Pinterest has been around since January 2010 and since then it has become an indispensable social media platform for millions of people all over the world. According to Pinterest it’s a great place for users to, “Discover recipes, home ideas, style inspiration and other ideas to try.” In simpler terms, it has become a massive search engine where users can save and organize search results.
While Pinterest doesn’t boast as many users as Giants like Facebook and Instagram it is a uniquely powerful platform for digital marketing and advertising.
Why Sell on Pinterest
Since Pinterest isn’t the largest it’s often overlooked or discounted. But if you ignore Pinterest in your marketing and digital advertising strategy you’re making a huge mistake! That’s because Pinterest is an extremely powerful tool when it comes to e-commerce selling.
“Pinterest is a dream come true for marketers. 96% of users regularly research products on the channel, while 87% buy the items they see. In fact, research shows that Pinterest bests Instagram at influencing purchasing decisions with US users.”
That’s a massive percentage of users that are using this platform to actively pursue purchasing and definitely not something that you should ignore. If you don’t have any presence at all on Pinterest you’re missing out.
When it comes to using Pinterest to increase your e-commerce sales there are many different options. You can manage boards and pins of your website, run ads, and create buyable pins and rich pins.
Keep reading for top tips and tools to get started with Pinterest.
Top 3 Ways to Sell on Pinterest
1. Buyable Pins
Buyable Pins make shopping quick and easy for Pinners. These pins are easy to spot and all shoppers have to do is add the item to their Pinterest shopping cart. Shoppers can then buy products from multiple brands all at once through their Pinterest shopping cart and check out on mobile or desktop.
The good news is that many major e-commerce platforms qualify to use Buyable Pins. These e-commerce platforms include BigCommerce, Demandware and Shopify. This makes setting up them super simple for you.
First things first, you need to set up a Pinterest Business account. Once you do that you can create pins from items in your store. They’ll be marked with a buy it or add to bag button with the price listed right on the pin.
2. Rich Pins
Rich Pins are somewhat similar to Buyable Pins in that they pull information about products and pricing directly from your website. It makes pinning products easier for you and your customers.
These types of pins are great because they pull the product information in real-time so that pricing, availability, and description are all always up to date. Everyone who views that pin will automatically see the most up-to-date information. With Rich Pins you won’t have to worry customers seeing outdated information.
Pinners want to know how to take a pin from inspiration to reality. Having an enticing image with all the info needed to purchase the products in the image is hugely useful. Unlike Buyable Pins customers will have to leave Pinterest to go to your site to purchase but they’re still a useful tool.
3. Promoted Pins
Another way to use Pinterest to boost your sales is with Promoted Pins. Promoted Pins are what Pinterest calls their paid ads. They can be images or videos and there’s a lot of room for you to get creative and attract the eye of Pinners.
“You can purchase ads based on one of three different marketing goals: awareness, engagement, and driving traffic to your website. Choose to put your pins in front of the audience most likely to purchase your products by targeting relevant keywords, interests, and locations.”
Many brands have found Promoted Pins to be very successful. It’s up to you to decide if you’re serious about making promoted pins work for you. This means investing time into creating and testing top quality ad content. If you can figure it out you can see a massive boost in sales.