Predicted to top $1 billion in ad revenue by 2020, Pinterest is an often under-utilized platform that's growing daily. While not everyone's ecommerce content is appropriate for Pinterest, the potential for sales is huge in specific industries. In recent years we've seen growth specifically in home and interior areas, as well as in the food and clothing sectors.
Given that, as of 2018, 40% of Pinterest users have a household income of over $100k if you're not already using this platform to generate qualified leads on your site you're missing out.
Let's take a deeper look at how you can leverage Pinterest to increase sales. 👀
Creating An Account
If you haven't already made a business account the process is pretty simple.
- First go to https://www.pinterest.com/ and click on 'Create Business Account'
- Fill out your email address, business name, password, and business category then hit 'Create Account'
- (If you already have a personal account on Pinterest, you can convert it to a business account if you login to your account and go to https://business.pinterest.com/en)
- Next you can enter additional information about your business, your website, and your username
- Once you're done you'll want to verify your Pinterest Account using your website. There are some great instructions on how to do this here: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/pinterest-guide-business-pages/
- You will also be offered the option to add a 'Pin It' button to your website.
Stay Active on Pinterest
Don't think that adding a 'Pin It' button to your site is going to suddenly lead to thousands of new sales overnight (although it can be useful). Pinterest takes work but the rewards are worth the initial push.
People pin a lot on Pinterest. If you're going to start using the platform to kickstart sales, you need to commit to using it regularly and properly. Every day 2 million people post around 100 billion combined pins. As a business, it's expected that you'll keep up with this desire for more content all of the time. The best approach? Make sure you're pinning a good mix of your own content alongside others' content to boards that really embody who you are as a website. A good board will have at least 100+ pins on it to start out with to offer your users enough content to browse.
Couple the visualization of your brand with knowledge of what's popular on the platform and you're onto a winner. The most popular categories that are leading to conversions right now are:
- furniture
- bedding
- bath
- windows coverings
- home/garden
- food
The good news for ecommerce sites is that unique products tend to be pinned the most on Pinterest. If you have a particularly distinct set of products in your shopping feed Pinterest could be an ideal platform to share these on.
Content For Every Stage of the Buyer's Journey
Around 93% of Active Pinners use Pinterest to plan purchases online. Creating content for various stages of the buyer's journey can help capture these users and nurture them along the sales funnel.
Given that Pinterest has somewhere in the region of 200 million users this year, the numbers of people you can reach with your content is staggering.
Create content that appeals at every stage and you will soon see an uplift in traffic to your ecommerce site.
Dig Deeper with Pinterest Analytics
Much like any other social media platform, Pinterest has powerful analytics for your account that you can leverage to maximize conversions. With their new audience insights feature you can also compare your own audience with the audience of Pinterest as a whole, to better understand how your brand stacks up and the opportunities for growth.
Your analytics are available at https://analytics.pinterest.com
We particularly pay attention to monthly viewers versus monthly engaged. It's pretty easy to get monthly viewers up to 10,000s of people when you start using Pinterest strategically, which is great for brand awareness. Those sweet conversions are only going to come from engagement, though, so you'll need to focus on that too.
Referring Traffic to Your Site
The in-app experience that Pinterest offers is powerful, but as with any social media platform don't forget to capture leads from Pinterest on your website. How-to articles and blog posts tend to have very decent click through rates from the app.
Also, nearly 85% of all searches on the app happen on mobile devices so make sure your website content is mobile friendly. Veterans to ecommerce will know that mobile friendly and super responsive sites will rank better on search anyway so are probably already on top of this.
Spending the Right Money on the Right Pins
You can't afford to ignore Pinterest ads. Promoted Pins are a powerful tool available to businesses but you can also promote app and video pins. Right now, promoted pins are available in the following countries:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Ireland
- Australia
- New Zealand
By using promoted content alongside organic posts, your account can ultimately reach more users and drive traffic to your online store.
More Insights from Pinterest
There's a lot to think about when it comes to managing your Pinterest Business account. Some interesting recent insights from Pinterest that should help are:
- According to a recent study, the most active time for Pinterest is actually 11:00 pm at night. Noon is also a relatively popular time for pins.
- Great news! Pins are pretty evergreen. The average pin is repinned 11 times and eighty percent of all pins are repins. When the half-life of a pin is 3.5 months, it's worth pinning your own products.
- The average order value from Pinterest referral traffic is $58.95, compared to $55.00 for Facebook
- 73% of Active Pinners have bought something because they saw it on Pinterest.
Pin It Like You Mean It
Pinterest is about a lot more than just adding a 'Pin It' button to your site — although our dedicated developers can do that for you too. Our team of marketing experts work with our clients to create powerful and highly engaging strategies to get their content in front of the right people, leveraging the power of Pinterest and other social media platforms.
Ecommerce integrations and shopping feeds can be tough, but our team have a wealth of experience meaning we can help you to get the right products on Pinterest and in front of the right people, automatically linking to your ecommerce platform of choice.Get in touch with us today for a free consultation. Whether you just need a hand deciphering data in Pinterest or Google Analytics for your ecommerce campaigns, or you really want to kickstart conversions from Pinterest, we can help you.
