5 Powerful Ways to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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