A Guide to Pinterest for Ecommerce Businesses

Pinterest is a visual search engine that has great potential for ecommerce businesses. From increasing sales to ramping up web traffic, Pinterest has a number of benefits—if you use it the right way.

Throughout this guide, we’re going to talk about why Pinterest can be so powerful for ecommerce, cover a few top Pinterest marketing strategies, and more.

By the end, you should be an expert at Pinterest for ecommerce, and ready to create your own ecommerce marketing strategy on Pinterest.

Let’s dig in.

Why Pinterest is a powerful ecommerce marketing tool

85% of Pinterest users have bought something after seeing a brand’s pin. That means having a presence on Pinterest and marketing your brand in order to increase your reach will almost guarantee more sales.

But more than that, Pinterest boasts a number of social commerce features, making the platform even more relevant for ecommerce brands.

Ecommerce brands can easily create a catalog of products, share shoppable pins, and promote ads specifically for increasing eyes on new products.

People who regularly use Pinterest are seven times more likely to say Pinterest is the most influential social media platform in their shopping journey. Pinners are using this platform to find new ideas, plan purchases, and shop.

Your ecommerce business just needs to make sure it’s in the right place at the right time. This is why the Pinterest marketing strategies we’re about to cover will be so essential to your next steps.

10 Pinterest marketing strategies for ecommerce businesses

Social commerce is becoming easier and more prevalent, meaning a major part of your ecommerce social media strategy should be making sales, as well as engaging your audience.

Pinterest allows you to do both. Keep these 10 tips and ideas in mind as you put together your own Pinterest marketing strategy for your ecommerce brand.

1. Brand your Pinterest profile

The first thing you want to do is make your Pinterest profile recognizable. Making sure your social media profiles match your brand is an essential step to creating a cohesive online presence—and your Pinterest account is no exception.

Add your logo as your profile photo, create a graphic or take a high-quality product photo for your cover photo, and make sure your board covers are branded.

Take a look at Bev’s profile. 

Their profile photo is a high-resolution graphic of their logo, ensuring anyone who knows the brand will immediately recognize it. Plus, they’ve added a photo of their product with their signature bright colors that also helps to show off a bit of their brand personality.

But they don’t stop there. They also have their board covers branded.

There are two ways to do this: Choose board covers that match your color scheme or upload branded graphics for your board covers. Bev has done the latter, helping to create a cohesive presence that stands out.

2. Create branded content that’s tailored to your audience

When you start creating your pins, be sure to keep your target audience in mind. Pinterest is a platform for finding new ideas and helpful products, so you want to create content surrounding that goal.

Take a look at the content that Glow Recipe is creating and sharing on Pinterest. First, it’s all branded in their signature pink, making it recognizable and like it all came from the same place.

Second, the content they’re sharing provides value. Of course, they have their product photos and promotions, but they’ve also created gift guides, information on their Vitamin C products, how to help with different types of skin issues, and more.

As a skincare company, this is information their target audience is looking for. And they’re providing it with graphic how-tos and related products.

Consider what your product is and how you can create educational and helpful tips surrounding that. This is how you’ll reach your audience, increase the number of saves your pins get, and ultimately sell more products on Pinterest.

3. Create seasonally relevant pins

Staying relevant on Pinterest is all about keeping up with the latest trends, and that includes seasonally relevant content.

When the holidays are coming up, you want to create gift guides and holiday-specific products/content. When it’s warmer outside, share content related to summer activities.

Here’s a great example from superfood blend retailer Golde. Their Pinterest is filled with recipes that can be created with their products. But during the winter months, they switched to sharing popular seasonal recipes, made with peppermint, cocoa, or apple cinnamon.

Pay attention to seasonal trends so you can incorporate them into your content. Oftentimes, even just changing up your color scheme to match the seasons can be enough to make an impact.

4. Invite brands and influencers to collaborate on your boards

One great feature that Pinterest offers is the ability to invite users to collaborate on your Pinterest boards. This can be useful for promoting brand collaborations and for working with influencers.

For example, you might do something like Ruggable has here, and create a board specific to a collaborative product collection. 

Both brands involved in the collaboration are added to the board, allowing the products to reach a wider audience and ensuring everyone involved can save relevant pins.

You can also create a user-generated content board and invite influencers that you work with to share their photos and other promotional imagery with that board. This is a great way to widen your reach on Pinterest and showcase even more use cases for your product.

5. Use high-quality product imagery

To really grab attention, increase saves, and generate more clicks and conversions, you need to invest in quality images. There are a couple of different ways to do this.

First, you can get inspiration from Smile Direct Club’s shop on Pinterest and upload your actual product images to your Pinterest catalog.

The photos are all against bright, white backgrounds, helping the branded purple products to pop off the page.

You can also take a more lifestyle approach just like this pin from Serena & Lily.

They’ve shared beautiful photographs that include their products in them. This is a great way to provide ideas to your audience about how they can use your product in their day-to-day, whether it’s a piece of home decor, clothing, furniture, fitness or healthy living equipment, etc.

