Pinterest Marketing with Sherisse Marie

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Everybody files Pinterest under social media. It isn’t. It’s a visual search engine quietly sitting on a goldmine — and a Pinterest strategist who got in on the ground floor explains how to mine it.

Let’s talk about Pinterest marketing

There’s a quiet giant in the room that most business owners walk straight past. They crowd onto Facebook and Instagram and X, elbowing for a sliver of attention that evaporates in an afternoon, while a platform built for exactly the thing they want — people actively hunting for something to buy — sits half-empty and waiting. Pinterest reported some 619 million monthly active users at the close of 2025, the great majority of them arriving not to argue or doomscroll but to plan, to gather, to decide what to spend money on next. And here’s the part that should make any marketer sit up: the overwhelming share of what people search for on Pinterest isn’t a brand name at all, which means the field is wide open for whoever shows up with the right picture and the right words.

To make sense of all this I sat down with Sherisse Marie, a Pinterest strategist who was, by her own account, among the first hundred people ever to open a Pinterest account, and who has spent the years since turning the platform into a lead machine for her clients. What follows is the groundwork, then the conversation — and beneath it, the video and audio versions of the whole thing.

What Pinterest actually is

The single most useful thing to understand about Pinterest is that it is not social media; it is a search engine that happens to wear a pretty coat. Sherisse put it perfectly: imagine Google and Amazon had a baby, and the baby could only communicate in pictures. People don’t come to connect with old friends; they come with intent, searching for a recipe, a renovation, a dress, a plan. That intent is why purchase behavior on Pinterest runs so far ahead of the other platforms, where users are mostly drifting past. It’s also, by Sherisse’s reckoning, the third-largest search engine going — arguably the second if you fold Google and YouTube together as the single company they are — and a great deal of what surfaces in an ordinary Google image search is quietly being pulled from Pinterest in the first place, which alone is reason enough to plant your flag there.

The other structural gift is longevity. A post on Instagram or Facebook lives a few restless hours and then sinks forever; a Pin keeps circulating, resurfacing, and earning clicks for months or even years after you make it. As Sherisse pointed out, nearly every Pin on the platform points somewhere — to a product, a service, a blog post, a video, a landing page, even a Facebook group, that last one a wide-open trick almost no strategist is using. Your effort doesn’t expire at midnight; it compounds. For a marketer measuring return on investment, that extended shelf life is the difference between renting attention and owning it.

The advertising menu, briefly

Pinterest does offer a full advertising suite for those who want to pay to play, and it’s worth knowing the shape of it. Promoted Pins simply pay to push a standard Pin in front of a wider crowd, blending into the feed and search results; Video Pins put your product or story in motion; Shopping Ads pull pricing and availability straight into the feed and send a click directly to the product page; Carousel Ads let a viewer swipe through several images at once; and Collection Ads marry a lifestyle image to the products beneath it for an immersive, catalog-like browse. Steering all of it are some genuinely sharp targeting tools — keyword targeting that catches people mid-search, audience targeting by interest and behavior and demographic, and Actalike audiences that hunt for new prospects resembling your existing customers — while the Pinterest Tag and its conversion tracking quietly measure what people actually do once they land on your site.

All of which is useful. But the headline Sherisse kept coming back to is that you don’t actually need the ads. The organic reach, she insists, is where the real treasure is buried, in no small part because so few businesses have figured the platform out that the competition — paid and organic alike — is a fraction of what you’d face elsewhere. Which is exactly where our conversation went.

Finding the right door

Sherisse describes herself, cheerfully, as new-agey and intuitive — closer to a Buddhist than anything, a little Buddha statue on her shelf to match the one on mine — and her favorite clients are the spiritually inclined entrepreneurs others overlook: the intuitives, the holistic healers, the mediums and the teachers of such things. She came to that niche by way of a belief she states plainly, that the doors meant for you swing open and the ones that aren’t stay shut. She had wanted, badly, for life coaching to be her door — taking anxious, overwhelmed people and teaching them to hear their own intuition — and it simply wouldn’t open. What opened instead was the work behind the scenes: doing virtual-assistant tasks for fellow coaches, stumbling onto a client’s Pinterest account, and discovering that the quiet machinery of helping other people’s businesses grow was the joy she’d been looking for all along. The door you push on isn’t always the one that gives.

