With everyone focus on promoting on Facebook ads and Instagram, things are getting a bit competitive when it comes to online businesses.
Most e-commerce stores now are invested in using social media, especially Facebook, since they can really attract customers.
But did you know that there’s a not-so-popular platform that has proven to be very helpful when it comes to deciding what to buy?
Surprise, surprise–it’s Pinterest!
Given that, how exactly can an e-commerce store use Pinterest to increase sales?
Sources would say you would need to create attractive and stunning images to be accompanied with catchy captions. You would also need to pin regularly on Pinterest.
But again, it’s so time consuming!
For an e-commerce store owner, you’d probably think you can spend more time on testing and running Facebook ads, instead of spending it on Pinterest.
You may be thinking that you’d have to spend a lot of hours every day to post on Pinterest–not to mention the learning curve. But don’t worry, I put this together to make it easier for you.
This post contains affiliate links, which means I will make a commission at no extra cost should you click through and make a purchase.
Yes to Rich Pins
To maximize your Pinterest experience, enable rich pins! To put it simply, rich pins are more useful than regular pins because they provide more information and details. This works by displaying metadata from your website. For e-commerce store owners, your pins can include the price of the products and its availability aside from the link to its product page.
One of the BEST reasons why you should enable rich pins is the customers can get the information that they need. This also includes the link to the product page. Once the customer clicks on that, there’s a big chance that they will buy it!
Here’s an example of a normal pin. As you can see, the rich pin has a LOT more information. It also looks more credible compared to a normal pin because of its product description preview. It also stands out in a cluster of pins.
To set this up, you’d need to prepare your website with meta tags, test the rich pins, and apply to get them on Pinterest.
Pin regularly and consistently.
Just like other social media platforms, you would need to pin every now and then to level up your Pinterest presence. It’s good to start with daily pinning instead of just pinning only once a week but for long hours.
When it comes to pinning, pin other products too and not just those that you sell. You see, the more pins you do, the more followers you will have. So go ahead and pin images and other products that you think your followers will also like. This adds value to your brand and also makes you look less “spammy.”
Speaking of spam, you should also spread your pinning times. When you do this, you get exposed to different market segments and attract new customers. You may want to use a Pinterest scheduler so you don’t have to manually pin every day in your efforts to be consistent.
Tailwind has what they call a “smart scheduler” which schedules your pins automatically according to the best times according to the data from your network. This is a great help because it will help you show your products to potential customers at the time of the day that they are browsing and looking for your product or something similar.
You might also want to explore Interval Pinning for easier spreading out of pins. Choose among open time slots, exact times, and optimized times–whichever one you choose, you’ll definitely be saving yourself a lot of time.
Create different boards and curate content.
I’m sure you always hear this mantra–” Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” In Pinterest, don’t put everything in only one board. Create more boards to organize your thoughts and products. For each board, create amazing descriptions because these affect search results. Basically, include words that your customers search for when looking for products you sell, or even other related words. Tie them all together for a fantastic and effective copy to help you sell more. Here’s a tip: use the Google Keyword Planner to zero in on the specific search terms.
As mentioned above, pin other products and content from other sources too. You can create a wishlist board or an inspiration board. Another thing you can do is to join group boards that are related to your brand and product. When you do this, you can engage with more people and let them know about your offers. Group boards are so useful because when you pin to these boards, you can have access to all the followers! That will definitely expand your market.
If you’re interested to join a lot of group boards, you can organize them using the Board List feature of Tailwind. Combine boards that curate similar content and pin to them at the same time! It’s fast, easy, and efficient!
While we’re on the topic of Tailwind, you might want to check out Tailwind Tribes too. Tailwind Tribes helps bloggers and marketers and business owners to share content. It’s the perfect way to collaborate, expand your network, and curate amazing pins.
Tribes are similar to the group boards on Pinterest, but they are much more effective and you feel like you’re in your own community. Another reason why Tribes are more effective than group boards is that you get access to analytics that tell you how many times the members are sharing pins from your tribe.
Optimize your pins!
Pinterest is like a search engine, so optimizing pins will help bring more traffic to your e-commerce store. There are a number of ways on how you can optimize your pins, starting off with using vertical pins as much as possible! They just updated this last April 2018–the ideal aspect ratio is 2:3 or 600px wide and 900px high. You see, pins are arranged by columns, so the vertical ones tend to occupy more space, getting more attention in return.
Another tip is to use Canva or PicMonkey to make noteworthy graphics. The more appealing the graphics are, the more engagement you will get. Aside from getting attention, what you want is for your pins to show up in the search results. So you should focus on the descriptions–include all the words that will pull up your pin but keep it short enough to be attractive. Don’t forget to add other useful information such as price, description, and other features. This is important because if your pins are optimized, you can get higher impressions and more website traffic to your store, even if you don’t have a lot of followers yet.
Analyze the data
You know how numbers can help in making decisions and recommendations? It’s good to regularly check your analytics and Pinterest business accounts give you access to this data.
But, if you want an easier way of looking at your analytics, the Tailwind dashboard is like a dream come true. The Tailwind dashboard is called intuitive because it gives you processed analytics such as engagement score, trending pins and topics, and even what categories or keywords are popular among your audience. In just one glance, you’ll see the number of followers you have, how many pins and re-pins you have, and even the trends and patterns.
So if you haven’t been using Pinterest for marketing your business, go ahead–you won’t regret it. I speak from experience and I want YOU to be better at what you do.