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The Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide – Why Instagram Is Overrated For Your Ecom Business
DISCLAIMER: Really long educational content for people trying to get x10 more traffic and sales from a platform better than Instagram
Yes you read that right, Instagram is a great visual platform but let’s be real how many sales can you generate monthly from an account with less than 10k followers?
A few sales? Well, let’s talk about link clicks, how many do you generate to your store using IG?
50? 100?
Like I said Instagram is a great visual platform for sales but not for your ecommerce business because you need to generate as many High Quality clicks as you can and this is difficult as you can only use one click-able link on IG.
Telling people “Click the link in bio for xyz” is a good strategy, but we both know you’re losing a lot of potential buyers because people want fewer clicks to purchase.
So what’s the option? Here’s the option and how to do it properly:
? Pinterest ?
Yes, that’s the solution, I used to be sceptical and ask “what does this social platform do” until I decided to get on the platform, fail, fail, fail, learn, and find an easy to replicate formula that can provide you at least 600 high quality link clicks
BUT before we go into that, what is Pinterest?
Is Pinterest a social media platform? No!
Then what is Pinterest? Well, Pinterest is the world’s first social search engine because it’s like a Google search for ideas which are called “pins”, and this means the traffic you’ll be getting from Pinterest is 100% search traffic, crazy huh? ?
? Common Terms On Pinterest
✏ Pin
A pin is a “post” that is saved to a board, pins are the most important part of your Pinterest content strategy as a well-designed pin will get you thousands of impressions while a poorly designed one will just be “meh”
This isn’t IG, regular “pretty pics” won’t get you link clicks, it’s value over pretty here.
✏ Board
A board is a category where you save or repin pins, a board is similar to a blog category but on Pinterest you’ll be posting(pining) photos (ideas) instead of 500-word articles
You can have a fashion account, and create different boards for different things such as “Jewellery”, “Dresses”, “Sunglasses” etc
You see it’s better than IG because it gives your followers and non followers the chance to sort your posts and find what they want quickly?
✏ Repin
A Repin is like a share, when your “Repin” someone’s “pin” to your “board” your followers will see this “repin/share” as your own pin, and they can also “repin” it.
It’s like you share a post on Facebook and your friends share that shared post, the shared post now has a “viral” effect.
✏ Monthly viewers
People say this is a “Fluke” stat but it’s actually the most important statistic on Pinterest because it helps you understand the momentum your account has gained in a month.
On Instagram this statistic is called “profile visits”, but it’s slightly different on Pinterest because followers are not important on Pinterest and the “monthly viewers” statistic is the number of unique users that have seen your pins or repins.
✏ Impressions
This is the number of “TIMES” your pins or repins have been seen on Pinterest
Uhmm what else? I think these are the important terms, OK let’s go to setting up your Pinterest account to drive traffic to your store.
? Setting Up Your Pinterest Account ?
? Get a pen and paper or use a notepad
? Download the Pinterest app
? Login to Pinterest with your Gmail account (don’t worry we won’t use this account, it will only be our research account)
? Keyword Research Time
Type in the name of your product in the search bar, you’ll get a few suggestions by Pinterest (the type of suggestion you get when trying to search a video on YouTube)
It is important to note these suggestions as they’re what others are searching for.
Let’s assume I’ve got a home improvement store and I sell indoor water fountains, when I input “indoor water fountain” into the search bar, Pinterest may suggest.
“indoor water fountains ideas”
“Indoor water fountains small”
and “indoor water fountains for kids”
Now, copy the top 3 suggestions
REMEMBER: Copy the suggestions that appear before you hit the search button
Repeat this step for all your products/product categories until you have 7 – 9 keywords, save these “suggestions into your notepad”
⚗ Time to Create your account
? Go to business(dot)Pinterest(dot)com
Replace (dot) with.
? Create a business account
? Input your business info
? When asked “do you want to advertise?” click I’m not sure
? Add your business logo
? Add business link and verify
? Now go to edit and in account name add one of those suggestions you copied to your account name
Let’s assume my indoor fountain business name is Fontana, I’ll name my Pinterest account :
Fontana | Indoor water fountain ideas
BUT why are we doing this? Remember I told you Pinterest is a search engine, so we’re adding keywords to our brand name, so we can appear on Pinterest search results ⌨
? Now go to your description and write a good description that includes one or two keywords you saved during your Pinterest research
Mine for this example is:
The Best Indoor fountain ideas and indoor fountain for kids design.
