How to Boost Your Sales with Pinterest

Posted 4 years ago by Mark Xavier Quadros

Pinterest is often underestimated as a marketing tool. While the platform may have started as an homage to aesthetic homemaking, it’s now one of the internet’s most visited online shopping sites. Pinterest might just be your new best friend for boosting your sales.

Read on to learn some of the secrets to social selling on Pinterest.

In this post:

Why Social Selling Is Important
Why Sell on Pinterest?
How to Boost Sales on Pinterest

Why Social Selling Is Important

Social selling is a form of marketing where a business uses social media platforms to find new customers and prospective buyers. Social media selling has many benefits, as it:

Reduces the amount of time it takes to contact potential customers
Increases the number of prospects you reach
Develops a deeper relationship with customers
Increases the potential for converting visitors to real customers
Shortens the sales cycle process.

Social selling is a form of marketing that relies on a different type of sales model. Instead of engaging in traditional sales activities, social media selling relies on promoting products through social networks, product education, and customer engagement.

Social selling helps you grow your revenue by giving customers a chance to learn more about your company and product before they buy from you. That makes them feel more confident about their eventual purchase.

Image via Superoffice

Selling has shifted from cold pitching to educating and meaningfully engaging with customers. As you can see from the graphic above, social selling allows you to use social media networks to connect with customers through engaging and educational content.

Social media selling is a type of soft-selling, a word marketers use to describe any promotional activity that prioritizes customer service and experience over directly pressuring customers into a sale. This contrasts the idea of hard-selling: advertising that uses a more direct and persistent sales message (think of door-to-door selling or mail order ads).

Like all forms of soft-selling, social media selling is more likely than hard-selling to earn you loyal long-term, repeat customers. This makes it a very profitable marketing investment.

Why Sell on Pinterest?

Social selling works on a large variety of social media platforms, so why should your business invest in Pinterest? Pinterest isn’t the right marketing choice for every brand out there, but can provide an exceptional return-on-investment for many different niches. If your brand fits into one of these niches, Pinterest is a platform worth exploring:

Entertainment
Holidays and events
Weddings
Crafting
Photography
Education
Art
Architecture and design
Hair and beauty
Travel
Health and fitness
Gardening
Food and drink
Parenting
Fashion.

Pinterest also carries enormous selling power. Metrics from Pinterest tell us that the platform has over 433 million active members each month. Pinterest’s audience is also unique. Here are some facts about their users:

Over 60% of Pinterest’s global audience is female.
Pinterest is increasing in popularity with men, as the number of men on the platform increases by 50% year-to-year.
Pinterest is the 4th most popular social media platform in the US, and a third of its users located in the US.
Pinterest is growing the quickest with generation Z (born 1997 – 2012) and millennials (born 1981 – 1996), whose presence on the platform increases by 50% and 35% annually (respectively).

Pinterest also has a great click-through rate (CTR). A click-through-rate measures the percentage of individuals that click on a particular advertisement that appears on a page, instead of the number that simply sees it.

According to the company’s metrics, over 72% of people use Pinterest for online shopping inspiration, and 46% of users are willing to try out an item they spot on Pinterest. This makes Pinterest a better investment than Facebook or Instagram, as it grows steadily in popularity every year.

Image via Statista

Pinterest is also a great platform to use to build up your email marketing list, as you can draw Pinterest users in and offer them free content in exchange for a sign up.

How to Boost Sales on Pinterest

Now that you’ve gotten the low-down on why social media selling is important, you’re probably wondering how to boost your sales through Pinterest specifically. This section will share six strategies designed to help you grow your sales. Let’s dive in.

Leverage buyable pins

If you’ve read my game-changing online marketing guide, you’ll know that the best marketers use a wide range of tools to engage with their customers. Buyable pins are one of these tools.

Buyable pins are a special type of pin that lets a customer buy your product without leaving Pinterest. These pins work on computers, tablets, and smartphones, allowing customers maximum flexibility, and catering to users who prefer to buy directly from their phones. Buyable pins can be paid for via credit card or with Apple Pay.

Image via Tinuiti

As a retailer, you are still responsible for buyable pin orders. Pinterest will simply handle the sales process for you without taking a cut. They send you the information the customer provides them.

Buyable pins are a great way to get your product out there, as they catch the customer at the moment they are most enthusiastic about your item.

Create high-quality visuals

Pinterest is an incredibly visual platform. As most of the content on its website is visual, you need to use high-quality visuals to stand out. This includes:

Photographs
Graphics
Comics
Photo collages
Infographics
Mind maps

To enhance the quality of your visuals, you’ll need to use subtle photo editing. Pinterest users prefer images that are minimally edited, especially for products. When editing your photos and images, prioritize cropping to a size that maintains the image’s aspect ratio, choosing a subtle filter, and adding text to your photos for effect.

