Social media advertising options for ecommerce businesses continues to grow. The key to spending your social marketing dollars wisely is finding the channels that create the highest conversion rates. Industry experts agree the hot channel in the ecommerce social media space for 2016 is Pinterest.  These statistics make a strong case for your business presence on Pinterest:

 
• Pinterest is the second largest driver of traffic from social media sites
 
• Pins drive more revenue to ecommerce stores than any other social share
 
• Pinterest generates more referral traffic than YouTube, Google, LinkedIn and Reddit combined

Follow these simple steps to get noticed on Pinterest, reach new customers, boost traffic to your site and increase revenue.

Step 1: Set up a Pinterest Business Account

If you haven’t already, set up a Pinterest business account for your store. Once you create an account and confirm your ecommerce website, you’ll get access to analytics that show how your pins are performing across different platforms and which pins are driving the most clicks and impressions.  You can also track promoted pin performance and conversions. Check out this conversion tracking guide for help.

Step 2: Add Pin It Buttons to Your Ecommerce Site

Adding the Pin It button to products on your website is a great way to get discovered on Pinterest. When you consider the average pin gets 11 repins, attention will grow quickly. According to Pinterest, 3 months after Allrecipes.com added the Pin It button, 50,000 recipes from their website were pinned. Check out this guide from Pinterest for Business to get started.

Step 3: Optimize Pins for Search

More than 1 billion boards and 50 billion pins have been created on Pinterest. To make it easier for users to filter through it all and find what they’re looking for, Pinterest added a feature called “Guided Search”. While intended to help pinners, the feature is a great way to help potential buyers find your products.  

 
• Using the example above, rather than title a sweater from your store “Blue Cardigan”, use more descriptive and refined terms that a user would likely enter into the Pinterest guided search bar.
 
• To find out which words people are using when they search for something similar to your product, type related words in the search box and popular suggestions will auto-populate.
 
• Optimize your business name by adding descriptive keywords you want to be associated with to your business name. For example, adding “wedding dresses” to the end of the business name “Amy’s Special Events.”
 
• Make sure pinned images have descriptive names and alt tags

Step 4: Advertise on Pinterest

In the last several months, Pinterest has expanded options for buyable pins, pins that allow customers to make a purchase directly on Pinterest. The social network launched buying pins on iPhones and iPads in June and expanded to ecommerce platforms including Bigcommerce and Magento a few months ago.  Buy It buttons are meant to be the next logical step beyond product inspiration, allowing ecommerce merchants to convert users directly on the Pinterest website or mobile app. Store owners keep 100 percent of the sale as Pinterest receives revenue from advertising tools.  As we mentioned in a previous post, Pinterest users are a profitable audience to capture. Research shows 93% of pinners use the platform to plan purchases and 87% have bought something because of Pinterest.  

Step 5: Reach your Target Audience

Before decided to spend advertising dollars or marketing resources on Pinterest, make sure your target buyers match the typical Pinterest user. This infographic from Sprout Social highlights key demographics that should help you decide.  

 Pinterest is quickly gaining traction as a social media powerhouse for ecommerce businesses. Don’t leave the discovery of your product pins to chance, tap into these strategies to get your business noticed and turn pinners into buyers.