Pinterest is ripe with opportunity for building traffic (and even sales) for online businesses, especially eCommerce stores. According to a 2012 study by Shareaholic, Pinterest beat out Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined in terms of referral traffic. And Pinterest users are 10% more likely to buy from your store than from any other social site.
Obviously, if you want traffic, you need to be on Pinterest.
But it’s not enough to just be on Pinterest, create a few boards, and add the occasional image you think relate to your eCommerce stores.
You have to do more with your store’s account than that in order to get the kind of traffic that beats out all those other social media platforms.
To help you get started, here are 5 powerful ways you can use your store’s Pinterest account to interact on this social media site and drive more traffic your way:
- Include beautiful, eye-catching photos on your site before uploading to Pinterest.
– Sure, this may seem like common sense, but an average photo simply doesn’t have as much of a chance of being shared as an attractive one. You have to realize that in order for your eCommerce store to find success using Pinterest, you’ll need excellent product images, as well as a solid understanding on what draws your customers’ eyes.For your product photos, make sure to practice proper photography skills and techniques, like using angles, good lighting, quality focus, etc. If you don’t feel like you can take product photos yourself, hire a professional to do the job, which will cost you but will guarantee the images you put on your site and then upload to Pinterest are the kind people will re-pin.
This “beautiful photo” rule goes for any other images you use on your site, too, like on your store’s blog. You can get images from places like photopin.com or compfight.com for these purposes, but again, always make sure they’re eye-catching. For more ideas, read about how to use images more effectively.
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Include your store’s URL as a watermark and in the title of the photo.
– When you create a board like “Our Products” on Pinterest, you might be tempted to simply pin your product images and call it good. Don’t. Simply pinning your images won’t help you much.
Instead, before you upload or pin any of your own store’s images to your board, make sure to include a watermark with your store’s name (maybe even URL) on the photos. You’ll also want to make sure your store’s URL is in the title and/or description of the photos. Both of these measures ensure your images won’t be stolen or credited to other people, and they give you the best chance of someone clicking through to your store directly.
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Search Pinterest for the keywords you want to use to attract customers.
– Chances are you’ve already done keyword research for your store and took measures to optimize the store’s site for SEO purposes (if you haven’t done keyword research yet, sign up for a free Google Adwords account and navigate over to their Keyword Planner Tool to start… or just hire an SEO expert).
Take those keywords you chose over to Pinterest’s search function. Enter them in and see what results come up. Study very closely the types of photos that appear, the text used in these photos, the sites they link to, and anything else attached to the search results.
Now go imitate all this with your Pinterest photos — the more you copy their formatting and style, the more likely your images are to be included with them in search results when Pinterest users search for your chosen keywords.
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Make a bunch of different boards your customers will also appreciate.
– You may have already started collecting data about your customers, who they are and where they come from. But now it’s time to think like them. If you were your store’s customer, what would you want to see on your Pinterest account?
Create boards that relate to your customers’ wants, needs, and interests (preferably all three of those together!). Maybe this means you make a “DIY” board with some of your products in use, or even a “Favorite Foods” board with photos of cuisine your customer base may be eating.
The idea here is simple: sharing relatable photos to your customers will make them trust you, and more likely to buy from you and spread the word about your eCommerce store.
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Interact and engage.
– It’s great to be active on your own boards, pinning and re-pinning to make them nicely curated. However, considering that there are over 70 million other users on Pinterest, you’ve got lots of opportunities for engagement.
Connect with these other users by following companies and people that your customers are also interested in (like you did when you made boards for them).
Repin images from these people so you’re not constantly marketing just your own store. Show that you are a supportive member of Pinterest, as well as of the larger eCommerce community in general.
You can also join in group boards that relate to your store’s products, vision, and customer base. Group boards allow you to interact with other pinners and can get you extra traffic when you share one of your store’s images.
Take these 5 tips and start trying each one out to see what works best for your eCommerce store. One may work better than another at gaining you referral traffic, but no matter what, you’ll be sure to see an increase in visitors to your store, all because you learned a few new ways to make Pinterest work for you.
Image Credit: mkhmarketing
33 comments
Pinterest is quite simply AMAZING. The meteoric rise cannot be matched by any other social network because there is nothing like it! I do not know why more businesses are not utilizing in their marketing strategies.
It definitely is that, Kostas. I avoided Pinterest for a while because I felt it was stuffed with fashion and DIY projects (which it still is) and I would waste so much time on it for no good reason. Now, you can learn to leverage those areas and the people looking at them for your business (and lots of pins about marketing and social media are starting to grow in popularity, too).
It must add value to the internet, and part of that is to be both timely and interesting!
Great article, thanks for the share!
Interesting, definitely. Timely… doesn’t matter AS much with Pinterest like it might if you believe in the “peak times” for sites like Twitter or Facebook. However, if there was a major news event you wanted to pin that you thought your customers would be interested in, yes, you’d want to pin images from that event almost immediately if possible.
