Optimize Pinterest For Business
Pinterest has been the largest source of FREE traffic on the internet since 2018.
It is a great way to expand your user base. Over 93% of Pinterest users have used the site to plan purchases and over 87% of them report that they have made purchases (278 million purchases if they only buy once) after seeing an item on Pinterest.
What many do not realize, Google loves Pinterest. Pins show prominently in the Google search results which can be an additional source of traffic for your relevant content or product pages.
The bottom line is simple, if your products are not on Pinterest, none of those purchases are made from you.
Why Pinterest?
Ask yourself, why am I not already using Pinterest to engage potential buyers and build solid FREE traffic to my products or content?
Pinterest Stats (updated 4/2022)
Pinterest is a powerful tool for social media marketers, sellers, and brands that too many small businesses and users are overlooking. Pinterest is a visual search engine where people look for and save new and creative ideas.
You can easily market to your target audience with a much smaller marketing budget increasing sales and brand awareness.
Pinners use Pinterest as a way to shop over the use of TV, catalogs or magazines. They are open to being marketed to, which is not the case on other social media channels.
When you register for a Pinterest business account, like any social media site, make sure to create a Pinterest business profile.
Always include links back to your listings. Do not use a link shortener as this will be seen as spam. These links count as high domain authority backlinks. It is a very important KPI for ranking on google and rewarded by Amazon when converting sales or social shares come from it.
Focus on this guide for a quick overview of how you can benefit from Pinterest and a detailed strategy to maximize the benefits and get the best results.
Using Pinterest For Business
Who Uses Pinterest?
Recent Dec 2021 stats:
How Pinterest Works
The key to success begins with understanding how Pinterest works and how it is different from other social networks. One key feature to keep in mind, pins naturally can get shared over and over and over. Pins last forever!
Pinterest users create boards (think mood boards). Accomplished by pinning content found online, or material found while browsing other relevant boards. The result, a collage of images and ideas that they’ve found, commented on if desired and collected in one place.
As a marketer, this aids you because you are impacting potential buyers at multiple points in the buyer's journey.
Make the best use of your Pinterest business account by applying SEO principles to all aspects of what you do. What does this mean? Keywords! Like anywhere else, always work from a position of optimizing everything to be found in search. This is accomplished by using relevant, popular keyword phrases and long-tail phrases in all of your titles, descriptions and bio's/profiles.
What is Pinterest For?
The purpose of Pinterest is sharing ideas and drawing inspiration for a project, a checklist of best practices or a scrapbook of ideas and things that you like.
The typical buyer's journey from beginning to end can take approx 90 days. It is imperative that you have content that satisfies the different stages of the buyer's journey. Your campaign objective should include the entire journey which immediately increases your potential audience.
The use of the term content here can mean many things. Marketplace sellers do not always have a content site to direct a user to. A youtube channel will suffice or maybe an article or two that you have written and posted on Medium or Quora instead. There are many different alternatives.
Post COVID-19, if you think just being a marketplace seller and waiting for the platform to send you traffic is a success then you have no idea what you are missing. Rather than do some of the short minimal efforts but evergreen producing strategies, I hope you are fine with spending your margins on discounts and ppc for traffic.
Typical Use Example
If you were getting married next spring, you could search for wedding inspiration – decorations, venues, bridesmaid dresses, seating plans, table names, flowers, etc...After finding ideas for things you like, you could pin it to your relevant boards. Eventually, with great content, a visual direction would come together, and you would have all the ideas all in the right place.
Expanding on that feature is the ability to mark the board secret or to let other users edit your private board (your partner or best man/maid of honor). You can upload your different images, including photos you’ve taken yourself. In your search for wedding ideas, you might find yourself following relevant boards of other users that have provided you with great ideas.
More than likely, after creating your board, you will see others that share your interests following your boards. At the same time, they follow other boards that offer things such as fonts, sharing cool images from movies, pictures of places they would like to vacation, etc. Additionally, you will find group boards with multiple contributors. These can be a great way of getting additional engagement.
How To Optimize Pinterest For Business
Use the checklist below to layout your Pinterest strategy from the top down. These are the deliverables through which you can best maximize your Pinterest business account to your advantage.
Where To Start
You need to find an ‘angle’ that will work within your niche or your industry. Begin by defining your target demographic, identifying the different categories and topics that you can engage them in. Far too often businesses fail to properly identify and target the right people.
Define Your Audience
Identify The Players
Proper planning is essential. Far too often sellers develop their listings and sales adverts oblivious to what their competition is doing. Everyday sellers state how great their listings, products, and offers are yet they have zero knowledge of what else is available on the market.
