Pinterest Board Ideas to grow your Creative Business

Have you experienced this scenario yet?

You’ve just created the perfect product, built a beautiful sales platform and started writing consistently on your blog.  And now you wait.  And wait.  After about a month still no sales.

There’s a problem.  Actually there could be lots of problems, but my first guess is that you don’t have a lot of traffic visiting your shop.  

Unfortunately, gone are the days when you start an online business and the traffic arrives at your door with little effort.  These days you need to promote your shop and products for your potential audience to learn about you.

But you have no money to spend on marketing and you aren’t sure how to use your marketing time most effectively.  I promise you.  I’ve been there.

When you’re just starting a business and you want to grow your traffic quickly, the best place to start marketing is Pinterest.  It’s one of the few places that you can still grow traffic organically.  And fast.  Very fast.

But Pinterest remains a mystery to many creative businesses.  If your Pinterest business account isn’t set up properly from the beginning, chances are potential customers won’t find your pins and clickthrough them.  

One of the first things you need to do when creating your business’ Pinterest account is choose the best Pinterest boards that will drive potential customers to your website.  

Although you might just want to add some boards that you’ll enjoy pinning to, it turns out the choosing the right Pinterest board ideas is just as important as picking the best pins to go on them.

Your Pinterest boards tell potential clients who you are and how you can help them.  If you don’t have the right collection of Pinterest boards on your business account, you can lose potential customers.

Imagine a potential customer walks into your office.  They see your Pinterest boards on a wall.  Suddenly, they’re interested in your business, know how you can help them and find ideas that they love.  Just from looking at the titles and pins on these boards.  And you’ve created a buzz about your business.  These potential customers want to stick around.

Pinterest boards are also important because they help to create your business identity.  When a potential customer is searching Pinterest for an idea, they use keywords.  These keywords lead them to the best results for their search.  If your Pinterest board has a title and description with keywords that match their search, they are led directly to your Pinterest board.  

The Importance of Keywords

As you start to figure out your best Pinterest board ideas, keep keywords in mind.  Remember that Pinterest is a search engine.  There are over 2 billion monthly searches.  That’s a lot of opportunities to be found.

Just like SEO helps you rank on Google, keywords help your followers find you and your content on Pinterest.

So finding the best keywords for your Pinterest boards and descriptions is really important.

How do you find the keywords?

One of the easiest ways to identify keywords to use in your Pinterest boards is to go directly to the source – Pinterest.

Find the Search bar on Pinterest and type in your niche or topic.  The related search terms that people are typing in will be displayed underneath. These search terms are the keywords your potential customers are using to find pins in your niche.

There’s also a series of tiles underneath the search bar.  These are other words that users and Pinterest combine with your original search words to find even more niche specific content.  Creating board names that combine all of these keywords will help potential customers find you.

Where do you put the keywords in your Pinterest boards?

Using these keywords, you can create a variety of niche specific boards that your audience will search for.

For the best search results, put the keywords in your Pinterest board names and descriptions.  Use the keywords to create useful Pinterest board titles both specific and broad.  From personal experience, nothing cutesy here.  Or no one will ever find you.

For example, my online shop – Katarina’s Paperie – sells designs for children’s birthday parties.  When making my Pinterest boards, I created one called “Boy Birthday Party” and another, more specific board, to feature our designs for a “Cars and Trucks Party”.  Having both boards helps customers locate the pins if they want more general boy birthday party ideas or if they’re looking for the specific party theme.  

How many Pinterest boards do I need?

I get this question a lot, probably because there really isn’t a right number.

Many people initially aim for hundreds of Pinterest boards thinking that the more the merrier.  The problem with too many Pinterest boards is that they are hard to maintain.  You need to be active on each Pinterest board in order to keep it relevant.

If you have too many boards, it’s also hard for your customers to find the specific board that they’re looking for.  Your Pinterest board just become a sea of ideas and can be overwhelming.

Studies now show that too many Pinterest boards is not as affective as having a smaller number of boards specifically curated to drive traffic to your business niche.

When figuring out your best Pinterest board ideas, choose the ones that you can use the most niche specific keywords.  These boards are most likely to drive the best traffic and customers that will buy (or at least click on) your products.

The Perfect Pinterest Board Ideas

Like most business owners, you will most likely have lots of Pinterest board ideas when you first get started.  (If you don’t, no worries. That’s why I created the list below to help get you started).  With so many ideas, how do you figure out the best ones?

Your best Pinterest board ideas will have the following three components:

Eye-catching title

Keyword rich description

Be specific to your business’ niche

When choosing your Pinterest boards, also think about the ones that you can add some of your brand’s personality.  This will help browsers and potential customers connect more with your brand.

Favorite Pinterest Board Ideas

Your collection of Pinterest boards will be as unique as your business.  That’s the way it should be.  Your Pinterest boards should represent your brand best.

With that in mind, though, I created some types of Pinterest board ideas to brainstorm.  Hopefully, if you are having trouble coming up with ideas, these will get you started.

Keep in mind, how you organize your Pinterest business account is up to you.  You don’t need one or a few of each of these kinds of boards.  Choose the ones that you think will connect with your audience best.  

Types of Products you Sell

If you are an online shop, the first kinds of Pinterest boards to create are those that can feature your products.  Each type of product that you sell should have a different Pinterest board.

For example, if you sell different kinds of handmade jewelry you might have Pinterest boards about necklaces, bracelets, wedding rings and anklets.

By creating a Pinterest board that features each of your product types, you have a place to share products from your shop as well as other ideas for using your product.

