The goal of visiting Pinterest is often to find inspiration—but that’s not the only thing you can do there. I’ve found that 55% of Pinterest users visit the platform to shop via affiliate links, and around 80% discover a new brand or product while they’re there.
With these many eager shoppers, listing your products on Pinterest through affiliates gives you a fighting chance to make a significant profit. If you have the right Pinterest marketing strategy, you can attract your target audience and drive traffic to your website.
In this post, I’ll reveal how affiliate marketing on Pinterest works. Let’s begin by discussing how it benefits you.
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How Does Pinterest Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing is pretty much the same everywhere, with the main peculiarity being the platform you’ll be using. Affiliate marketers promote your product or website on Pinterest, earning a commission for every sale or lead they bring through their unique affiliate link.
On some social media platforms, like TikTok, you can only add a link to a business account’s bio. Pinterest, however, allows the affiliate marketer to embed the affiliate link as each pin’s URL, making affiliate marketing convenient on the platform.
3 Benefits of Pinterest Affiliate Marketing for Your Brand
If you use affiliate marketing on Pinterest, you can expect to enjoy these three major benefits:
1. It Increases Your Traffic and Lead Generation
Running an affiliate marketing campaign lets you drive some of Pinterest’s traffic to your website. For many visitors, the whole point of using Pinterest is to find inspiration from other users’ pins.
When these visitors find affiliate content that resonates with their intent, they’ll be compelled to click through, right into your website for more ideas. This gets you new leads that you can drive further down the marketing funnel.
2. It Boosts More Sales
Pinterest users love shopping. The platform’s Feed Optimization Playbook notes that 75% of users are more inclined to say they are consistently shopping, while 83% of weekly Pinners made purchases influenced by Pinterest content.
With affiliates that constantly create high-performing pins, you’ll not only drive more traffic but also increase sales and revenue. Your affiliates may even decide to drive traffic to their blog posts or YouTube videos. This presents more opportunities to link your affiliate products and provide helpful content around your offers.
As a result, you can enjoy multiple sales of different products from one affiliate.
3. You Enhance Your Brand Awareness
Pinterest affiliate marketing opens your brand to millions of users, many of whom will include your target audience.
As users troop into Pinterest, they begin to learn more about your brand through engaging affiliate pins. Even when they’re not purchasing instantly, they will remember your brand when they are ready to buy or recommend you to others.
Why You Should Consider Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest
The convenience of adding links to your affiliate pins is one—but many other outstanding features make Pinterest ideal for affiliate marketing, including:
Access to a Large Audience
Pinterest has over half a billion monthly active users. Among the US users, 46% are between 18 and 24 years old, 40% are within the 25-34 age bracket, and users within 34-44 years make up 39% of the US audience. These categories of people tend to shop more on social media. When it comes to number of users, Pinterest is ranked as the 17th social media network.
Its Visually Appealing Nature
The high-quality images on Pinterest give the platform a visually pleasing appeal.
Visuals are so powerful because they influence emotions quicker than words and aid memory. Also, the visual appeal of Pinterest contributes to its widely recognized positive user experience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Benefits
Pinterest is a search engine, much like Google, but it’s a visual search engine. This means that with proper SEO techniques, you can have your pins in the top search results when people look for products in your niche.
Optimized pins drive organic traffic to your website. Additionally, affiliates can run ads with a Pinterest business account to reach a larger audience.
Long Lifespan of Pinterest Pins
Your pins will remain visible on the platform for a long time. If they’re well-optimized, they will appear in search results on Pinterest and many other search engines.
User Engagement
Pinterest allows users to engage with your pins through reactions and comments. In addition, your affiliates can build a loyal following on the platform when they interact with other users and post relevant Pinterest content—this eventually helps more users see your offers.
Tips for Setting Up Your Affiliate Marketing Program on Pinterest
Now that you understand the benefits you could gain with a Pinterest affiliate program, let’s discuss how you can set one up. The first step is to determine your affiliate products. Then, your affiliate network does the majority of the rest of the work.
Before we skip a beat—what are affiliate networks?
Affiliate networks are like third-party service providers that help you plan an effective affiliate marketing program, source affiliates, set up the program, and monitor it. If you contract one, you’ll save valuable time.
If you can’t work with a network, the alternative is to:
- Source affiliates yourself,
- Ensure they have a Pinterest business account,
- Provide them with the necessary information on how to excel as affiliates on the platform and
- Use affiliate marketing software to generate affiliate links, onboard affiliates, and track the performance of your affiliates.
If you’re going through the process of onboarding affiliates yourself, I recommend providing marketing tips and resources to boost their affiliate marketing efforts on Pinterest. This is because your affiliates are part of your team. They contribute to your bottom line. So if they’re armed with knowledge for success, it’s a win for you, too.
But I also understand you might know little about succeeding on Pinterest as an affiliate marketer. So, here are some tips you can share with your affiliates to do affiliate marketing on Pinterest right. Encourage them to:
- Create attractive pins.
- Provide valuable content.
- Do keyword research to optimize pin descriptions and pin titles.
- State their affiliate relationship in the pin descriptions.
- Optimize their Pinterest profile by adding niche-relevant keywords.
- Create multiple pins to promote a product and compare to see which performs better. Test out static pins against videos.
- Regularly track performance with Pinterest analytics.
- Add a call to action to each pin description.
- Always post. Consistent pinning will keep you at the top.
Pros and Cons of Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Before you launch your affiliate marketing program on Pinterest, let’s look at the overall pros and cons.
Pros
- Pinterest has a significant number of users who visit the platform to discover new products and shop, so there’s little need for extensive marketing.
- The visual appeal of Pinterest influences buying. Particularly, visually appealing pins draw attention and drive traffic to your website.
- Affiliate marketers on Pinterest can add direct affiliate links to pins. So they don’t need an affiliate website.
- With a business Pinterest account, affiliate marketers can gain access to business tools like Pinterest Analytics to monitor their pins’ performance.
- Your affiliates can enable Rich Pins, a feature that syncs your website details about a particular product with the pin on Pinterest.
- Pins can appear on Google results.
- Your affiliates can join or create niche-specific group boards (Pinterest communities) to reach targeted audiences.
- Optimizing affiliate content for Pinterest SEO boosts affiliate marketing efforts.
Cons
- Each affiliate marketer must know how to use design tools to create eye-catching pins.
- Consistent pinning is necessary to remain visible and grow on the platform. Fortunately, affiliates can use tools like Tailwind to schedule pins.
Use Pinterest for Affiliate Marketing Success
Pinterest is a visual social media network that can help Pinners earn passive income through affiliate marketing on Pinterest while enabling brands to achieve more sales, increased traffic, and brand awareness.
Setting up and managing your affiliate marketing program on Pinterest can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t know how Pinterest works. But Vivian Agency can step in on your behalf. We’re a team of marketing professionals that efficiently takes charge of your affiliate marketing program, from getting affiliates to reporting progress.
Want to know more? Reach out to us here or book a call for a one-on-one session to discuss more.
