Pinterest, without a doubt, plays an essential role in people’s buying habits when they’re online. For instance, 89% of Pinterest users in the U.S. are willing to search and purchase products on the platform. It seems that Pinterest has a strong effect on users’ buying decisions.
Statistically, 320 million users actively use Pinterest monthly. And most of them use it for shopping.
These facts are the focal point of why you should give a shot to Pinterest to sell your products.
What makes Pinterest so special?
According to the statistics, Pinterest is the platform that most users are determined to purchase or research specific products. It means almost half of users use the platform to buy what they search for.
At first sight of these facts, it may seem quite simple to sell on the platform, but it’s not actually. And you need serious configuration to start this journey successfully
You need branding before starting to sell
Customising your branding profile is the first step to starting an online business on Pinterest. So, let’s dive into it.
Find your target audience
Every marketing campaign should indeed start with finding a target audience. It also applies to this one. Understanding social media demographics is a must before launching a new campaign.
Creating a buyer persona helps you target potential customers on Pinterest. At the very basic level, this persona could include profession, age, gender, etc.
Create a business account
Most business owners misunderstand a business account on Pinterest.
Remember, a personal account is different from a business account. The latter gives you more features (such as ads, insight, etc.) to manage your business on the platform.
Formulate a pinch of branding
People tend to follow branded products and companies because the taste of branding gives them a more enjoyable and colourful experience.
For instance, to build a brand for your business, you can start with a few essentials:
- Choose high-quality visuals;
- Define your brand colours and use them consistently;
- Create an eye-pleasing logo;
- Build a professional website;
- Write a compelling bio and product descriptions;
- Make your official contact information publicly available, and so on.
Remember: having a website is a must as many tips we’ll cover below are impossible without a website.
Verify your account
After all these steps mentioned above, now it’s time to link and verify your business account on Pinterest.
It may seem a bit technical, but all you need to do is add a meta tag or upload an HTML file to your website to claim it.
For the last word, be sure that it’s your main website to generate more sales by creating a shop and linking products.
How to sell on Pinterest
It’s normal to rush to sell on social media. And yes, it’s free to have an account on it. However, you should know specific steps to follow to sell your product and boost your ROI.
So let’s dive into them.
Create quality content
The first thing you should know is that Pinterest is a visual platform. Let that sink in for a second. So it means the better your visual is, the more users it’ll attract.
In my own experience, I’ve developed a 5-rule framework that proved to be working for years. Find them below.
Your visuals should:
- be high-quality;
- be well-designed;
- have optimal size;
- be in the right colours;
- use attractive fonts.
Find rich pins
Brief dictionary lesson: Rich Pins are a kind of Pin that keep the information on Pinterest up-to-date based on information they get from your website.
Why should you use rich pins? Because it has the potential to gather more data and information via your website. It also gets data from pin information.
For example, if you have rich pins, users will see the price and description of the product on Pinterest. In addition, they can also see the information about the product availability on the stock.
Utilise promoted pins
Promoted pins help your product to go up to the platform feed. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a blog post or product description.
One more thing. Formulating promoted pins gives you a chance to target users by their age, gender, and so on.
Brand your pins
Interestingly, more than 95% of Pinterest’s top searches aren’t branded products. So if you sell a product on Pinterest, it’s your chance to create a branded pin to differentiate yourself from others.
Pinterest suggests you put your logo next to the pin on the designed visual. So when users scroll down, they’ll catch the small logo. Whenever they search for a product, they’ll automatically look at the same position to see if it’s familiar or not.
Collect your pins into one catalogue
Yes, you read it right. Collect them into a catalogue.
The Pinterest business feature gives you a huge opportunity to create a pin catalogue. To do that, you need accurate data on all your products to upload them.
When Pinterest accepts your data, it means you’ll create pins automatically whenever you add a product to your website.
What a saving of time and resources. As I always say, automation rocks!
Schedule your campaigns
Do you know when Pinterest users are so active or when and what topic they’re talking about?
Knowing your audiences’ most active time helps you boost your sales because you create campaigns when your audience is online.
For example, Pinterest provides helpful seasonal insights. With this insight, you know the exact time users are active and the things they’re talking about.
So if you see your audience is more willing to purchase products in December, you should schedule the campaign for December.
Tag your products in Shop the Look Pins
Would you not want to collect several products into one Pin? Well, Pinterest allows you to gather some of your products in one Pin.
Here are examples of Pinterest's "Shoppable Pins", "Shop the Look" pins, and an actual ad on Pinterest. pic.twitter.com/YVt8GqLYZN
— Amrita Khalid (@askhalid) October 18, 2019
For instance, you post a picture and pin all of the products you sell on this picture. Then, if a user wants to purchase the jacket on the model’s body, the white dot on the photo shows them the price and the link to the website.
Share user-generated content
You can use UGC (user-generated content) as leverage to sell more. For example, Pinterest users share their favourite brand products with their friends, relatives, and colleagues on social media.
Pinterest already stimulates these kinds of engagements. All you have to do is find creative ways to urge people to share your Pins with their friends.
Create mobile-first content
The last tip is about using mobile-first content. Because more than 85% of Pinners use mobile apps. So there is no meaning in preferring only desktop content.
Considering most people use their phones outside, generating mobile-first content is reasonable.
Generally, as you see, it’s not that hard to sell on Pinterest as long as you know the basic and essential steps. So now you’re ready to go and try what you learned on the field.
