Pinterest marketing gives you the opportunity to get your products in front of an audience browsing Pinterest for purchase ideas. In fact, 72% of pinners say that the Pins they see inspire them to shop, even when they aren’t actively looking for anything in particular.
These users could very well be potential customers for your products who are in the middle of the research stage in the buying process.
But while many ecommerce businesses could benefit from building a presence on Pinterest, many don’t because of time restraints, the difficulty of getting started, or the struggle of consistently creating interesting Pins.
Luckily, there are tools that can help with all of this, that can improve the efficiency and efficacy of your Pinterest marketing. Here are 10 apps and tools that can help you take your Pinterest game to the next level.
If you’re new to Pinterest marketing, be sure to check out:
1. Tailwind
Price: $9.99 USD per month (billed annually)
You can save a ton of time on social media marketing by scheduling your content in advance to be automatically published. Tailwind gives you this ability, along with a slew of other features tailored for Pinterest.
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You can schedule individual Pins for specific time slots, or create queues of content that will be automatically posted in the next available slot. It’s easy to view the entire content schedule at once, and quickly drag and drop queued Pins into different time slots.
Tailwind gives you a few options for creating pins. You can:
- Create Pins from scratch by uploading images.
- Create a Pin from an Instagram post.
- Use their browser extension to save images and create pins from anywhere online, including your own Shopify store. This is a huge time-saver, and it can help you ensure that you don’t miss out on a product you should be promoting.
Tailwind also offers Pinterest analytics, which can be helpful to access while scheduling content. There’s not much you'll get from their dashboard that you can’t already get from Pinterest’s native analytics, but it's nice to have it all available on one platform while scheduling content.
Tailwind has a free 30 day trial. After that, plans start at $15 per month when paid on a month-to-month basis. Alternatively, you can check out Buffer if you're looking for a tool to schedule posts on multiple social media platforms beyond just Pinterest and Instagram.
2. Canva
Price: Free, paid plans start at $12.95 USD per month (per user)
Pinterest is a visual-first platform, and if the Pin itself doesn’t look good, there’s little chance that the pinner will stop to read the description, let alone click through.
Making a strong first impression is key on Pinterest, and design software like Canva can help you streamline the way you create good-looking visual content. Part of creating a high-performing Pin, after all, will be creating Pins that fall within the ideal size ratios.
Canva actually has Pinterest Pin templates ready to go, with multiple layouts that you can choose from to quickly create gorgeous Pins at scale.
Each of these layouts is completely customizable. You can change the text, the font, the background image, add graphics or take design elements away. You can even just start a new graphic from scratch and upload your own visual assets.
Even if you have existing images sized perfectly for Pinterest, you can use Canva to add a logo or text overlay on your images to ensure your brand or website is represented on your Pins as it gets re-pinned.
The basic plan for Canva is free with tons of images and assets available at no cost, with the option to purchase new ones for $1 each.
If you decide to upgrade ($9.95 per month when billed annually), you can gain access to even more design assets and stock photos, with the option to save your branding and design choices for quicker creation.
3. Piktochart
Price: Free, paid plans starting at $12.50 per month
If you’ve recently browsed Pinterest, there’s a good chance you've seen at least a few infographics or infographic-style Pins. Infographics can help diversify your own Pinterest content.
Piktochart works similarly to Canva, but infographics and charts are their specialty. There are infographic templates available to choose from, which give you a quick start and make it easier to create a gorgeous image even if you have zero design experience.
The templates are all fully customizable, though they recommend not changing the size of the text boxes as they’re already designed for the ideal ratio. You can, however, change everything about the infographic, including setting new color schemes with just a few clicks. Fast is the name of the game here.
You can technically use Piktochart for free, but most businesses might benefit from upgrading to at least the Lite plan, which costs $12.50 per month. You can get up to 600 templates instead of the 6 offered in the starter plan.
If you can afford it and are using it regularly, consider springing for the Pro plan, which costs $24.17 per month. This gives you access to HD image exports, watermark removal, and custom color schemes for your brand.
For alternatives, be sure to check out these other easy-to-use infographic makers.
4. Woobox’s Pinterest Tab
Price: Free
If your store has been around for a while, there’s a good chance that you’ve built up a decent following on Facebook. Facebook, after all, can act as a central hub for your social media presence—it’s where users are likely to go to look for social proof, reviews, and more to evaluate your business.
You can make the most out of your Facebook Page with Woobox, which allows you to add a static Pinterest tab to your Page. This tab stands out visually, and lets you share your boards on Facebook. This allows you to tap into the audience that you already have on Facebook and send them over to Pinterest while showcasing your top boards.
Woobox is also known for being a strong social media contest platform, and they have an exceptional “Pin It to Win It” campaign option. This contest type lets you incentivize repins of specific, pre-selected pins with the chance to win a prize at the end.
💡Note: You must give pinners a choice of Pins, because asking them to repin a single image goes against Pinterest’s contest rules.
The contest will be run through a landing page, and you’ll be able to capture lead information and view analytics as the contest progresses.