For example, as pictured below, tall and vertical images look great on Pinterest mobile. Experiment with your photo design and find an optimum structure that works for you.

Many businesses also have great success with posting animations on Pinterest as they grab the user’s attention. While Pinterest originally housed images, the platform now supports GIFS and MP4 videos.

Tip: Use services like Looka to create branded images and infographics for Pinterest.

Learn more: Simple Product Photography Tips to Beautifully Showcase on Your Store

Incorporate Pinterest SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) on Pinterest is similar to other platforms. On Pinterest, the algorithm uses hashtags to sort images, favoring images from profiles with high engagement over other posts.

To use this system to your advantage, carefully curate a collection of hashtags to associate with your brand, and use these across your pins, boards, and in your image descriptions.

The best Pinterest posts are planned out well in advance. Instagram marketing experts recommend posting five Instagram stories a day, and the same is true for Pinterest. There is no need to spam users with images, as five well-planned posts are more effective than ten posts with no SEO.

If you struggle to stay on-top of multi-platform marketing campaigns, straighten out your schedule with a task manager app to help you meet your posting schedule.

Get creative with your catalogs

Pinterest catalogs are a digital version of a standard catalog. Each image included in the catalog is a buyable pin, turning the catalog into an interactive online shopping experience.

Image via Pinterest

Pinterest users regularly scroll through catalogs. They are likely to engage more with your business if you keep your catalog’s content interesting and dynamic. Alongside your regular posts, include engaging posts that bring users to your website. This can consist of videos, interactive tools, games and quizzes.

It’s also essential to market your catalog appropriately. Your catalog should be sorted into appropriate sections, so customers can effectively browse your items by product type.

Each product listing should contain several images and diagrams where applicable. Each entry should also include a detailed description, warranty information, and your refund policy.

The listing itself needs to contain the sale price, item name, and brand name. If you want to become a top Pinterest seller, provide Pinterest with full product data before you list your items.

Still have questions? Learn more about product pins before you start.

Use rich and promoted pins

In addition to buyable pins, Pinterest allows brands to use many other types of pins. Specifically, rich pins and promoted pins can be helpful marketing tools.

Rich pins are a type of organic pin that sources information from your website. This ensures the data in the pin (like the item’s price) stays accurate for users. Pinterest allows you to use three types of rich pins:

Product rich pins: for selling products
Recipe rich pins: for promoting recipes
Article rich pins: for sharing articles.

Ecwid doesn’t have integration for rich pins on Pinterest (yet), so you have to create them yourself. But don’t worry! Rich pins are free and available for anyone on Pinterest.

You need to apply for rich pins before you can start using them. Here’s how to apply and create your rich pins.

Alternatively, brands can choose to use promoted pins. Promoted pins are ads you pay for on a cost-per-click basis. These are great for drawing traffic to your website and products, as they can be targeted at specific user demographics (location, age, gender, etc.). Learn how to promote your pins on Pinterest.

Image via Pinterest

If you are going to use rich or promoted pins, you need to identify yourself as a brand to successfully use those pins. This includes filling out your profile information and including links to your website and social media pages with a Linkup. The more information you provide, the more reputable and trustworthy you will appear.

Also: Run More Effective Ads With Pinterest Tag for Your Ecwid Store

Engage with user-generated content

Lastly, it’s essential to engage with other users on Pinterest. Pinterest’s algorithm favors accounts with high engagement levels, as this shows Pinterest that users want to see your content.

To boost your engagement, you’ll need to participate in the Pinterest community. This includes engaging with users directly by liking their posts, commenting on relevant content, and pinning content from other users.

Engaging with the community also means using your account to promote others. You can do this by creating a board on your profile for pinning pictures customers take with your product or brand. You can create a hashtag or giveaway to incentivize user-generated content about your brand.

This may seem like a convoluted strategy, but it will deliver you real results. The more you put into Pinterest, the more you will get out of it. Don’t believe me? Track your social media metrics and test it out for yourself.

Start Boosting Sales with Pinterest

Pinterest is a platform full of potential for social selling. The platform is perfectly designed for online shopping, offering brands a unique social selling experience.

Although Pinterest may not be as well known a sales channel as Instagram or Facebook, it’s effectiveness in social media selling is not to be understated. Especially when you sell products that fit the most popular Pinterest niches: fashion and beauty, art, home, food, DIY, health and wellness, travel.

As Pinterest’s co-founder and chief product officer Evan Sharp puts it, if pinland were a country, it’d be the 7th largest in the world.

About The Author

Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content. On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot Sales, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIN, Twitter, or email: workwithmarkquadros@gmail.com.