Seek out your competitor on Pinterest and set your minimum acceptable results and goals higher than theirs. Mediocre or second-best does not win the competition. An easy way to find the most influential pinners in your niche is by using Pinterest's own guided search. Type your niche name in the search box.
At the right end of the search box, use the dropdown and choose people. The results provided show the names behind the most powerful boards in your niche as demonstrated in the example below.
Specific industries lend themselves to this type of content. A crafts business, women's' fashion, and baby products do very well on Pinterest. Believe it or not, bracelets are a hot selling item on Pinterest right now. However, you will be hard-pressed to find a niche not represented on Pinterest, both B2C, and B2B.
Pinterest is here to stay and its' influence on buying decisions will only strengthen moving forward. In this business, the late ones to the table always have to settle for leftover dust. Don't be the last one to the table
Seek Out Shoulder Niches
A shoulder niche is a niche that you share an audience with but do not compete. For example, I sell baseball gloves and you sell baseball bats. We share a common audience but we do not compete against each other. There is no reason that their followers, and the influencers that they use to promote their products would also be interested in your brand, they just don't know who you are yet.
Follow these profiles here and elsewhere, interact with their engaging posts, add helpful advice and information. Do not sell, network. People will notice that you know what you are talking about and then will check out your profile and hopefully follow you as well.
This is a very solid method that works across all platforms. It should not be overlooked and should be a part of your regular marketing efforts. You can automate some of it by using social listening.
Seek Input
Grab a few friends or business acquaintances and brainstorm ways to provide inspiration and motivation while subtly promoting your brand. Leave the hard sell routine for the other marketplaces. Pinterest is about suggestion and persuasion through imagery with emotional appeal.
If you sell stocks though, having a successful Pinterest board will be more challenging. The key is to speak to the underlying lifestyle associated with successful stock ownership.
I'd create Pinterest boards about the quality of life ideas that come with financial gains, interior designs for beautiful homes, exotic travel destinations, etc...
A well thought out board can gather it's own momentum, going viral, independent from your business. That would be called Pinterest gold! A perfect position to promote your products, services or ideas.
Research, Evaluate & Define
To do this, you need to focus, real-time on Pinterest, treating it like its own product until you understand what messages work best for you. Test everything with many variations, keep track posts, when, and what does and does not work.
A reliable technique for product listings is first to read all the reviews and questions asked on your competition's listings to identify the solvable pain points experienced by buyers. Find a way to depict this via imagery or an infographic. Once you have begun gathering a targeted audience, rotate these items into your posts as a way to add authority.
If you have a blog, a niche blog centered around your products, each blog post should have imagery depicting the post subject. Optimize these images, filename, meta content, and share these to Pinterest as a way for your audience to stay abreast of your current topics and direction.
Steps To A Perfect Board
Tell a story with your board, building awareness. Show all of the uses and benefits that can come from purchasing the item. Build interest and excitement by leading them through your board via the story as explained with imagery. Ensure that your profile reflects your business information and has direct links back to your storefront or listings.
- 1Choose your topic wisely! Ensure it is something that will appeal to your target market.
- 2Remember your first priority is to build engagement, not sell.
- 3Pick a short, informative name for your board, (think keyword) but make sure it is unique and relevant.
- 4Find an eye-catching image that relates to your board’s topic and use it as the board cover
- 5Start pinning! Be sure to always pin relevant and interesting content. Be consistent!
- 6Keep the flow and structure tight. The board is the book and the pins are the chapters.
- 7Remember that there is SEO value to naming the boards and pins correctly
Pinterest Advertising
Promoted Pins are a method for businesses to guarantee that users see their product pins. They are the same as pins except they are ads. Read that again! The key is to subtly, naturally promote your product while making the pin look natural and not like a sales pitch. People share interesting content, not ads.
Promoted Pins never go away. With Facebook or any type of PPC, when you stop paying the ad disappears. With Pinterest, the shared promoted pins stay forever and can continue to be shared over and over again. You determine your CPC. Pinterest has a flaw in that it recommends bid amounts that are too high. You can choose to send $3.00 a day to test the water.
The half-life of an ad is the length of time it takes for an ad to reach half of its engagement. The half-life of a tweet is 24 minutes. The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. The half-life of a Pin is 153,000 minutes,
Hot Topics
- Your Products, Category, Services
- Inspiration Boards
- Infographics
Your Niche
- How to Use Your Products & Services
- Related Products
- Trends in Your Field
- Articles About Your Field
- Pain Points Solved By Your Products
Creativity
- DIY Projects
- Creative Uses of Your Products
- Your Products in Exotic Locations
Behind-the-Scenes:
- Photos of Products Being Made
- Videos From Company Events
- Photos of Your Employees
- Business Related Community Events
Customers:
- Customer Testimonials
- Customers With Your Products
Starbucks Pinterest Boards on Facebook
Sales Directly On Pinterest
While this article relates directly to driving Pinterest traffic to Ecommerce listings, landing pages and content, I would not be telling you the entire story without the following key points. They also have a new feature called Buyable Pins, the ability to purchase directly on Pinterest and without the high commission paid to sites such as Amazon.
