Automate Your Pinterest Marketing for Better Results

With over 400 million monthly active users, Pinterest has become an essential platform for businesses looking to drive brand awareness, traffic, and sales. However, effectively managing an engaged Pinterest presence involves consistent effort across numerous areas:

• Creating eye-catching new pins
• Curating content from other sources
• Monitoring analytics to optimize approach
• Interacting with followers and influencers
• Tracking campaign performance over time
• Adjusting strategy as trends/algorithm changes

Handling all these responsibilities manually on an ongoing basis is hugely time/resource-intensive. But automation can help dramatically amplify your Pinterest marketing productivity.

The Power of Marketing Automation

Per a recent Social Insider report, the top 25% of Pinterest business profiles rely heavily on automation, scheduling 75% of pins versus just 25% manual pinning.

Why such a strong preference for putting Pinterest activities on auto-pilot?

Automation tools provide a force-multiplier effect – letting you accomplish more while working less thanks to streamlined, systemized processes that handle repetitive tasks.

Benefits of automating Pinterest marketing include:

• 10x more pins shared consistently without daily heavy lifting
• Hours saved on repetitive content curation and posting
• Improved engagement with auto-spaced activity avoiding spamminess
• Better audience targeting following/unfollowing based on smart filters
• Enhanced analytics with custom reporting revealing what works

With the right automation approach, you can grow your Pinterest presence tenfold while spending a fraction of the manual effort.

Clearly automation has tangible advantages, but how exactly can you put it into practice for Pinterest? What specific tools and tactics offer the best ROI?

I‘ll cover the details in this comprehensive guide…

Top Pinterest Automation Tools

Several excellent platforms exist to help automate various Pinterest workflows. I‘ll provide an overview of the most popular options and key capabilities:

1. Zapier

Zapier is an integration tool with over 3000 app integrations. It lets you connect Pinterest to other programs for automating data transfers and tasks.

Some things you can do with Pinterest + Zapier include:

• Auto-post blog content – Instantly add new blog posts to relevant Pinterest boards

• Follow/unfollow automation – Follow new followers, auto-unfollow non-followers after set duration

• Auto-reply to comments – Configure triggers to add default responses to common questions

• Email digest reports – Schedule emails with analytics like top weekly pins, follower growth etc.

Zapier requires some technical know-how for creating workflows called "zaps" but they provide templates and solid documentation.

Plans and Pricing

• Free – Build 5 zaps, 100 task runs per month
• Starter – $19.99/month – 20 zaps, 750 runs
• Standard – $49.99/month – 50 zaps, 2500 runs

2. IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) provides premade "applets" connecting Pinterest to 300+ other platforms. It offers simple automation recipes through an intuitive UI.

Examples applets for Pinterest include:

• New WordPress post -> Create Pinterest pin
• New Shopify product added -> Pin product
• Get mobile notification when your pin is repinned

You can mix-and-match applets to create various workflows. IFTTT is simpler to start with than Zapier but less customizable.

Plans and Pricing

• Free – Unlimited applets, basic functionality
• Pro – $9.99/month – Additional features like 3-hour time triggers

3. Tailwind

Tailwind offers a visual scheduler optimized for Pinterest and Instagram marketing. You can easily bulk upload pins and schedule them to automatically post throughout the week.

Other Tailwind features:

• Repin top-performing content from influencers
• Smart suggestions for high-quality content based on your niche
• Engage your audience by auto-commenting and liking posts
• In-depth analytics tracking pin views, repins, link clicks etc.

Plans and Pricing

• Free Trial
• Starter – $9.99/month
• Pro – $19.99/month
• Business – $49.99/month

4. BoardBooster

BoardBooster offers a toolkit specialized for Pinterest marketers focused on automation and analytics.

Key features include:

• Auto-invite new followers to like your boards
• In-depth analytics dashboard tracking all key metrics
• Auto-follow/unfollow profiles matched to niche filters
• Schedule re-pinning for consistent content
• Bulk pin editing

BoardBooster starts from $16.58/month up to $124.50/month for premium tools.