I am agreed with you to do something different in online marketing with the help of social media and as we all know social media is one of the finest way to get number of traffic to website.
Yep, it’s pretty powerful if you use it the right way, Hyptia!
Bree very helpful tips to use pinterest to drive traffic………….ultimately every site owner’s aim to drive traffic…….. Thanks for sharing such a helpful article.
Hi, Raj, I’m glad you found this useful!
The visual aspect of Pinterest makes it incredibly attractive, particularly to girls. The provides a unique opportunity for businesses to appeal to and target their key female demographic. Much to think about. Thanks for the article!
Yes, Pinterest is mostly used by females in the U.S., but recent stats have shown that more men are starting to use it in countries like England, so you really need to figure out your audience and where they are coming from (or where you’d LIKE them to come from) and pin accordingly.
Hi Bree,
Your tips are really very helpful for ecommerce site owners as Pinterest is a great source of traffic for Ecommerce products. Also, recent studies have proved that traffic from pinterest converts better as compared to traffic from Facebook or Twitter
Thanks
They have indeed proven that! I believe Pinterest users also have a higher average purchase (maybe that’s because they’re mostly women in the U.S. and they are still the ones in control of finances in general?).
Pinterest is very useful tool for promotion.. thanks for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it!
By including your watermark on everything you do such as pictures or Youtube videos, you would be amazed at how much more traffic you can get to your site from the reinforcement of your branding.
Interacting is a little difficult for me unless I am extremely organized on any given week. To get this done I set aside just 15 minutes a day to go through Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook and it works well for me. The key is consistency as with anything else.
Consistency is very important. And timing – your 15 minutes is all that’s really needed if you use social media effectively. There’s no reason to sit on Pinterest all day if it won’t help advance your business (now sitting on it for personal gains is a completely different matter!).
Hello,
Well no doubt pinterest is one top major social media and i rarely use pinterest. But after reading this post i must implement your tips.
thanks
You should!
Pinterest is something that I have never experimented with. All that I did was adding a PIN button. But I have a question on the effectiveness of pinterest on blogs that are not really media rich. Does it really work for such blogs?
Actually, I’d say you’re looking at the wrong part of marketing if your blog or ecommerce site doesn’t have a lot of media attached to it. There are tons of stats out there that prove how much better visuals drive traffic and revenue, so you will want to fix that problem before you worry about how Pinterest will affect your site.
In other words, no Pinterest simply can’t work unless you put the work into creating media for your site. 🙂 Even adding a header image instead of text for your pages can help, because then you can pin those.
Social signals have become a buzzword in recent years but as explained by Peter Visser, a social signal is a link from someone’s social media profile to your website or blog.
If you click the Like, Retweet or Pin It button next to this blog post it becomes a social signal.
Besides providing you with social proof, Google increasingly rewards sites for social signals. This means that the more social engagement you get, the better it is for your SEO.
Connect your other social media profiles (Facebook and Twitter) to your Pinterest account by adding the links to your About section and regularly cross-share your pins. Pin videos from YouTube or Vimeo and don’t forget high-traffic sites like Google+, LinkedIn and Slideshare.
But you have to be careful with cross-sharing because what may work on one social media platform may not work on another. Also, users can be put off by how much cross-sharing you do, so it’s in your best interests to be selective with this practice.
Pinterest is very useful tool for promotion.. thanks for sharing
I am using Pinterest from last 4 months but never come to kno how to bring huge traffic through this social networking site. I am also able to generate a do follow back link through it but not able to drive traffic but after reading your post now I understand the whole concept regarding the traffic driven from pinterest…
I only recently started using Pinterest. Having used Twitter and Facebook for years and got in early with Google Plus, I was slow to take up new trends with social media (when I joined Facebook it was a minnow compared to MySpace and Twitter was just another new SM site).
Thanks for these tips. I picked up some nice hints and immediately pinned my Albert Einstein / Miles Cyrus image to my FUN Board on Pinterest – lol
Hi,
This is really helpful for me because recently i have created a store for affiliate marketing. So many thanks for your great ideas.
Regards,
Gautam
Nice! Pinterest.. I use it for my blog
All the how to posts on Pinterest is pulling me into giving it a try. It looks fun.
Hi,
I like the points that you have shared. Pinterest is truly amazing and has gained a lot of importance nowadays. Targeting through Keywords is just the best option I feel. All other points are great too. Thanks for the share!! Keep on updating more.
Thanks !! Pinterest is one of the social media that I have never really understood! I will try out some of the tips that you give!
Thanks for your useful tips. These tips will be helpful for my site to rive traffic. Although my site is not an e commerce site but still I would apply those tips. Keep on posting such more informative posts in the future.
Wow, this is a very detailed post. I must say that Pinterest now looks interesting after reading. Will sure come back to this.
Thanks for sharing.
I can’t agree more on your points here man. Pinterest is a very effective traffic source to any site and many people have been utilizing its powers ever since its inception so, if you’re not yet using it to drive some awesome traffic to your own site then, you’re indeed missing it. Thanks for sharing this with us. 😀