A Buyable Pin features a buy now button next to the pin button. The catch is currently only 4 platforms support Buyable Pins – Shopify, Demandware, Salesforce, and Bigcommerce. I suggest Shopify as it is very versatile. For $9.00 a month you get a buy now capability that includes being able to accept 9 different payment methods without the long application process and access to the Shopify backend.
Full disclosure, I am a Shopify Partner. This is my affiliate link if you choose to sign up and want to use it. Setting up and optimizing your Shopify account is too much for this article and will be covered separately.
When using Buyable Pins, the sale occurs on Pinterest. Users can pay with a credit card, Apple pay and can close out the sale with Touch ID (the swiping of their fingerprint). This takes onsite sales to a new level. Think impulse buying!
Pinterest Tool
Pinterest themselves have a browser tool, the add to Pinterest Save Button, that makes saving images from around the web. It adds a pin icon on any image on the web. It enables you to build collections of images and boards. The free Pinterest tool is available through Pinterest and will assist you with ease of use and organization.
Pinterest As Part Of Your Overall Marketing Plan
An issue that we come across regularly is that sellers fail to see the bigger picture of marketing and how everything is interconnected. Pinterest optimization and Pinterest marketing should be a piece of your overall marketing strategy.
There is no one platform that should serve as your complete platform. Often, Amazon sellers will only run Amazon PPC and call it a day without any other methods of marketing or driving traffic. The days of being able to be successful following this strategy died years ago yet so many sellers fail to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The ideal marketing strategy should look more along the lines of a combined effort across platforms. Your best approach is to put others to work for you and to leverage the authority of trusted authoritative voices in your space to drive traffic with recommendations to their audience. This is called influencer marketing. These influencers don't need a huge following either. The small ones are much more effective and drive higher percentages of converting traffic. It just takes more of them to accomplish this. The days of shelling out large amounts of cash before they drive traffic are coming to an end as well.
A potential buyer sees an influencer that they follow mention your product on Instagram or TikTok. Hopefully what they see is user-generated content created by one of your brand advocates. A few days later they are on a different platform and they see someone else that they follow has images of themselves using your product in tagged photos on their profile. A week later the see several of your pins in their Pinterest feed. Maybe they also see a video ad at the beginning of a relevant video on YouTube.
This potential buyer may not be ready to purchase, but they now are developing brand awareness and brand recognition which creates trust.
Finally, a few weeks later, they realize they want to purchase and go to their favorite search engine or Amazon and enter a search for the product. If you have done your job correctly, it is a branded search. On google, they should see multiple search results referring to your product. Your Amazon listing, your website, if you have one, your Facebook page, several different review site profiles, a YouTube video etc... But even if it isn't a branded search and your brand is the only one they recognize in the search results, which listing do you think they will choose first?
What Is Next?
When this article was first written in early 2018, Pinterest was just beginning to apply changes that transformed it into the traffic generating powerhouse that it is now. There is not enough space in this article to detail how to utilize Pinterest to fully take advantage of all of its' features and reach full potential.
We have created a 2 to 3-hour Workshop that goes in-depth into how to set Pinterest up properly and your strategy to potentially drive waves of warm traffic to your listings or content.
For those of you that are extremely busy already and need a boost for your account, we have created a Pinterest Launch Service available further down this page. This is a paid service designed to get your account setup, linked and optimized., It includes creating multiple boards and optimized Pins.
PINTEREST TRAFFIC DOMINATION is available to you within our member's area. It is a FREE Workshop and is designed to assist and provide you with the necessary tools and ability to make changes beginning the day you start the workshop that will lead to quality traffic generation. Our Workshops are designed to give you items that you can take action on immediately, impacting your outcome starting that day!
Get FREE Access to
PINTEREST TRAFFIC DOMINATION!
Learn how to maximize your potential on Pinterest starting today by enrolling in our workshop. In just a few short hours, you will be in a position to begin transforming your Pinterest account into a traffic producing power house. This has the potential to crush all of your current marketing projects for less than the cost of half of a weeks groceries. Pinterest is here to stay. The longer it takes you to get on board with driving Pinterest traffic, the smaller of a slice of traffic you will see.
Pinterest Launch Service
Pinterest Account Setup
Our strategy:
We Lay The Foundation:
Pinterest is the #1 source of FREE Ecommerce Traffic! If you are not showcasing your products on Pinterest, you are missing out on sales!
