There was a time when I didn’t have a clue about Pinterest funnels. I’ve been a Pinterest manager for creative online service providers since 2020 and I technically did “all the right things.” I followed all of Pinterest’s best practices like pinning fresh, original content, using researched keywords in all my copy (complete sentences too), and using my analytics to inform my strategies.

While these things helped my clients grow their brand awareness, engagements, and even website traffic, I noticed that it didn’t matter how much I did on Pinterest, sometimes we didn’t see an ROI. As I got curious, I noticed that the clients who did see an ROI were the clients who had something we call a sales funnel. And the clients that struggled to see an ROI were the ones with not much more than a few random blog posts.

That’s when I realized there was a huge gap to bridge, and no one was talking about it.

Was I seeing it wrong? Was this trend only amongst my clients? Pinterest educators everywhere hardly spoke about what happens once a pinner leaves Pinterest and enters your website. So I spent time learning all about sales psychology, neuromarketing, and sales funnels and that’s when everything started to make perfect sense.

The way to make Pinterest profitable was to go beyond the platform and dig into the rest of the customer journey. I realized that Pinterest was only the mouth of this funnel, and as a Pinterest expert, I couldn’t sell a transformation that neglected the rest of the Pinterest funnel. So that’s a little backstory on how I became a Pinterest and funnels strategist!

Okay, so let me tell you about what I learned!

What is a Pinterest Funnel?

Let’s start with how I define a general funnel, and then we’ll mold that to fit Pinterest!

A general sales funnel is the journey your client or customer takes between first discovering you and finally buying from you. Sometimes that’s as quick as searching for a specific product, clicking on the website, and immediately purchasing. Sometimes it’s as long as realizing you have a problem, casually searching for a solution, being nurtured by the provider of that solution, to finally purchasing when the time is right, taking longer to work through the 5 stages of awareness.

It’ll be helpful if we use an analogy here: a pitcher full of water, a big funnel, and a small jar underneath. Imagine the jar is on a table, but the funnel is suspended a good foot above the jar. 

The pitcher represents Pinterest.

The water represents your leads.

The funnel represents your nurture efforts.

The jar represents your sales.

When a Pinterest user clicks through to your website, that’s the water being poured out of the pitcher, into your funnel. Now, if you don’t have a funnel, that water is going all over the place, maybe a few drops will make it into the small jar, but not many.

But if you do have a funnel, you’re concentrating the direction of that water towards  your small jar. But remember, we’re suspended a bit above the jar, so we’re not catching as much water as we could.

Okay, now let’s talk about what the funnel represents.

Your funnel encourages your audience into a relationship of trust. You’re building that trust with lots of free value, staying top of mind, and letting them get to know and love your brand. We do this with freebies, blogs, email marketing, and Instagram.

Now picture that funnel with a longer spout (beer bong anyone?? LOL). It’s so long, it’s touching the entrance of the small jar, meaning most of that water is entering the jar. This shows us that the more we build our funnel, the more likely we are to land more sales!

The more effort we put into our blogs, freebies, email marketing, and IG will help us catch the most amount of sales possible. Let’s talk about how to do this the right way.

How Do I Build Pinterest Funnels?

I mentioned there’s a right way, not because there’s a certain formula you must follow, but because there is a wrong way. And if you can just follow these general guidelines, you’ll avoid that wrong way!

The wrong way to build your funnel is by randomly throwing together your blog, freebies, welcome sequences, email newsletters, and Instagram. If you can follow a structure instead, it will make a world of difference, I promise.

Want to know my biggest secret to building Pinterest funnels?

(And one of the first things I teach in my course, Power of Pinterest)

Flipping it upside down and starting with the bottom.

This means we want to start by identifying what our end goal sale is. What do we want our audience to eventually purchase? Is it a product, course, service, or something else? We also need to get hella clear on who this product is for. 

Once we’ve identified our end goal sale and who it’s for, we need to get clear on the problem this sale is solving. Once we’re clear on the problem, we need to create lots of small, free nuggets (freebies, blogs, emails, content) that help that specific customer exactly where they’re at. 

Understanding the stages of awareness is super helpful here as you build this free content and nurture them towards your end goal sale.

Promoting your content on Pinterest

Once we create and systematize our free nuggets, we are ready to promote them on Pinterest! Each nugget is perfectly suited for our ideal customer and it gently guides them into your sales funnel. It nurtures them into the big sale by solving mini problems around their main problem, positioning yourself as the one-stop-shop solution, and building trust.

I teach you how to do all of this inside Power of Pinterest!

Here’s an example of a fictional Pinterest funnel:

Meet Mor (iykyk), she’s a copywriter that wants to sell her brand messaging guide. This guide is perfect for established businesses that are refining and improving their marketing, not starting from scratch.

This audience is problem-aware, but not quite solution-aware yet. Right now, they need to be educated on what will solve their problem of not knowing how to speak to their ideal customers.

So Mor decides to write some blogs that provide quick, mini solutions to her customers’ problem of not knowing how to speak to their ideal customers. Then, she develops a freebie that takes those blogs a level deeper while also giving a small taste of her end goal sale, her brand messaging guide.

She writes email welcome sequences and sales campaigns that educate, provide solutions, and establish personal connections. She keeps her IG active and relevant.

Now she’s ready to pin about those blogs and her freebie. And now every single click she gets is someone who is looking for the solution she provides. Every website visitor is now brought into the ultimate goldmine of value. Those visitors turn into email subscribers who fall in love with Mor, begin to deeply trust her, and return to her when they’re ready to buy that brand messaging guide because 1) they now know they need it and 2) Mor stayed top of mind the whole time.

Concluding notes on Pinterest funnels

Do we see now how important it is to nurture our audience? How many customers are slipping through the cracks because we’re just sending them straight to the checkout page? How many customers would gladly buy from you if they were just educated a bit more? The potential for more sales is wild. I hope this convinced you to give your funnel some love!

I’ll walk you through this entire process, step-by-step in my course, Power of Pinterest. Try a “tini” taste of POP by watching the first 10 minutes for free here!

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