5 Essential Pinterest Tools to Power Up Your Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest has seen dramatic growth since its inception, with well over 70 million users worldwide. Even though Pinterest is now concentrating on growing internationally, most of its appeal is still focused in the US, where over 70% of the users are young, affluent women, itching to spend their money. A study by RichRelevance shows that the average order placed by Pinterest shoppers is $169, compared to $95 on Facebook, and $70 on Twitter.

Many top brands have caught on early, and now 60% of major brands have a Pinterest account. It has become a very valuable platform for businesses looking to increase sales or connect with potential customers.

Many smaller businesses have also seen their traffic and sales increasing dramatically, therefore it is a platform not to be ignored!

The rise of Pinterest has spawned many tools, and services related to analytics, scheduling pins, and creating images. Many have come and gone, but the best are still going strong. Some of the tools are free, and others have different paid packages, to receive more advanced features.

In this article I will show you 5 essential tools that I think you need to explode your pinterest marketing, and also save you time! They will enable you to create fantastic images in minutes, analyse data to enable you to target content specifically for your customers, and save time, by scheduling your content.

Pin Alerts

Pinalerts sends you notifications via email when someone has pinned directly from your website.

This is an excellent way of finding out which of your articles or images on your website are popular on pinterest, and are being pinned. This then allows you to focus more on creating content that is going to be popular. It also identifies the pinner, so you are able to then go to their page, and thank them for pinning your content. Chances are, they will then go and check out your website again. This is great in terms of building a community of followers, and increasing engagement. Pinterest analytics will only show you who has re-pinned content from your pinterest page, not your website.

Pin Groupie

Group boards are an excellent way of getting your pins out there, and increasing traffic to your website. But, hours can be spent trawling through pinterest looking for ideal group boards in your niche. Pinterest do not provide a search facility specifically for group boards, and up till recently, the main way of finding out about group boards was through the few Pinners who created pages just rammed with group boards, or through google search, so obviously wasn’t ideal!

Now you will be pleased to know, there is a great little site out there called PinGroupie which takes all the hassle out of locating those elusive group boards. It will allow you to search by category, and also see the board description directly on the website, which is great to see if the board is a good fit for your business. For more information about PinGroupie, Vincent Ng has a detailed blog post.

Tailwind app

Pinterest now has analytics features on its business accounts, but they are very basic. To get more insight into whether your content is achieving results, and whether you need to alter your marketing strategy, you really need something like Tailwind, which gives very detailed analytics data for Pinterest. This app has many features, including identifying your most popular pins, discovering influential followers, your engagement score, and tracks the growth of your profile.

You can get basic analytics data for free, but if you want to pay for more features, it is $149 for the lite plan, which is tailored towards small businesses, social media consultants, and bloggers.  The professional version is $399 per month.

 Viraltag

If you want to make your life easier, but still pin to pinterest on a regular basis, then you need a scheduling tool. There are many benefits of scheduling your pins, rather than having a pinning frenzy:

It actually saves you time! Rather than getting carried away on pinterest, you schedule your pins, then stop!

People can get really annoyed if their homefeed is cluttered up with your numerous images of shoes..they might even unfollow you!

More people will see your pins, if you spread them out over the day, and especially if you schedule for busy times.

I recently wrote an article about Viraltag. It is a great scheduling tool, that also incorporates analytics, and the ability to schedule re-pins. Read all about it here.

Picmonkey

Pinterest is Images. And picmonkey is one of the best free image creation tools out there. You can maximize the impact of your business on Pinterest, by really focusing on creating great eye-catching images. You can explore creative ways to turn not only your product images, but reviews, case studies and guides into great visual content.

Picmonkey allows you to resize your images, overlay pictures with text, and create collages. It is also very easy to use!

This is by no means the only Pinterest tools that are out there, but these cover the main areas of analytics, content creation and engagement, that are necessary for your pinterest marketing strategy.

If there are any tools that you use for Pinterest Marketing that are not included, then please let us know in the comments below.