Social media marketing advice tends to focus on Facebook and Twitter, but there are increasing benefits to putting solid marketing effort into other sites like Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Pinterest, in particular, is a social media platform that’s well worth investigating for any e-commerce business. It has over 250 million active users. It works differently from the aforementioned platforms, so it requires its own strategy.
How Pinterest Works
Pinterest works like a million corkboards that users (“pinners”) can pin different things to. The main idea is to collect ideas and inspiration together onto a board to help the user make a decision in the future, usually a purchasing decision.
A pinner can pin text, blog posts, or links to a board, but the predominant use at the moment is for images and video. If they’re thinking about redecorating their kid’s room, for example, they may begin to collect images and design ideas in a Pinterest board or browse relevant Pinterest boards that have been created by others.
Pins to add to a board can come from user uploads, suggestions from friends, or from searching on Pinterest. This means that we are able to get our products in front of motivated users who are interested in relevant topics if we choose our Pinterest content wisely.
Pinterest Is Primarily Business-to-Consumer
Every e-commerce business can make money through Pinterest, but business-to-consumer (B2C) companies tend to get more out of Pinterest than business-to-business companies do.
Private vs. Public Pinterest
One thing to remember when starting marketing on Pinterest is that much of the user interaction on Pinterest is hidden. Pinterest allows users to create private (“secret”) boards where they can collect pins without anyone else knowing.
This is different from the usual social media experience. Pinterest is designed to be a safer space to discover new things without everyone in your life instantly knowing about it or considering it an endorsement. This can mean that users are more comfortable interacting with your brand as it’s not public.
93% of pinners say that Pinterest helps them decide what to purchase.
Pinners Are Motivated Buyers
When you realize that Pinterest users are proactively searching for things they want, Pinterest becomes a lot more interesting from a marketing perspective than more passive social media like Facebook.
People who use Pinterest buy more often and spend more than their non-pinner counterparts. They’ve been shown to spend 29% more than people who don’t use the platform, and over 40% of users have an annual household income of over $100,000.
Setting up Your Pinterest Profile
A business account on Pinterest is a no-brainer, as it gives you access to exclusive advertising tools and access to analytics.
Your Pinterest profile should match the branding on your website and other social media sites.
The boards on your profile page can be organized into niche sections. This makes it easier for users to find the content they’re really interested in from you, and you’ll be optimizing your boards to hit more keywords.
You can create different boards to market your different types of products. You can also create boards that will sell your products to different audiences.
Featured Boards is an option that lets you place your most important boards above all others.
What to Share on Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual platform, so it’s no surprise that images of products work well. You will get the best bang for your buck with Product Pins, which show an image of your product alongside a price and where to buy. If the user clicks on the pin, they’ll be brought through to the linked website to purchase the product.
Videos are becoming increasingly popular on Pinterest, and if you have a backlog of videos already created on YouTube, you can automatically import them to Pinterest. Because people are usually looking to get something done when they browse Pinterest, how-to videos perform particularly well.
Article Pins also work well to bring people to read your informative article. More than on other platforms, your article should be accompanied by an excellent image that entices people to read it, alongside a description that tells them what they have to gain.
Infographics work well on Pinterest but remember that most people are browsing Pinterest on their mobile device, so keep the details legible.
Keywords
Keywords and phrases are very important to success on Pinterest and should be taken into consideration every time you add a pin. Buyers are actively searching for products that they might purchase, and you want them to see your pin whenever they search for relevant phrases.
Hashtags can and should be added to pins in the main description, but don’t go overboard!
Pinterest has a useful keyword tool in the Promoted Pins creator that you can use to find similar and relevant phrases based on actual search data on Pinterest. You can use this for all of your pins, optimizing them for two or three relevant and popular search topics.
Get on Pinterest
There’s no doubt that Pinterest is a social media platform with huge potential for most e-commerce companies. Create a high-quality profile and publish well-designed pins with great keywords, and you may find it a goldmine for new customers.