5. Buffer

Buffer provides an efficient way to schedule social media posts in advance across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

Features for Pinterest:

• Analyze best posting times
• Bulk upload pins for queued auto-posting
• Recycle top older pins for renewed engagement

Plans and Pricing

• Free (Instagram only)
• Publish – $5/month with Pinterest scheduling
• Pro – $15/month for analytics and team features

With an overview of leading options covered now, let‘s see how we can put these tools into practice…

Actionable Tactics for Pinterest Automation

While tools provide the foundation, you need the right strategy and execution process in place to extract maximum value.

I‘ll share proven insider tips across key facets like content scheduling, community growth, analytics tracking, and more.

Follow this expert advice for streamlined Pinterest automation.

Scheduling Content Publishing

Consistently sharing compelling new pins is the lifeblood of Pinterest marketing. But manually creating and posting content daily consumes vast time.

Thankfully, automation eliminates the grind of perpetual pinning by letting you batch prep pins and schedule intelligent posting cadences.

Here are pro tips for efficient content scheduling:

Buffer Up Pins in Advance

Rather than pinning daily, use apps like Tailwind or Buffer to bulk upload 50-100 pins at once, then queue their release over days/weeks on optimal schedules.

This way you frontload the pin creation labor but benefit from a prolonged drip-feed of content.

TIP: Schedule a mix of Evergreen pins along with time-sensitive pins tied to events, promotions etc. This adds relevance without strictly pinning real-time.

Auto-Pull Content from Feeds

Rather than manually seeking content to pin, leverage existing feeds:

• New blog posts
• Products added
• RSS feeds from influencers/news sources in your niche
• Pinterest‘s Topic and Board RSS feeds

Use IFTTT, Zapier etc to auto-post fresh items from these streams into your boards regularly.

TIP: Apply filters so only relevant items matching keywords get auto-posted rather than everything.

Optimize Scheduling Cadence

Determine optimal daily pin volume for each of your boards to drive audience growth without overwhelming followers.

Analytics tools like Tailwind and Zapier can reveal historical performance data showing engagement by time-of-day, day of week etc. Use these insights to calculate ideal posting frequencies.

Generally, 2-5 pins daily per board prevents spam while providing regular content.

TIP: Vary specific pinning times day-to-day to improve reach.

Now let‘s explore tactics for accelerating community growth through smart follow/unfollow automation…

Expanding Your Audience

Gaining new followers interested in your niche boosts discovery and traffic. Yet manually finding and engaging profiles that fit your target demographic is hugely tedious.

Automation streamlines audience expansion through:

• Auto-following profiles tailored to your niche
• Automatically unfollowing inactive non-followers

I‘ll share best practices to responsibly automate community growth:

Leverage Smart Follow Filters

Tools like Tailwind and BoardBooster filter Pinterest search results, auto-following profiles matching parameters like:

• Keyword/hashtags of interest
• Follower count thresholds
• Follow specific influencers
• Location, gender filters
• And more…

Example: Auto-follow users who posted about "yoga" with 500+ followers last week.

Regularly run these filters to automatically connect with on-target prospects.

TIP: Export any newly followed profiles lacking descriptions for manual review before unfollowing. This avoids disengaging real humans accidentally.

Schedule Unfollowing Non-Followers

It‘s common courtesy on social platforms to follow back profiles that follow you. Those that don‘t after weeks can be safely pruned.

Zapier lets you:

• Get daily email notifications of new followers still not following you after X days. Manually unfollow inactive profiles.

• Fully automate unfollowing non-followers after a set duration like 14 days.

TIP: Only prune a small percentage of non-followers per day to avoid penalties for aggressive unfollowing.

Combining smart following with responsible unfollowing keeps your community cultivated for activated members actually interested in your brand.

Now let‘s see how analytics tracking can be automated to cut down reporting time while improving visibility into performance…

Automating Analytics and Reporting

Monitoring key Pinterest metrics manually consumes many hours across:

• Navigating Pinterest analytics to record latest numbers
• Comparing new data to previous benchmarks
• Creating visualizations plotting trends over weeks/months
• Exporting reports tied to campaigns or events

Automating analytics workflows eliminates these recurring reporting hassles.