Woobox does have a free plan available that lets you utilize both of these features. If you want your contest to scale, however, you can opt for their $30 a month plan, which allows up to 5,000 participants to enter.
5. Pingroupie
Price: Free
Contributing to group boards is a quick way to make connections on Pinterest and to potentially distribute some of your own content in new places. The tricky part is to actually find these boards, because manually searching for them is more difficult than you could even begin to imagine.
Enter Pingroupie. This free tool’s entire purpose is to list group boards that are currently live. You could reach out to these board owners and see if they’d be open to doing a group board with you, or if they’re in need of contributors like you. If you’re able to contribute relevant, non-spammy content of your own, there could be a lot to gain for your brand.
Pingroupie sorts groups by industry, but you can also search for keywords. When you click on them, you can see them immediately on Pinterest.
Pingroupie can also be a strong competitive research tool thanks to the industry sorting feature. You can see what types of collaborative content other businesses in your industry are putting out, and see if you can spot something they’re missing that you can offer yourself.
6. PinFollow
Price: Free
It’s a common practice to follow a number of Pinterest accounts early on in hopes of having people follow you back. If you’ve ended up following more people than you have followers, however, you’ll want to occasionally prune the accounts you’re following to maintain your follower ratio and keep your feed clean.
PinFollow is a valuable tool for this purpose. It can tell you which of the accounts you’re following haven’t followed you back. Then, if you choose to, you can even unfollow them right from the PinFollow dashboard. It takes an otherwise time consuming and painful process and speeds it up a great deal.
PinFollow is free, and it takes only a few seconds to set up, making it one of the easiest Pinterest marketing tools to use on this list.
Disclaimer: Don’t use this tool to mass unfollow everyone at once, as this behavior goes against Pinterest’s terms of service and could get your account banned. Instead, you can use this tool to monitor your following and slowly unfollow unengaged users over time.
7. Product Pins
With Product Pins, users can purchase your products directly from a Pin through secure payment options without having to leave the Pinterest app. For users who aren’t as familiar with your brand, this can help them feel more confident in purchasing and make first-time purchases easier.
8. Zotabox’s Social Sharing Buttons
Price: Free
Pinning your own content is great, but what’s even better is when your customers and site visitors do it with you. Enabling Pinterest sharing on your site can do wonders for your Pinterest marketing.
Zotabox is a Shopify app that’s easy to install and allows you to add either “Share” or “Follow” social media buttons, along with links and icons to specific profiles.
Adding “Share” buttons that appear across all your content marketing and on individual product pages can help get the word out about your products. People who like what they see, after all, may save it to Pinterest to consider purchasing later or share it with their followers, and the more Pins you have floating around on the platform, the better.
Zotabox’s social sharing buttons are free. If you decide to upgrade the app to a paid plan, you can get other features, like the option to remove branding or collect emails, but for the sake of Pinterest marketing, the free plan gives you what you need.
9. Pinoculars Conversion Tracking (Shopify App)
Price: $15 per month
Remarketing can be an exceptionally valuable investment for your business, and that doesn’t change with Pinterest ads. Many users, after all, don’t buy a product the first time they see an ad.
Pinocular’s conversion tracking app for Shopify makes retargeting based on Promoted Pin activity significantly easier. This app can help you get more out of your ad spend to increase your overall profit.
Pinterest’s conversion tracking tags are a little more complicated to set up than Facebook’s, and for merchants without coding experience it can be intimidating. One of the biggest advantages of this app is that it simplifies the process of setting up Pinterest conversion tracking tags for your store. And without the tracking tags, you wouldn’t be able to retarget accurately, or track the results from your Promoted Pin campaigns.
One of the biggest advantages of this app is the ability to effortlessly retarget users who have added items to their carts and then abandoned them. These are high-intent, high-interest users, and giving them a nudge could be all they need to follow through on their purchase.
Pinocular’s app costs $15 per month, but there’s a 7 day free trial you can check out before taking the plunge.
10. IFTTT for Pinterest
Price: Free
Sometimes the best way to get more momentum on two different social media platforms is to integrate their marketing together. IFTTT is a commonly used tool for creating automated workflows, and now it’s one that you can use to improve your Pinterest marketing too.
Their Pinterest and Instagram marketing integrations are particularly valuable. Some of the top recipes include:
- Sync your Instagram posts to Pinterest boards
- Sync Instagram posts to Pinterest boards when using a specific hashtag
- Publish a tweet when a new pin is added to your board
- Upload new Pin images to a specific Facebook album on your Page
As a word of warning, you don’t want to overuse this tool to the point where you’re completely out of the editorial equation. A fully automated social media presence is obvious to your customers. That being said, it’s a useful tool for easy automation as long as you use it to supplement your marketing efforts, not replace them entirely.
Which Pinterest tools do you recommend?
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are plenty of useful third party tools and apps out there to complement Pinterest's built-in features and improve your Pinterest marketing efforts.
That said, let’s hear from you. What tools do you use for Pinterest marketing that you couldn’t live without? Share them in the comments below!