So, you’ve been using Pinterest for a while for your eCommerce brand but you haven’t gotten one sale yet. You’re following tips you found online or from Pinterest marketers on Pinterest but, you still can’t seem to understand why you’re not seeing any improvements.
Or, maybe you’re seeing an increase in traffic but, no conversions happening. Or, you’re a new eCommerce brand on Pinterest trying to learn everything you can before you start utilizing the platform.
Regardless of your frustrations with increasing sales on Pinterest, this blog post will actually give you actionable tips to start seeing a difference within 3 months (yes, that’s fast for Pinterest since it’s a search engine!)
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1. Understanding your Audience Insights
I hate to break it to you but one reason you may not being seeing any sales using Pinterest is because your audience doesn’t exist on, or use, Pinterest. Did you know that Pinterest is only best for 20 different industries? You can use the Audience Insights tool in your Pinterest Business account to see if your ideal customer uses Pinterest to shop or look for ideas within your industry.
If you’re not sure how to use the Audience Insights tool, I created a Youtube Video on How to Know if Pinterest is Right For Your Brand, where I walk you through on how to find out if Pinterest is the best move for your brand.
2. Make sure your account is optimized
Before you can even increase sales using Pinterest, you must first make sure your Profile, Boards and Pins are optimized for search. This is very important because Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a social media platform. It’s actually the number one visual search image in the world. and beats out Google Image search. at the number 1 position for visual search engines.
So how exactly do you optimize your Pinterest Profile, Boards and Pins to increase sales on Pinterest. First, go back to looking at your audience insights tool and look at your industry. Then click on industry topics to see what keywords are being used within that industry.
3. Using the Right Keywords (Keyword Research)
Next, click on the most relevant keyword for your brand or product and it will open up another tab for you to see the top performing pins for that category. Use this to understand what your competitors are doing and what type of medium is best for that keyword. Do you see mostly video? Idea Pins? Standard Pins?
What ever keywords you find that are the most relevant to your brand and products, make sure to use these keywords are present in your
- Profile title
- Profile description
- Board titles
- Board descriptions
Another quick way to find keywords to optimize on your profile is to use the good old Pinterest search bar. Start typing in keywords you think your target customer is searching and pay attention to the bold keyword suggestions that start to pop up. These are keywords that Pinterest is telling you that has a high search volume.
Also, use the Pinterest trends feature to also see the search volume of certain keywords throughout the yea so that you are publishing content that’s being highly searched in the moment, or to plan for the future.
4. Having Irrelevant Boards
This is a huge mistake I see with ecommerce brands wanting to increase sales with Pinterest. It’s their boards! You boards play an important role on Pinterest, it’s where you house your relevant pinterest pins.
Your boards should reflect the products/services you sell and/or reflect your brand messaging. You should not have random boards. So for example, if you are a skin care brand that sells skin care products, you want to be able to create Pinterest pins that reflect your products you sell. Which means, you shouldn’t have a fashion board because you’ll never be creating pins that have to do with fashion that leads people to your website to purchase a fashion item. Hopefully that makes sense.
5. Start pinning only YOUR pins
This tip is very self explanatory if you’re strictly using Pinterest for Business. Only saving other’s pins will not lead traffic to your website. At the end of the day, your goal for using Pinterest is to increase to sales and you can only do that by pinning your content that leads to a page on your site.
There is no rule on Pinterest that says you have to pin other people’s content. I always suggest pinning your own content 100% of the time. If you have nothing to pin for the week, it’s ok to pin other’s relevant content, just know it doesn’t help with your website conversions in the end.
6. Creating pins that are engaging
If you want to increase your sales on Pinterest, you’re going to have to have visually appealing pins that convert. Let’s be real, if you sell amazing products your customers love that are found easily in search but don’t capture the customer’s attention, it’s going to be hard for you to increase traffic and sales.
Now, Pinterest share’s it’s best practices for good pins which I highly recommend you look over.
However, if you don’t want to second guess if your pins are going to be visually appealing and created to convert, I highly suggest in investing in our $27 20 Pack Canva Pinterest Pin Templates designed by our Pinterest Marketing Experts (because the free Templates on Canva aren’t created by experts or created to convert!). We have Pinterest Pin templates for
Ofcourse, don’t forget to optimize keywords within your Pinterest pin graphic, Pinterest Pin Title and Pinterest Pin description. Make sure you add these pins to the most relevant board (particularly the board that has the same keywords in the board description as the ones in your Pinterest pin description)
7. Diversifying your Pin medium
There are 4 main mediums on Pinterest and they are
- Standard Pins
- VIdeo Pins
- Idea Pins
- Promoted Pins (Ads)
And as a brand wanting to increase sales with Pinterest, you’ll need to be utilizing all 4 to some extent. I won’t get into promoted pins in this post but many brands are using Pinterest ad campaigns completely wrong or don’t understand how to read the analytics. Would you like a blog post on how to use promoted pins to increase sales? Comment down below to let me know!
Idea pins are all the rave right now on Pinterest and it’s the top medium Pinterest is pushing out right now so you want to be using them as a chance to increase your brand awareness on Pinterest. Now, you can also tag your products on your idea pins (currently on mobile version) which is the only way to add links to your idea pins and this can also help increase traffic and sales.
If you’re using idea pins, keep in mind that you want to give “ideas” to your audience and not just only sell! Use your idea pins to show how to use your products, new arrivals, customer reviews, what your products are made of, etc. All of these can help sell your products with out actually telling your audience ot buy.
8. Using Pinterest Campaigns Correctly
I know I stated I won’t get into Promoted pins in this blog post because it deserves it separate post but I did want to list this as a reason why you aren’t seeing an increase in sales on Pinterest.
There are 3 different types of campaigns on Pinterest which are
- Consideration Campaigns
- Conversion Campaigns
- Conversion Campaigns
and most brand don’t see success because they are either not spending enough, not understanding their analytics, choosing the wrong campaign for their goals, etc. Before running a campaign, I suggest you become familiar with how Pinterest Ads work first.
9. Having good landing pages
Now, truth is, Pinterest does half of the work for you. Meaning, that if used correctly, Pinterest will get visitors to your website but your landing pages must do the heavy lifting in order to convert. So what does this means?
This means that you want to make sure your landing pages are relevant to what you promised the pinner would receive on the pin the clicked on. You also want. to make sure your landing page is easy to read, has good navigation, and takes only up to 3 clicks to make the desired action.
Having a bad landing page will increase your bounce rates making Pinterest not show your pin in the algorithm anymore (and yes, Pinterest will know how long someone stays on your site with a pin that led them there!)
10. Consistent and Quality Content
If you have an eCommerce store, it. is possible to see results with Pinterest with only product pins but it’s not recommended if you want to continue to increase sales on Pinterest. Pinterest loves consistency and fresh pins. Meaning that in order to stay competitive in the algorithm and in search results, you’ll need to consistently be producing new images, new content (blogs) and new urls.
I always recommend having at least 2-3 new blog posts every month on your eCommerce site to be able to consistently create fresh pins for Pinterest. Plus, this will give your pinners new content to take in and learn about your brand and/or products. Blog posts help build credibility and trustworthiness for your brand and will help visitors understand if they want to purchase from you or not.
Blog content can also help increase your email list from Pinterest. as well which if nurtured correctly, can increase sales with Pinterest.
Did you learn something knew about increasing your sales with Pinterest?
We hope that this blog post gave you some important tips when it comes to using Pinterest to see an increase in your sales. Comment down below if you’re interested in learning about how to effectively use promoted pins for your ad campaigns.
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