6. Make it easy for shoppers to share your products on Pinterest

Your product pages should have social sharing links—and that includes Pinterest. This way, people who are interested in your products but aren’t quite ready to buy can easily save them to one of their Pinterest boards and refer back to them later.

But more than that, this provides the opportunity for any of their followers to see your product and save it to their own board or make a purchase.

Take a look at this product page by Greer Chicago. Underneath the product description, they’ve provided social sharing links (Pinterest included!) that allow shoppers to share products online.

7. Create informative pins relevant to your products

People scroll through Pinterest to find ideas and learn ways to use products they’re interested in, so create content that helps them do just that.

While lifestyle content is useful, creating infographics like the ones below can also be a great way to provide information on your products.

Take a look at this example from Ruggable. Creating a guide that helps potential customers know exactly what size rug will fit well in their bedroom is a great way to help them feel confident making a purchase.

Here’s another example from The Sill. It includes three top indoor plant picks and their basic care tips, again instilling confidence and knowledge in someone getting ready to buy.

Both pins lead to product pages, making it easy to immediately start shopping.

8. Use video to grab attention

Most pins are static graphics, but you can also upload video pins to the platform as well. Incorporating this type of pin into your posting schedule is a great way to stand out in a user’s feed and grab their attention.

This hyper-lapse video from Lovesac shows how a couple turns their living room from a chic seated area into a cozy lounge perfect for movie night.

Or, take a look at this video pin from Grommet. The center is a video while the border is a branded static graphic.

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Videos allow you to show off even more of your product than you can in a single image.

9. Show your product in action

Take stylized images that give Pinners an idea of how they can best use/wear your products in their own everyday lives.

This example from Chicwish shows an outfit made up of their products, while also linking to their Pinterest catalog. This way, shoppers can buy products they see right in the image, or find something similar that fits their tastes exactly.

Here’s another example from The Little Market. Styling kitchen storage solutions right inside a kitchen is a great way to show how useful the product can be.

The question that you should be thinking about while creating content on Pinterest is: how can you show off your products in a way that entices your target audience and makes them want to buy?

10. Create a catalog for shoppable pins

Want to really ramp up your Pinterest sales? Create a catalog that includes all of your products, categorize them, and lead shoppers directly to your website’s product pages.

Here’s an example of Walker Edison’s Pinterest shop. They’ve broken their products down into easy-to-navigate categories to make it easy for shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Create your own Pinterest catalog to help your followers find your products much more easily and increase your brand’s social sales.

5 useful Pinterest marketing tools

To get the most out of your Pinterest marketing strategy, it’s important to engage relevant helpful tools. These five tools can help you track performance, create a consistent posting schedule, reach a bigger audience, and design engaging pins.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest Analytics is a built-in insights tool that helps you keep an eye on your pins’ performance. 

Find information about your pin impressions, engagements, and reach over your specified date range. 

Track conversions, video insights, and more. With Pinterest Analytics, you can choose to track performance across all pins as well as pins that are only from your website.

Pinterest Trends

If you’re looking for ideas of what to share on Pinterest, checking out Pinterest Trends (another free, built-in tool) is a great way to learn what people are searching for right now.

Especially when trying to decide what holiday or seasonal content to share, checking out Pinterest Trends can be a big help.

As you plan your Pinterest content, check out recent trends to discover new ideas and to see if your business has anything relevant to publish. If so, that’s a great way to increase your reach and potentially generate more sales.

Canva

Canva is a DIY design tool with templates that can help you to design beautiful, engaging, and high-performing Pinterest graphics.

You can start from scratch or choose from their library of templates. Add in your brand colors and fonts to make sure your content is recognizable on the platform.

Canva’s Pinterest templates are an optimal 1000x1500px and are designed to help your business stand out. Utilize their stock photos and other design assets or upload your own to grab your audience’s attention.

Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing app that helps you to schedule and plan out your Pinterest content ahead of time. This makes it much more manageable to post content regularly so your audience is consistently getting new content.

Tailwind’s tool also provides the ability to create your own designs for your Pinterest graphics, making it a one-stop shop for Pinterest management. Furthermore, you can optimize your posts and find the best hashtags to increase your reach.

PinGroupie

PinGroupie is a tool that helps brands find group boards to join on Pinterest. Group boards help you reach a wider audience with your content and products, but it’s important to find ones that are relevant to your brand and the pins you create.

PinGroupie also helps you pinpoint top Pinterest influencers, top pins, and top keywords that are being searched for, helping you be more strategic and reach a wider audience.

Get started with Pinterest for your ecommerce business

Pinterest is an essential social media platform to use for ecommerce marketing. Start being more strategic in the content you post and how you promote your products to see an increase in impressions, reach, engagement, and sales.

With these tips and tools, you should be able to revamp your ecommerce social media strategy in order to successfully incorporate Pinterest and start ramping up your sales.

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