and what might need to change. You might also find that a particular pin is doing so well that you want to keep it going. If you're coming up on the end date you set for your campaign or the end of the budget you initially set, you can change your settings to keep your campaign going if you're happy with the results.

Promote Your Most Popular Pins

In addition to the budget and engagement rates, the Pinterest Ads dashboard also gives you the opportunity to view your highest and lowest performing Promoted Pins. If you have a limited budget to work with or want to make the most of your advertising dollars, you might consider halting your lowest performing pins and reallocating those funds to the pins that are doing well and bringing you lots of great results.

Pinterest Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "How to Advertise on Pinterest for Only $50" was first published on Small Business Trends