Gift Shop Plus Spring 2023

The power of Pinterest: A retailer’s guide to success (Part 2) By Crystal Vilkaitis

Pinterest is an undeniably powerful tool for retailers to grow their businesses. In The Power of Pinterest: A Retailer’s Guide to Success (Part 1), you learned why store owners should care about Pinterest and the types of content that perform best on this platform. In Part 2, let’s dive into the best ways to leverage pins to find your perfect customers to sell to.

HOW TO CREATE GREAT PINS

First and foremost, you should know that the best pins are timely and relevant to your followers’ interests. Using the Pinterest Trends tool allows you to see popular trends for a specific keyword or search term, what types of pins are getting the most engagement, and information about the demographic searching for each trend.

What’s more is Pinterest Trends’ newly expanded features help advertisers get deeper insights into Pinner behaviors to inform campaign planning. So not only will you be in-the-know on what trends your audience loves, trends by demographics and seasonal trends, but the new API for Conversions provides a more comprehensive view of campaign performance to measure the actions those audiences take on an advertiser’s site. Learn more about how this tool helps retailers at trends.pinterest.com.

Knowing the latest Pinterest trends is also essential for generating traffic to your site. It’s important to find out what topics are trending right now and be able to offer up content quickly. For the past two years, Pinterest released an annual trends report called “Pinterest Predicts” — a predictive look at what will be trending in the year to come across various industries based on people’s pinning and search activity. Check out the current trends at business.pinterest.com/pinterest-predicts.

Another important step in creating great pins is identifying influencers in your industry or niche who might be willing to help promote your products by pinning them on their boards. If they repin from your board onto their own, they’re essentially giving you a shoutout! Consider reaching out to these influential people with the intention of setting up an affiliate partnership agreement.

Pinterest Trends and partnerships to create a strategy for what and when you pin in order to make the most of your company’s presence on Pinterest.

MAKING THE MOST OF PROMOTED PINS

Promoted Pins are one of the most powerful tools available to retailers on Pinterest. Essentially, this is a tool that allows you to pay for your pins shown in different places across the site, such as on a user’s home feed or when they search for something specific.

To get started with Promoted Pins, head over to their dashboard and set up an account. Then, click on Create Campaign (found under Ads) and complete some basic information about your store. You’ll be able to choose what types of things interest people who visit your boards and upload some images from those boards so potential customers know what to expect if they click through.

IMPLEMENTING IDEA PINS

Almost every social media platform has rolled out some version of Short Form Video, which is essentially a full-screen video that’s 90 seconds or shorter. An Idea Pin on Pinterest can be compared to Stories on Instagram. It allows retailers to upload up to 20 photos/videos and use them as individual slides or combine them into one longer video.

Idea Pins can grab and retain attention by telling a story about a product or service. The viewer can click through the multi-slide post versus scrolling down their Pinterest page of curated posts. Consider sharing a product video in an Idea Pin, then using several slides to show up-close detail and product information such as quality, material, size/fit, availability and price.

Like the ever-changing features on so many social media platforms, Pinterest is integrating Idea Pins with AR (Augmented Reality) features so customers can “try on” items. Continue to expect Pinterest to evolve its platform as it creates more features and tools to help retailers reach, connect with and sell to its users.