REMEMBER: Don’t sell with your description
? Let’s Create some boards
? Tap on the ➕ icon in the app and click on create board
? Now create board titles with the “keywords” we copied during our research
? Use one keyword as a title for each board until you create 7 – 8 boards
? Creating Attention Grabbing Content
? Go to Canva(dot)com or hire a Designer on Fiverr (will cost you a lot tho)
I’ve got a team ready to help you with design if you wouldn’t mind expert help, 2 store owners only!
? Use the default Pinterest dimension on Canva
? Place your product in the frame
? Write a good offer caption
? add a good call to action at the bottom of the photo, a simple “click now to get 30%” off will do wonders to increase your link clicks
? Hire a writer and post how to content on your Shopify blog, then create graphics to post on Pinterest (for ecom)
REMEMBER: Creating high quality pins is the best investment you can make, Canva can do the job or hire a designer on 5ver.
? Momentum Building ?
I’ve told you how to create good pins that’ll help you get a lot of clicks, but don’t start pining your own content just yet
BUT why?
Pinterest rewards engagement with more engagement and this means it’s easier for your own content to go viral when you interact with other people’s content through repining, commenting, and following others.
This process is called momentum building, can surfers surf without waves? Nah! Bigger waves = Better surfing (I don’t surf but this example just came to me, hope it applies ???)
So the steps to moment building include:
? Repin the pins of others to your boards, this can be done by tapping on your board, clicking more ideas, and adding similar pins to your boards
? Repeat this step for all your boards
? It’s a numbers game so the more pins you add to a board daily determines how fast you build momentum
? I advise 60 – 80 repins to each board daily, but don’t Repin 60 or 80 pins at once, you can do 30 in the morning and 40 in your free time.
? Leave relevant comments on posts (optional)
? Follow others
The number of followers you have doesn’t matter, any well-designed and ranked pin will perform once you’ve got momentum
? Do the momentum building tactics for 15 – 20 days before you begin to pin your own designed content
? Pining Your Own Content ?
Now here’s the sweet part, doing this right will get you results and doing this wrong won’t have a positive effect
? Do the necessary keyword research, and add a few keywords to your pin title and description
? Write title descriptions longer than 22 words
? Do not engage in keyword stuffing
? Don’t use sales terms in your titles
It’s that easy
REMEMBER: Pay attention to keyword research and pin 3x daily for best results
EXTRA TACTICS
? Will Group Boards Help You?
Group boards are like Facebook groups with “board contributors” and these contributors can post to these groups.
It’s easy to make posts go viral easily once you use group boards
? Pinterest Influencers
Working with Pinterest influencers gives you the chance to skip the part of setting up your own account, and building momentum.
Working with Pinterest influencers is highly profitable, and they’re really humble.
? Hiring a Pinterest VA, Yes or No?
Pinterest VA’s help you create, schedule, and engage with pins, it’s important to hire one of you need time to focus on other parts of your business.
THE ONLY FLAW OF PINTEREST
Yes its a great platform, almost the best but they need to work on their spam filters as a lot of good and non spammy accounts get easily suspended due to error from their bots
If you get your account suspended you may get it back after a few weeks and a lot of emails crying and trying to “present your case”
Yessssss, we finally got to the end!
I’ll update this post regularly with the latest Pinterest growth hacks, feel free to ask any questions below.
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9 Replies
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How would you tailor this for a service-based business that doesn’t have easily itemized/pictoral content to pin?
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Would pinterest work if you want to generate interest for a newsletter/templates/ebooks etc.
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how would pinterest work for furniture b2b
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I’ve been trying out Pinterest. Very useful info!
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Exactly what I was looking for, truly an awesome post! I’m starting a side hustle and pinterest is going to be my main marketing channel, so this guide came to me right when I needed it.
Thanks op!
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thanks tor this i been looking for something like this!
should i try and create an account for each of my product niches? or just add keywords for both to my account description.
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Thank you for this. Pinterest is an undervalued platform for marketing. It’s great because you give value upfront and viewers get to decide if they want to keep following your content….
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How about creative courses for people? Like card making for example ..
This is a very helpful post, thank you for taking the time to post it!? -
I’ll try with this, thanks!
