How to Sell on Pinterest: A Complete Guide for Beginners

How to Sell on Pinterest: A Complete Guide for Beginners

A platform that started as a place to find the latest DIY ideas and recipes has now turned into a major search engine for shopping. 

With almost 459 million active users on the platform, Pinterest is one of the best places to sell your products. Interestingly, one data point suggested that 47% of their users are visiting Pinterest only to purchase and research new products.

These are the reasons you should consider this platform to sell your products.

Why Should You Sell on Pinterest?

Pinterest has a lot of potential to get new customers every day. Moreover, it has been found out that the customers on Pinterest pay more per order than most other social platforms. 

average order value by social network
Source

However, it is not easy to get sales on Pinterest without the right guidance and proper planning. You need to find your target audience and put your products in front of them. In this guide, we have listed down some of the best ways to sell on Pinterest.

Prepare your brand ready to sell on Pinterest.

Now you have decided to sell your products on Pinterest. But before trying to sell anything, you first need to do some initial setup to prepare your brand. 

Set up your online store

If you plan to sell on social platforms like Pinterest, you need to have a professional online store set up, where every detail about the product is mentioned.

Don’t worry! You need not be a professional designer to set up your store. With many eCommerce website builders available online, it is easy to build an online shop with their drag and drop features. Companies like Shopify and BigCommerce provide their users with ready-made templates to set up their online store.

You can also create your store using popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce or Magento with an optimal web hosting server. However, this method of creating an online store requires more technical knowledge.

Of course, depending on your product, you could also establish Etsy as your online store and market your Etsy store on Pinterest like so many other business owners do.

Once your online store is set up, let’s move on to the next step.

Define your target audience

Before starting your online campaigns on any platform, it is essential to understand your target audience. With the proper understanding of your buyer persona or avatar, you can easily understand how to set up the campaign to bring in more conversions on the Pinterest platform.

Some of the factors you need to consider are job profile, income, interests, location, and age group.

For example, if you are selling a premium product on Pinterest, you can exclude the age group of 18-20, as most of the users in this age group do not have the potential to purchase your product.

Set up a Pinterest business account

Having a Pinterest personal account is entirely different from having a business account. In the personal account, one can only save the pins and see trending topics. On the other hand, one can see the analytics, top pins, and run ads on the Pinterest business account.

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You can create a Pinterest business account and connect it with your personal account or leave it as a standalone business account.

create a Pinterest account

Here is how you can create a business account for both the options:

Connect Business Account with Personal Account

● Firstly, log in to your Pinterest personal account

● On the top right corner, click on your profile and select the option “Add a free business account.”

● Now, fill in your business information and other required information and click on submit.

You are good to start with your first pin now!

Create Standalone Business Account

● Go to the following URL: pinterest.com/business/create

● Now, click on create account

● Fill in your business information and select your advertisement preferences.

These are the two ways you can create your Pinterest business account.

Use branding for your account

Like any other social media platform, even a Pinterest account should be aligned with your brand.

Have a high-resolution image of your business as your profile cover and logo as a profile picture. Make sure that the images used on your Pinterest profile match with other social handles of your brand. And finally, add your contact information in your bio section so that customers can reach out in case of any queries.

It goes without saying that your bio section should have a branded and SEO-optimized description of your company and products and services similar to what you would have on other social platforms.

The final step in getting your Pinterest business profile set up is verifying your website. Once you enter your website link in the profile section, Pinterest provides you with an HTML tag that needs to be placed in the source code of your website. Once you place the HTML code on your website, click on the claim button. It will verify your website in less than a minute.

How to sell on Pinterest?

Now your brand is prepared for selling. It’s time to know some of the best methods to sell your products on Pinterest.

Create high-quality visuals

First of all, Pinterest is a visual discovery engine which means that high quality and impressive images play a crucial role in driving sales for your product.

A combination of beautiful photography, adequately sized images, and the right set of fonts that go with your brand can increase the CTR and sales through Pinterest.

how to travel to Bora Bora on a budget Pinterest pin

Having your brand logo on each of the images can help the users save your pins and purchase them in the future. You can even use high-quality royalty-free stock photos and turn them into attractive graphics with tools like Canva or Stencil.

Below are some tips for creating attention-grabbing pins

  • Use high-quality photographs
  • Create properly sized graphics
  • Use bold fonts and colors
  • Match visuals with your brand

Optimize content for Pinterest SEO

Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, it has its algorithm to rank your pins. Make sure to do proper research on your niche-related keywords. Look for what type of content your competitors are using on Pinterest, and use them in your Pin/Board titles and description.

Write the attention-grabbing title and description for your pins to increase the CTR and likelihood of people buying from you. Use the targeted keyword strategically and naturally in your content to get more organic views through Pinterest SEO.

It will increase the visibility of your pin and help drive organic sales if the content is appealing to the users. 

Implement rich pins

Rich pins showcase extra information from your website along with the standard pin information like photo, description, and title. It helps extract the price and product information, which will help the users view information on the pin itself.

Mobiles users will be redirected to the product landing page when they click on the shop now button. If you provide additional information about the product stock on your website, Pinterest will even extract this information and showcase to the users the availability of the product.

Happy Sad Smiley Ring Gold Pinterest pin

There are four types of rich pins on Pinterest.

Product pins: These pins include pricing, availability, and link to the product page for purchase. The primary goal of these pins is to make shopping easier.

Recipe pins: These pins include cooking time, ingredients, and serving sizes. 