Here are examples of tracking Pinterest data automatically:

Schedule Email Digests

Have core statistics like profile views, follows, repins etc. exported on a routine cadence via Zapier without any manual exports needed.

Zapier compiles numbers into digest emails with simple charts sent daily, weekly or monthly based on preferences.

Queue Custom Reports

For specific initiatives like product launches or promotional campaigns, use Zapier to instantly collect detailed analytics once triggered by the event kickoff date.

Reports include pin performance tied to custom parameters rather than just overall numbers. Email results to stakeholders.

Notify on Goal Achievements

Instead of manually monitoring dashboards for certain milestone thresholds being hit, automatically get alerts from Zapier when key achievements occur like:

• Gaining 1000 total followers
• 250 repins on a single pin
• 100 clicks on links you‘ve pinned

Celebrate benchmarks instantly versus delayed noticing!

With the foundation covered now for scheduling, audience growth, analytics etc – let‘s briefly highlight some other helpful ways to automate Pinterest workflows…

Additional Automation Opportunities

While publishing content, tracking data, and community management represent core focuses – we can systemize a few more helpful workflows…

Pin Metadata Management

Details like descriptions, board assignments, destination links can make-or-break pin performance. But editing these fields at scale is hugely tedious manually.

Instead, leverage bulk editing capabilities from Tailwind or BoardBooster to modify hundreds of pins in one step based on batch actions or filters.

Auto-Commenting

Personally replying to every comment can be challenging at scale. Automate common responses through canned templates triggered by keywords.

For example, Zapier can auto-reply to questions about shipping times, return policies etc by filtering trigger comments then adding prewritten answers.

Auto-Liking Content

Liking posts from followers and influencers drives reciprocal engagement. But browsing content to manually like taxes time.

BoardBooster features a smart collector to auto-like posts matching defined filters for hashtags, mentions etc rather than strictly manual curation. This allows more meaningful engagement at scale.

Email/Message Follow-Up Sequences

When new users follow you, further engage them with targeted email or direct message sequences highlighting selected products, boards, invites to like content etc.

Zapier enables creating multi-message sequences triggered upon gaining a new follower. Tailwind also offers follow-up messaging capabilities.

Key Takeaways and Predictions

With Pinterest‘s meteoric rise showing no signs of slowing down, brands need to determine optimal strategies given limited resource bandwidth.

Based on the expertise and evidence shared here, my guidance for maximizing Pinterest marketing ROI would focus on 3 key principles:

1. Automate repetitive tasks – Reserve your energy for high-level strategy rather than perpetual posting, reporting, and basic engagement.

2. Segment audiences – Follow/engage profiles selectively rather than mass targets to improve conversions.

3. Analyze data rigorously – Quantify/compare performance metrics constantly to guide decisions with evidence vs guesses.

While human creativity and emotional appeal remain branding necessities, leaning more heavily into consistent automated workflows and analytics creates a force-multiplying effect for Pinterest results and efficiency.

The Future of Automation

We‘ve only scratched the surface of potential automation innovations on the horizon as artificial intelligence accelerates…

Here are two exciting developments to watch that could further optimize Pinterest marketing:

Dynamic Scheduling

Rather than fixed content schedules, AI will dynamically adapt pinning cadences on each board based on evolving audience behaviors. Matching timing, messaging and creative styles to real-time responses 24/7.

Automated Design

Leveraging machine learning and datasets of high-performing designs, AI will auto-generate completely original, on-brand pin designs optimized for engagement. Removing creative hurdles when ideation stalls.

Will automation wholly replace human marketers someday? Likely not completely. But enhanced productivity enables us to focus energy on the passion points that first attracted us to marketing rather than operational drudgery.

Now over to you – what opportunities or concerns around marketing automation resonate most right now? Which workflows should we focus on optimizing next? I welcome your perspectives in the comments!