When Pinterest burst onto the social media scene, it was primarily a platform for users to find DIY ideas along with their favorite recipes. However, over the years, the platform has undergone a major evolution. Today, it’s a social media platform that brands use not just to market themselves and their products, but also to sell.
If your brand is new to Pinterest, you might be wondering what you can do to drive sales through Pinterest marketing. In this post, we’ll give you all the information, tips, and tricks you need for making sales on Pinterest. So, if you’re curious to know more, read on.
Selling on Pinterest: Why you should consider it
A lot has been said about selling on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. However, the fact is that in terms of sales potential, Pinterest has more to offer than its more prominent social media counterparts. In 2020, Pinterest research revealed that out of the 320 million active users on the platform, 150 million logged in simply to make purchases. It’s 2022 now, and both those numbers have swelled, and the platform boasts of a whopping 433 million active monthly users.
So, for businesses that want to see an upturn in their sales figures, that’s a lot of potential customers to target. Of course, it’s not a walk in the park – you have to put in a lot of effort to see results.
However, if you tick the right boxes, you’re sure to see results in the form of increased sales. Now that you know why considering selling on Pinterest is in your best interest, let’s turn our attention towards what you have to do for prepping your brand on Pinterest to start selling.
Tips to make your brand sales-ready on Pinterest
You can’t simply set up a Pinterest account and expect sales figures to skyrocket overnight. There are 4 things you need to do to ensure that your brand is sales-ready on the platform.
- Create a business account: A business account comes with a diverse array of features designed specifically for businesses. Prominent examples of such features include ads and analytics, which will allow you to use Pinterest for business marketing and track the progress of your ad campaigns. Even if you’ve started proceedings with a personal account, it isn’t a cause for concern, as you can quite easily switch to a business account.
- Incorporate your branding elements into your Pinterest account: Branding matters big time on Pinterest, as it does on other platforms. So, after you’ve set up your business account, it’s time to incorporate all your branding elements into it. An important thing to remember while branding your Pinterest account is that the branding elements you use should be consistent with those you use across other platforms.
- Find your target audience: So, your account is set up, and you’ve incorporated all your branding elements. The next step to take is to find your target audience. You can do this quite easily using Pinterest’s native audience targeting tools that target potential customers based on various factors such as interests, demographics, and keywords. There’s also an auto-targeting feature that you can use, which involves the Pinterest algorithm showing your ads to audiences that are likely to be interested in your brand.
- Finish prepping by linking and verifying your business website: The final step in the prepping process is to link your business website to your Pinterest account and then get it verified. Linking your website should be simple enough, and it’ll take you a few seconds to do it through your profile settings. However, after you’ve successfully linked your business website, you’ll need to claim it as your own. Remember, you can’t link more than one website to your Pinterest account, so make sure that you link the website where your audience can browse and buy your products.
The top tips and tricks to make sales on Pinterest
After you’re done and dusted with the prepping process, it’s time to finally do the things you need to make sales on Pinterest. We recommend going through these tips and tricks thoroughly and then putting them into practice one by one for results.
- Optimize your pins for greater discoverability: The Pinterest community is vast, and if you want your pins to be discovered by your target audience, you have to optimize them. This is where Pinterest search engine optimization (SEO) can come in handy. It involves strategic use of keywords across the titles and descriptions of your pins and boards. An important thing to note here is that the Pinterest algorithm isn’t too favorable towards pins that feature keyword stuffing. So, instead of stuffing your titles and descriptions with keywords, it’s better to include them naturally. This will help your pins drive organic traffic, which is vital for making people aware of your products and encouraging them to buy in the long run.
- Focus on creating visuals that make a mark on your audience’s minds: Pinterest is one of the most visually engaging social media platforms. So, needless to say, your content should be visually appealing. So, some elements that are vital across all your pins include well-designed graphics, top-notch photography and videography, and visuals that are sized optimally. Also, there are no hard and fast rules as to what works visually on the platform and what doesn’t. So, the trick is to devote time to experimentation. Use Pinterest Analytics to understand the pins that drive success for your brand, and stick with them.
- Use promoted product pins: If you want to make it convenient for your target audience to buy your products, there aren’t many better pin types than promoted product pins. These pins allow users to easily identify the companies that are promoting the pins, and once they click on these pins, they are taken directly to the company websites. This increases the likelihood of purchases. During the promoted product pin creation process, you can target potential buyers based on metrics like gender, age, and interest. Also, you’ll be free to create full-fledged campaigns or do one-off promotions through quick ads.
- Make the most of Rich Pins for providing more information to your audience: If you want to be as thorough as you possibly can in terms of providing concrete information about your products to your target audience, use Rich Pins. Here’s how they work – they don’t simply display information like regular pins, they also extract descriptions of products and their respective prices and display them. Rich Pins can also notify users regarding the availability of products, i.e. whether they are in stock or out of stock.
- Promote your products through user-generated content (UGC) sharing: If a well-known Pinterest personality is using your products and sharing pictures of the same, you can’t ignore it. In recent years, user-generated content (UGC) has been as effective as conventional ad forms in terms of product promotions and sales. If you’ve got the money to spare, you can even get in touch with a reputed Pinterest marketing agency for setting up an influencer marketing campaign.
- Use Shop the Look Pins for product tagging: Pinterest offers a great degree of flexibility in terms of product tagging. If you want, you can tag a single product in a pin, but you can also tag several by using Shop The Look Pins. For instance, suppose you want to tag five products in a single pin – Shop The Look Pins will allow you to do this. Once the products have been successfully tagged, users will be able to add white dots on them. Clicking on the white dots will take them to the respective product purchase pages on your website.
- Be consistent, and most importantly, persistent: No matter how good your products are and well-designed your pins are, the key to success on Pinterest lies in being consistent. Without consistency, the Pinterest algorithm will forget about you, and your pins will be drowned out in the platform’s madding crowd and fierce competition. Last but not least, you’ve got to keep at it, i.e. be persistent. Just because a few pins didn’t do well shouldn’t mean that you scrap your Pinterest growth strategy. Remember, there are various tools and features that come free of cost with Pinterest business accounts, so use them to measure the progress of your Pinterest campaigns.
Conclusion
So, that’s about it for this post – we hope that you’ll now be able to take the right steps for making sales on Pinterest. Of course, nothing happens overnight, so make sure that you stick to your strategy and keep going for results.
Before we conclude this article, we’d like to tell you about the benefits of using a Pinterest growth tool like Pingainz. Nowadays, Pinterest is one of the most competitive social media platforms for businesses. Quite simply, new businesses find it challenging to compete with the bigger names. However, this is where a growth tool can come in handy. It can rapidly improve the numbers associated with your Pinterest business account, allowing you to make positive impressions in the minds of your target audience. So, give Pingainz a try, and you won’t be disappointed with the results.