Article pins: Article pins show the story title, description, author, and link to the original article.

App pins: These pins have an install button through which users can install your app without leaving Pinterest. However, currently, these pins are only compatible with the IOS operating system.

Rich pin only works after you claim your website on Pinterest. So take advantage of this eCommerce feature to sell on Pinterest.

Make use of promoted pins.

If you can’t wait for the Pinterest algorithm to feature your pins in their search, use promoted pins. If you have a reasonable budget and are looking for faster leads for your business, try working on the promoted pins.

Promoted pins will take your targeted user to your desired product or landing page, where you provide the complete information about your product. Also, in promoted pins, you can target the users based on their age, income, devices, and location. It helps in getting more leads for your business in less time.

Organize your Pinterest boards

Quality content plays a crucial role in gaining more customers for your business. Try to organize your pins into innovative groups called boards on Pinterest. Ensure that each board has relevant images on it. If not, try to rearrange the pins.

Custom Built Home Pinterest page

If you have subtopics in your boards, you can try creating new sections and move your existing pins to different sections within the board. For example, if you are selling computer peripherals like hard disks, you can create a board on the hard disk and further classify them into different sections like 1TB hard disk, 2TB hard disk, etc. Having your data more organized will help the users to find what they are looking for easily.

Create product tags for shop the look pins

Once your store is connected to Pinterest, you get access to the product catalog. Now, you can use the shop the look pins feature to tag all your products in a single pin. 

After the feature is activated, the available products are shown with white dots, and when hovered over the image, users can find similar products and shop for them.

Though the process of tagging images is manual, it is worth investing your time in tagging the relevant products to get more sales.

Arrange product pins into Catalogs

Once you have a business account approved on Pinterest, catalogs are the best way to drive sales. Apart from that, catalogs are also great for arranging products into categories.

Arrange product pins into Catalogs | Nordstrom Pinterest example

Once you get data source approval from Pinterest, every product added to your store will automatically get pinned on your Pinterest account. Once you have lots of pins, try to organize them into catalogs and run the shopping ads for better results.

Share some social proofs.

Social proof plays a crucial role in the product purchase decision of your customers. Try to contact some influencers in your industry and ask them to promote your brand through their pins. It will create more trust in your brand.

In short, if any user finds your product being promoted by celebrities or influencers, your customers are more likely to buy your product, as it creates a sense of trust. If possible, try to pin the reviews of your existing customers as well.

Implement content marketing

Product reviews, guides, and informative blog posts help in driving more sales to your business. Along with your product pins, try to educate your users with frequent blog posts.

Create and share pins of your quality blog posts that are conversion-focused. It would be best to create a solid content strategy and try different pin ideas for Pinterest. The best content types to share on Pinterest are guides, tutorials, and DIYs. Make sure your pins are visually appealing to improve CTR.

Analyze your performance using Pinterest analytics

Now that you have completed all the basic steps mentioned above, it is time to track the performance of your pins. Regular tracking of your analytics data is essential to make intelligent marketing decisions and to improve the conversion rate of your products.

Pinterest helps you analyze the data for different parameters like:

  • Impressions
  • Top Pins
  • Top Boards
  • Engagement
  • Number of Clicks

You can filter these parameters on a daily, weekly, and also monthly basis. With this data, keep experimenting with different ways to engage customers with your brand and drive more conversions.

Summing Up!

Selling on Pinterest requires a lot of experience and understanding of visual power. However, it is not tough to gain experience. Start your journey of Pinterest marketing by following the steps mentioned above and frequently improve your Pinterest marketing skills.

Author Bio

This guest post was written by Ranjit Singh. Ranjit is a web developer and blogger at AppsTale. He loves to write about social media marketing strategies and eCommerce conversion optimization techniques.

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4 Comments

  1. Loved this info.. thank you ♡ glad to see everything I’ve done on pinterest for the past few years is correct, referring to my two influencer business accounts which grow by the day. I have a concern, a problem I’ve run into with all accts I’ve had & pinterest seems almost scared to admit there’s an issue as they don’t know how to resolve it. I’ve complained, advised of all troubleshooting steps done on my end & without fail… each account, after about a year… Stats drop literally overnight from 3 billion to Zero.
    – This doesn’t happen when you are posting designer brand/Couture that is available online for sale… & a discount code of 25% & free shipping. Those posts never would hit Zero… & remain at zero, all stats.
    All products, all brands, all Discount offers. Every product pin uploaded.. goes from 2-3 billion views, clicks etc for over a year, different accounts… then ZERO! I receive absolutely no help from pinterest & in the past I have gotten so frustrated that I would delete an entire account that took me FOREVER to create. Once I do that, right back to 2k views.
    I should not have to do that. It clearly is an issue on their end, & it drives me coo-coo lol
    — What I’d love help with from anyone & would be so very grateful as it’s not exactly easy…
    But – Board name ideas for;
    1. Womens clothing for sale, discount available- board name needed
    2. Makeup for sale, Discount available
    & so on.
    Someone would have to look at my account to visually look at my boards for names.
    Names for fashion boards, are easy.
    But add in, they are for sale & click to order, & use Discount code… (not easy topics to name)

    • Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. Truth be told I have also heard of Pinterest accounts being closed down, and as Pinterest tries to transition itself into becoming a social shopping destination, I expect more friction to happen. I do believe that Pinterest customer support does exist and there are ways of engaging with them, so I do hope you are able to resolve the issues that you have with them!

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