How To Use Pinterest For Your Business
There are many ways to use Pinterest to promote your business. Everything from increasing exposure, to gaining new fans, to promoting specific products is possible. Perhaps the most comprehensive way is to look at Pinterest as a sales funnel which leads from your account, to your boards, to specific pins, to your product sales pages.
This guide is going to show you that customer journey, and give you advice that will push your account even further as you seek new followers, and get more repins.
Your followers Are Everything
Having followers on Pinterest is just as important as it is on any other social media platform. Having more and more people following your account, or just one board that interests them, will help your reach grow.
Every social platform has some sort of sharing aspect to it. With Pinterest it’s repinning. The more followers you have, the more repins you get. The more repins you get, the more your content spreads to other people who can also repin that content.
The Pinterest sales funnel explained
Envisioning a typical customer journey and applying it to Pinterest is how you will promote not only your business, but also your products. A typical customer journey takes four steps from discovering your content, to finally landing on your website sales page. Let’s look at them now.
1: The draw for your account
Social media marketing is all about value added content. Having a draw, or theme, to your account is about doing more than talking about your products. A sports store can talk about athletes. An electronics store can talk about the TV stars that will be on the TVs they sell. A fashion store can talk about celebrities who wear their brands.
This idea will form the top of your sales funnel. It’s the broad topic that will trap new Pinterest followers, and keep them coming back for more. With over 10,000,000 monthly views and never using a T.V. ad, ModCloth is proof that Pinterest is an amazing platform for business. They went with an all things fashion and home decor for the broad aspect of their sales funnel. Here’s a quick shot of their Pinterest homepage:
2: Breakdown content into boards
Once someone has found your Pinterest homepage, through a shared interest, you can start breaking the sales funnel down. The way to do this on Pinterest is by creating boards. You can see how ModCloth did it above. There are many ways that you can do this, but the ones which coincide with your product categories will be the best fit.
Take a look at Nordstrom’s homepage:
You can see that they have begun breaking their content down into categories that start to coincide with their product lines. They have boards for fall fashion clothing, winter clothing, jewelry, shoes, and fitness. Some of them have cute names, but they are straight up product categories leading consumers towards sales. Even ‘Pick Pink’ is a themed category for those who want Nordstrom’s products in pink. It’s specialized, but it works!
3: Create and curate your content
If you’re not creating pins worth repinning, you’re not using Pinterest very well. The examples I provided in the first step (sport store pins athletes, electronics store pins TV stars, fashion store pins celebrities) are very shareable pin examples.
The other shareable type of content is ‘how to’ and ‘DIY’ type stuff. This can apply to nearly any industry. It thrives in the hardware/building industry, like Lowe’s Build It! board, but it can also work in fashion where pins are fashion suggestions like the following from Herschel Supply Co.:
Their product is the backpack, the value this pin adds is in the engagement of the company with their clients. Their ‘Styled by You’ board is full of this content, earning them massive repin numbers.
Now what if you’ve done all this work, made some content that’s actually great, but you’re still not getting the repins you need? It can all come down to you needing a little boost to get things going.
Using Rich Pins to drive sales
Rich Pins are a tool which can help vastly improve your ROI from Pinterest. They are a tool which takes time to install, but this pays off as Rich Pins can:
- Add live stock counts to your pins, letting people know how much stock you have for online sales.
- Add live pricing to your pins so there’s never a surprise when they visit your online store.\
- Notify those who have pinned your content when prices change, giving them another nudge to visit your website and make a purchase.
There is currently no other social media marketing platform which offers all three of these in one package. They’re worth the time invest for the live stock counts and pricing alone. The addition of updating consumers when there’s a price change perhaps makes Pinterest the one true place to really do marketing with social media.
Read our guide on setting up rich pins here: Elm Street Design's Guide to Pinterest Rich Pins
Using Pinterest to promote your business
Pinterest can be one of the most powerful tools for promoting your business in a social media context. This is thanks to how long pins last, the connections you make, and how Rich Pins add to the mix.
Work on building your content in a manner that works with your overall account goal. Encourage and push repins. Top all of this off with Rich Pin usage on your products. With all of that in place you can find Pinterest to have the highest ROI of all your social media marketing efforts.
Want to speak to someone about Online Marketing or specifically marketing on Pinterest? Give us a call 561-376-9415 or visit the contact page