What a funnel really is

The word “funnel” has been passed around the marketing world like a cigarette at an AA meeting — everyone’s handled it and almost no one quite has it. Sherisse cuts through the fog: a funnel is simply anything that carries a person from point A to point B along the buying journey, the wide top of the pyramid holding everyone who wants your free thing, narrowing to those who’ll buy something modest, narrowing again to the cream who’ll work with you one to one. What makes her version sing is where she chooses to start — not with a timid little teaser but with your biggest, best win right up front. Give away the thing that delivers the most bang, she says, because that’s what turns a stranger into a raving fan who thinks, if she’s handing that out for free, what on earth is waiting behind the door? Curiosity is the engine, and curiosity runs on emotion — people decide with their feelings and justify with their logic afterward, which is both wonderful to know and maddening to act on.

Joe’s pizzeria and the local problem

Not every business is a natural fit, and Sherisse is honest about it. Local and regional outfits are trickier on Pinterest, because the platform doesn’t reliably know where your customers live, and a small geographic target can turn into a bit of a crapshoot. Her workaround for, say, a neighborhood pizzeria is clever: rather than hoping recipes magically summon walk-in diners, build a slim recipe book — the two best dishes posted free on a landing page, with an upsell to the full collection for a few dollars and a scattering of mouthwatering photos and the restaurant’s details alongside. A series of Pins, one per recipe, drives traffic to those pages, you watch which performs, and the whole thing becomes a tidy self-liquidating funnel that pays for itself while quietly advertising the restaurant. One small technical note she was firm about: hashtags belong in the Pin’s description, down at the bottom where Pinterest actually reads them, never stuffed into the title.

Make the Pin earn its click

Here Sherisse handed over the most practical gold of the hour. A Pin is an advertisement, and you should write it like one. The image has to stop the scroll — a pattern interrupt, she calls it — which means studying your own feed and then deliberately doing the opposite of the crowd: when everyone’s using muted grays and baby pinks, you come in with a bold blue that pops; when everyone’s shouting in bright colors, you go quiet and muted. On the Pin itself, three to five words that promise what the click delivers, maybe an arrow to pull the eye; the title carries your keywords, and the description is pure ad copy, your best argument for why a stranger should hand over their attention and maybe their email. She was refreshingly contrarian about infographics, too: they get saved and re-saved and printed and shared, which feels lovely but rarely earns the one thing you actually want, which is the click. As for video, Pinterest allows short video Pins of fifteen to thirty seconds, and her favorite cheat is to animate a still graphic in Canva — one small element bouncing — which exports as video and, in her experience, converts beautifully. Try the moving version against the static one, she says, and lean hard into whichever your audience rewards.

Rich Pins and the backlink windfall

For anyone who cares about SEO — and on this blog, we do — Sherisse pointed to a feature most people never touch: Rich Pins. The setup is a two-step affair: first you claim your website by dropping a snippet of code into your SEO plugin or site settings, then you separately enable Rich Pins, and after the platform spends a day verifying the handshake, you’re live. The payoff is that every Pin pointing back to your site is, in effect, a backlink, and backlinks are SEO oxygen. But the real multiplier is volume. Sherisse insists her clients build between fifteen and twenty-five Pin templates, sometimes thirty, and then spin each piece of content into that many Pins across ten or more boards — a single blog post quietly becoming thousands of Pins, each one a fresh doorway and a fresh backlink, all from one afternoon’s design work. It is, she admits, the kind of compounding math that’s hard to write notes fast enough to capture.