Think in Themes

In addition to having Pinterest boards that showcase the different types of products in your shop, you can also create boards named after product themes. 

For these types of boards, think about how your products are connected around a topic or idea.

For example, if your shop sells digital kids wall art, you could create a Pinterest board called “Big Boy Room Ideas”.  This board can include pins of different wall art from your shop that older boys might be interested in as well as other ideas for decorating an older boy’s room.

Moms shopping for wall art for their child’s room will search “Big Boy Room Ideas” and come across your board – and your art.

On my stationery shop’s Pinterest page, I include theme boards for all of our popular party themes.  Each themed board includes product pins from our shop, our blog posts showcasing ideas for the party theme AND pins from other people’s websites. 

These themed Pinterest boards are quite popular with our customers because they can find lots of different ideas to help them plan their party.  They are also easy to cross promote on other social media networks.

Trends in your Niche

As a designer, understanding current trends is important to growing your creative business.  Even if you’re still developing the product line for the newest trend, creating a board highlighting the trend can easily grow Pinterest followers.

In our stationery shop, unicorn birthday parties have been the rage for awhile now.  While I was still designing our unicorn stationery collections, I created a unicorn birthday party ideas Pinterest board.  Many of my new customers found me through this board when they were looking for ideas for their child’s unicorn party.

Keep in mind that your trend boards might not last forever.  That’s okay.  If you gain new followers and customers from them in the short term, then they’ve done their job.

Related Things of Interest

And I’m not talking about your own personal boards here. 

Although customers might be shopping for a new baby or wedding, there are lots of other things that they’re interested in.  Capture these interests by creating a series of related Pinterest boards.

By having at least a few related boards, a potential customer is more likely to follow you because the content you share encompasses many of their interests.

It’s important, though, to choose topics that your customers might also search for in addition to the product keywords.  Not boards that relate to you personally.  

For example, a shop that sells vintage inspired home décor might also include Pinterest boards that feature favorite out of print books or easy home organization ideas.

By figuring out other things your potential customers are also searching for, you can attract your target audience more easily.  Even if they aren’t ready to make a purchase from you right now.

Freebies and Resources

As many of you know, my belief in growing a successful business is to give, give and give some more.

Gather all of these gifts – usually in the format of freebies and resources – and organize them onto their own Pinterest board.  This gives cusomters a place to reference all of the amazing free things you’ve created for them.

You can even market this Pinterest board on your other social media channels.  Cross promotion is a great way to gain new Pinterest followers and transform your customers into raving fans.

Recent Blog Posts

If you write blog posts for your shop, which is one my favorite free marketing tools, you need to organize this content in one location. 

Create a Pinterest board dedicated to your shop’s most recent blog posts.  When I write a new blog post, this is the first place that I post it.  That way my followers know where to check what’s new on our blog.  

This Pinterest strategy also helps make sure that I don’t miss pinning a blog post.  Once you’ve written a lot of blog posts, it can be hard to figure out which ones you remembered to pin and which you didn’t. 

Holidays

Depending on your business niche, creating Pinterest boards focused on the holidays might be a great niche to drive more traffic to your shop.

For kids stationery and celebrations, holiday designs can make or break my sales depending on the month.  I have set up Pinterest boards focused on the major holidays that I design for – Valentine’s Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween and Christmas.

In addition to holiday themed Pinterest boards, I’ve also created boards focused on special events or times of the year.  Some of my Pinterest boards include back to school, graduation and dance recitals. 

When brainstorming Pinterest board ideas, think about the celebrations that matter to your customers.  If you have a shop in the wedding niche, create Pinterest boards beyond the wedding event.  You could create boards focused on Engagement Party Ideas, Rehearsal Dinner and Bridal Shower.

Organization Ideas

If you have a product that needs special organization – such as jewelry – create a board to pin some organization ideas.  Customers love to search for ways to store their new products. 

As a quick side note, writing about how to organize your product also makes for great blog posts.  Consider writing a series of posts about the best way to organize your product.  You can then pin these blog posts onto the Organization Board for easy sharing.

Product Care

Along with having a Pinterest board about organizing your product, it’s also great to have a board dedicated to caring for your product.  You can pin ideas for cleaning your product, maintaining the color and taking care of it.

Customers will ask a lot of questions about the best ways to care for their new purchase.  In addition to having an FAQ response, you can also link to this Pinterest board.  It’s a great way for customers to discover your Pinterest account.

Quotes

There’s something about a good quote that makes me feel all happy inside.  And I’m clearly not the only one.  Quotes are shared quite often on Pinterest.  It’s a great way to make your original content stand out.

So even if you don’t specialize in the quotes, you can still create a Pinterest board dedicated to quotes.  It’s a great way to find new followers interested in your niche.

Just remember – don’t post just any quote.  The quotes you choose for your Pinterest board should be focused on your niche.  For example, if you are a wedding planner, you could have a quote board focused on your favorite love quotes.  Or an artist might include a board with creativity quotes.

Final Thoughts…

No matter how beautiful the pins you make for Pinterest are, these gorgeous pins aren’t enough.  You need build a Pinterest profile with creative Pinterest boards that will get your potential customers to want to stay around and clickthrough your pins.

That’s where having a lot of amazing Pinterest board ideas is important.  You want to create a profile full of Pinterest boards that feature keywords your customers will search for. 

Brainstorm Pinterest board ideas based on the types of products you sell and the keywords your potential customers search for.   Use these ideas to create your business profile’s Pinterest boards. 

Then start pinning.  Create pins of your products, blog posts and other people’s content.     

Over time with the right Pinterest boards, you will attract the best customers and grow your sales.  Sometimes exponentially.