What’s brilliant about Pinterest as a channel to market for a business and sell products is that Pinterest has squeezed the 5-stage buying cycle into two!
On Pinterest, a customer SEES and BUYS, just like that!
This article will change the way you see Pinterest as a marketing and sales channel; it might just be your long-awaited way to give sales a little, or big, boost.
We’ll look at ways to use Pinterest for marketing, sell on Pinterest, and how marketers use Pinterest for business these days.
A. Get Ready
Let’s just make sure first that you’re familiar with the basics and that you’re fit for this platform to make the utmost results from Pinterest for marketing for your products and boosting your sales through this social media channel.
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1. Who Are Your Target Audience?
A quick look at any statistics website and you’ll learn all about Pinterest’s demographics as a social media platform for business.
With a number of users that exceeds 442 million active members each month, Pinterest as a marketing channel is worth exploring.
Pinterest’s Growth — source: Statista
- Pinterest’s users are mainly females of all ages (even the elderly win a share of 15%).
- Male users constitute a small portion of the Pinterest audience. Yet, the platform is getting popular with men; some numbers say that the number of men on the platform increases by 50% year-to-year.
- The audience on Pinterest makes +75k with high education.
- Their location is not specific: urban, suburban, and rural people use the platform almost equally.
Think of the product or service you provide; does it fit the previous audience?
2. What Are You Selling?
Make sure that Pinterest audience is interested in what you are offering.
They are a hard-to-please audience. Or we could say that people on Pinterest are interested in a specific range of products or services.
Although Pinterest isn’t the right marketing channel for every brand out there, it can provide an exceptional ROI for many different niches.
- Entertainment
- Holidays and events
- Weddings
- Crafting
- Photography
- Education
- Art
- Architecture and design
- Hair and beauty
- Travel
- Health and fitness
- Gardening
- Food and drink
- Parenting
- Fashion
Metrics encourage you to invest in Pinterest if you fall into one of the above categories.
Do you?
Then the next step for you is to set up a business account on Pinterest.
3. How to Set Up a Business Account on Pinterest?
You’re here because you want to know how to use Pinterest for business.
Well, first off, a personal account won’t do you good in the long term; you better have a business one.
A business account on Pinterest gives you access to a lot of useful features for selling on Pinterest: analytics, ads, and others.
What if you already have a personal account?
No worries, you can easily log into your personal profile and convert it into a business one.
Go to help.pinterest, follow the steps, and you’re all set.
Now you’re almost ready.
Let’s give your account a branding that sticks and lasts.
4. How to Brand Your Pinterest Account?
According to brandingmag.com, “branding, by definition, is a marketing practice in which a company creates a name, symbol or design that is easily identifiable as belonging to the company. This helps to identify a product and distinguish it from other products and services.”
You must have other social media pages, and you must have the same brand image for all of them for sure. Then Pinterest in no different.
To brand your Pinterest profile, set an image of high resolution as a profile picture; it can be your logo or a headshot of your face if it represents the face of your business (like Neil Patel for example).
Optimize your bio (biography) and craft in a way that reflects your business as a person. People tend to trust businesses that look like themselves, that have a personal touch and a known history.
Provide contact information that is current and accessible.
I don’t have to mention that all of this info and elements have to match your other social media profiles, do I? 🤔
You also need to link the website that you make sales from to your account.
5. How to Link Your Website to Pinterest Account?
This is the last step for getting ready to sell on Pinterest: link and verify your e-commerce website.
This is such an important step to use Pinterest for business: adding your website enables you from creating a shop and link the products you’re selling.
Attention 🛎️ You can only verify ONE website for every business account on Pinterest.
Here’s how to link and claim your website on Pinterest.
Now you’re all set.
Let’s dive into the juice ;)
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B. Sell on Pinterest
- How to sell on Pinterest?
- How to make money out of this full-of-potential channel?
- How to turn this visual platform into a new revenue stream?
Friends, merchants, and marketers lend me your ears. 👂 That’s are what we are gonna explain.
1. Use Breath-Taking Visuals 😮
As a visual platform itself, businesses on Pinterest need to give the highest priority to creating stunning designs and pictures to use.
Use high-quality photography of your product in use or in real life.
The platform also supports GIFS and MP4 videos.
Design beautiful graphics that match your branding and WOW your audience.
Throw in some bold colors and fonts that make someone can’t help but click on your pin.
Such visually appealing pictures draw users in, entice them to click, and encourage them to purchase what you’re promoting.