A field almost nobody is playing

The thread running through everything Sherisse said is opportunity born of neglect. Pinterest carries hundreds of millions of users, skewing heavily toward women, leaning toward higher incomes and real buying power — and yet only a sliver of businesses have a presence there, and a smaller sliver still are using it in any way that actually produces results. The reason, she figures, is simply that it remains misunderstood; there were never many people shouting from the rooftops about how it works. That neglect is the gift. Advertising rates on Pinterest, she noted, sit roughly where Facebook’s did five or ten years ago, back when a modest budget went a long way — and yet, in her telling, you don’t even need the ads, because the organic reach is still so underexploited that showing up consistently and well is most of the battle. The crowd hasn’t arrived. The door is open. That won’t last forever.

Give away the chicken nugget

Sherisse is evangelical about the free giveaway, and her framing finally made it click for me. Give away your most valuable thing — not all of it, but the single best piece, the one step in your ten-step process that everyone raves about, the part where a client reads it and thinks, that’s the thing I was missing. She reaches for the grocery store to explain it: Whole Foods doesn’t hand you the whole chicken, it hands you one irresistible nugget so you’ll go buy the bird; Costco builds entire legends out of free samples; the famous Costco hot dog loses money on purpose because it lures you in to buy in bulk. The point of the giveaway, she stressed, isn’t really the email address, which is neither here nor there — it’s the moment a stranger experiences your best work, decides they can’t do it all themselves, and says the magic words: I read your thing, now I want to pay you to do it for me. I confessed to her that I’d just finished a thirty-page client workbook I was reluctant to give away, and she set me straight gently: don’t give away the thirty pages, give away the two that land hardest. A long workbook loses a reader by page two anyway; the free thing must be short, sharp, and a fast, startling win.

Forget Karen and her Crocs

My favorite stretch of the conversation was Sherisse’s impatience with a certain kind of marketing advice — the gurus who insist you sculpt an elaborate avatar before you do anything else. Her name is Karen, she’s thirty-three, she has blonde hair and a Louis Vuitton bag and wears Crocs on the weekend and shops at Polo Ralph Lauren — and Sherisse’s verdict on the whole exercise is that none of it matters, not one stitch of it. Who cares what car she drives. What matters, and the only thing that matters, is the client’s pain web — their problems, their overwhelm, the content-creation hamster wheel they’re trapped on across four exhausting platforms — and the dream life on the far side, the one where it all runs on autopilot and someone else carries the load. Know the pain and know the dream, and you can build the bridge between them; fuss over the handbag and you’ve learned nothing. The corollary, she added, is that you genuinely must know your ideal client and prove your funnel converts somewhere else first, because Pinterest is a long game that pays off over three to six months, and there’s no sense pouring that patience into an offer your people never wanted.

Where Pinterest is heading

Looking down the road, Sherisse expects Pinterest to lean further into video, and — more interestingly — to evolve into a place where you can consume the content without ever leaving, embedding videos and pulling in blog posts so that users stop clicking away and forgetting to return. She suspects some form of buy-it-right-here purchasing integration is coming too, a click-to-own future that would delight the e-commerce crowd and the marketers who serve them. Her utopia is a Pinterest that hosts the whole journey — discovery, consumption, and purchase — under one roof, which, given that it’s a search engine at heart, may be exactly where a platform like this is always destined to go.

About Sherisse

Sherisse Marie Sutherland is a Pinterest marketing consultant who helps entrepreneurs — especially spiritually minded and holistic ones — supercharge their marketing strategy on Pinterest so they can grow their income and impact without living on social media around the clock. Alongside her Pinterest work she also helps clients with branding, identity, and content creation. One of the platform’s earlier adopters, she has spent years turning Pinterest’s visual search engine into a lead-generation engine for the people she works with.

Watch & Listen

You can take in the full conversation in whichever form suits you. Watch the video version on YouTube or BitChute, or listen to the audio on Apple Podcasts, all linked below.

Learn More About Sherisse

You can find Sherisse online and grab her free Quick Start Success Guide through the links below.