How Merchants Can Take Pinners from Plan to Purchase
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What every business owner, active on Pinterest, wants to know is “How do I move from seeing active Pinners to active Purchasers?” A solid marketing strategy is useless if your plan isn’t producing conversions for your business. In order to grow and thrive on Pinterest, you must uncover and resolve the hole in your marketing plan before moving forward.
What can you, as a merchant on Pinterest, do to maximize your efforts and see Pinners move from plan to purchase?
How To Advertise on Pinterest. What are Pinners Looking For?
Most Pinterest users come to Pinterest looking to be inspired. It’s not often that they know exactly what they are looking for. Most searches are unbranded, meaning Pinners are more likely hoping to discover something new rather than the same brands they’ve seen time and time again.
This opens the door for small businesses and entrepreneurs to market their products to a broader audience. According to Pinterest, “People use Pinterest to refine their taste. Looking for the right thing—even before they have the right words.”
Pinterest suggests a 4-step approach to creating a successful shopping marketing plan for their platform:
- Set Up Shop
- Build Brand Loyalty
- Scale Campaigns
- Measure Your Growth & Analytics
Ready to Create a Pinterest Shop? Here's What You Need to know.
Pinterest has rolled out a new feature allowing businesses to create a shop of up to 20 million products—directly on Pinterest. If you’re a Shopify user, you’re also able to connect your Pinterest and Shopify accounts. Once your catalog is uploaded, you can add relevant information such as pricing and product availability—simplifying your customer’s shopping experience.
When Pinners saves a product, it is automatically added to their Pinterest shopping list, giving them access to all of the products they love without having to hunt through different accounts to find what they’re looking for. This shopping list also allows Pinners to receive notifications about specific products, including when a drop in pricing occurs.
Become a Trustworthy Brand
People want to shop from people and brands they trust. One of the most important elements of every marketing strategy is to build credibility with your audience.
One way Pinterest assists you in doing this is by allowing you to become a part of the verified merchant program.
It is free to sign up for, but you are required to meet certain requirements, connect your product catalog, and set up Pinterest tag.
There are several benefits to becoming a verified merchant, including:
- A “verified” blue check badge
- More visibility via appearing in shopping experiences
Elevate Your Campaign Strategy
Actively learning more about all of the features available to you on the platform will allow you to improve your campaign strategy and reach more Pinners.
On Pinterest, you can create shopping ads and collection ads. These ads can be utilized to encourage users to take action when they’re looking for products similar to yours.
Two other valuable features to help you elevate your campaign strategy are:
- Automatic Solutions
- Dynamic Retargeting
Automatic solutions give you a hands-off approach to bidding. Just set up automatic bidding and a campaign budget and allow Pinterest to use information regarding your Pin activity to adjust as you go for even better results—without the hassle!
Dynamic retargeting is a great way to give a little nudge to Pinners that have shown interest in your products in the past. Bringing your product back to their feed may be all they needed to close the sale.
Track Your Successes
The opportunity for growth is there. According to Forbes, “Pinterest has increased 2.5-times its traffic to retail domains and merchant sites.”
As always, all merchants need to evaluate their analytics as they go, and Pinterest makes it easy! Having a solid marketing plan doesn’t mean there will never be any changes to your strategy. An effective marketing strategy will adjust and shift as Pinterest changes the way Pinners interact with the platform.
Support Where You Need It Most
We realize that keeping up with the trends of an ever-changing online platform can be anxiety-inducing. Busy business owners don’t always have the time to learn the newest fad on the internet. That’s why we do what we do! Our Mama Hen Media team of Pinterest marketing experts actively follows Pinterest updates to keep your account up to date and running smoothly.
Are you ready to outsource Pinterest marketing for your business? We’re ready to support you as you discover the opportunity awaiting you. Apply to work with us today!