Tip 💡 Five well-planned posts are the ideal number to post on Pinterest every day.
2. Focus on Pinterest SEO
Pinterest has its own search engine rules and works according to its own algorithms because it’s a visual platform.
Determine the keywords you’re focusing on, related to your industry.
Use these keywords smartly in the Pin title, Pin description, board title, and board description.
Take care ⚡ Keyword stuffing won’t do you any good. Incorporate your keywords properly and naturally into your titles and descriptions to help Pinterest SEO work well.
So, take all the time you need and do a good research so that you use the right keywords to expand the reach of your Pinterest content and increase the likelihood that someone will buy.
Tip 💡 Pinterest’s search algorithm uses hashtags to sort images and favors images from profiles with high engagement over other posts. Use the same collection of hashtags across your pins and boards, and in your image descriptions.
3. Put Rich Pins into Use
Rich Pins are a great feature that extracts any extra data or information from your website and shows it next to the Pin info.
When users scroll down on Pinterest itself, they see the price and product description that is pulled from your website.
On mobile, it’s even cooler. Users can click a blue Shop button to head directly to your product and check out.
Tip 💡 Add the In Stock info to your online store so that the Pin shows it also on Pinterest.
Once you link your e-commerce website to your Pinterest account and verify it, Rich Pins will work just fine.
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4. Promote Your Pins
Like any other social media platform, Pinterest offers paid ads to its users, called Promoted Pins.
When a business promotes its Pins, they push them to the top so that users see them first and often.
This is opposed to search engine optimization, which relies solely on organic reach.
If you’re familiar with paid ads on any other platform, Pinterest’s are no different. You’re able to target an audience by age, interests, gender, etc.
You can run one quick ad or create an entire campaign, as you see fit to your goals.
Tip 💡 Promote product Pins to take the user directly to your website.
5. Use Buyable Pins
Buyable pins are one of the tools that marketers use to engage with their customers.
Without leaving Pinterest, customers are able to buy your products through buyable pins; how great is that?
From their computers, tablets, and smartphones, customers have the flexibility to buy directly from their devices and pay for products via credit card or with Apple Pay, one of the best payment gateways providers.
What happens is that Pinterest sends you the information the customer provides them with. Then, you are responsible for the buyable pin orders you receive.
The great news is that Pinterest doesn’t take a cut or fees for such a process.
Buyable pins are a great way to boost your sales, as Pinterest catches customers at the moment they are most enthusiastic about your item.
6. Encourage User-Generated Content
Show the algorithm that people want to see your content and are engaging with it.
Participate in the Pinterest community by liking, commenting on, and pinning other users’ posts and relevant content to yours.
Tip 💡 Create a board on your profile for pinning pictures customers take with your product or brand to incentivize user-generated content about your brand.
7. Tag More Than One Product
Here’s a cool feature to use Pinterest for marketing to more than one product in the same Pin.
Shop the Look Pins!
Post a photo of some of your products arranged together, and manually tag each product.
Users then are shown small dots on each product; when they click on they can see more about it.
Tip 💡 Dress a model in an outfit of your latest collection, or mix some pieces of furniture in a room decoratively, tag each piece, and say hello to huge profits and closed sales.
8. Lure’em in with Coupons
People have always loved the words free, discount, deal, and the like.
Coupons are hot on Pinterest.
Give your customers a hot deal in a stunning image and you can have a home run for your product sales.
Make a coupon board on your business Pinterest account, Pin images of your deal, with details of your offer, and link back to the specific coupon page on your website.
9. Stir with Contests
Another way for how to use Pinterest for business contests.
Contests are amazing: you connect with your customers, generate a lot of repins, get tons of likes of shares, and get your products associated with positive events.
Whether you host the contests on your website or directly on Pinterest, they are sure to drive traffic and boost sales significantly.
To Sum Up,
In this article, we have covered how to sell on Pinterest, how to use Pinterest for marketing, and how to use Pinterest for business.
Pinterest, like any other social media channel, has a lot of benefits and merits for marketing for specific types of businesses.
If you know your audience well, Pinterest digital marketing can boost your sales to the top.
Give attention to the quality and colors of the images you post on the platform; people are there for the visuals.
Invest in paid ads and promote your product Pins.
Encourage user-generated content as people trust other people like them who recommend a product than an ad or promoted Pin.
Lure customers with coupons as frequently as you can, and heat up the platform with contests and prizes.
Link your e-commerce website and verify it so that you can both get more traffic to the website and sell directly through the platform.
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