5 unexpected ways to promote your brand on Pinterest

Pinterest is an amazing platform for e-commerce stores to promote themselves and boost conversions.

With almost 250 million monthly users, Pinterest offers immense traffic and an opportunity to significantly grow your audience.
As any social media platform, Pinterest demands constant content posting and interaction with other users. Any brand that is present on Pinterest is aware of how to craft attractive Pins and where to look for the followers. But there is more to Pinterest that you may think.
Read below about 5 unexpected and efficient ways to promote and grow your e-commerce brand on Pinterest.

Post to Group Boards

If you search Pinterest and set “Boards” as a filter, you will see some of the Boards having circles with different photos in the lower left corner.
This circle indicates that you see a Group Board – meaning, a Board with multiple contributors and hundreds of followers. And you can become a contributor as well! This way, your content will be seen by all the followers of the Board and many of them may eventually become your customers.
To become a contributor, reach out to the Board owner and ask how you can join. Be polite and try writing an email instead of sending a DM. Owners probably get hundreds of messages on a daily basis and you don’t want to get lost in them. Emails tend to work the best and show that you are really interested in becoming a dedicated contributor.
To find such Boards, use PinGroupie. The tool lets you search the Boards on a specific topic and see the number of followers, contributors, repins.

Use special tools for automated Pinning

It is recommended to Pin at least 10 times a day (preferably about 30) so your content gets noticed and drives people to your profile.
But you, as an e-commerce store owner or marketer, may not have extra time to do all the pinning or think about the kind of content to post. In this case, use scheduling tools like Viraltag to schedule your Pins and stop worrying about the content consistency.
If you are ready to use something more complex, try Socinator. This is a comprehensive marketing automation platform for Pinterest which provides you with a bunch of useful features (auto-follow, the search of targeted users, auto-comment) and advanced analytics.

Collaborate with influencers

Influencer marketing is on the rise. Unlike big celebrities, influencers usually have a rather modest number of followers – but all of them are extremely responsive and engage with the influencer on a regular basis.
An influencer is a person who is good in something specific or has specific interests. Examples would be traveling bloggers, dancers, even book lovers. Such people share their opinion and views with the followers via a social media platform and usually deliver incredibly profitable results for the brands in case of collaboration.
You can find relevant influencers with the help of such tools as Buzzsumo or Peg. These services allow searching the influencers by specific category and number of followers and see which influencer would be the best fit for your brand.

Add Pinterest buttons to your store

This one may seem obvious, yet, many e-commerce store owners forget about the importance of adding Pinterest buttons to the site.
Pinterest offers an array of free widgets to use on your site. They include such buttons, as “Save”, “Follow”, embed Pins or Boards in your store. All of these buttons perform one very important function: they enable users to interact with your Pinterest profile without leaving the website.
Depending on your goal, see which buttons will work the best for you and get them here.

Use Rich Pins

A Pin is your average image with a short description and hashtags that help users find your content. But if you want to engage the users and raise your conversions, Rich Pins are what you need.
A Rich Pin may come in the following forms: product, recipe, article, app. Such a Pin usually has a rich description and comes in the format that is corresponding to the pin type. Say, if you want to post an article, it will have a bold headline and all the information that may be requested by the user. A recipe, in its turn, will feature the information about the ingredients and serving size.
Rich Pins help you reveal all the benefits your product can bring to the user and help make the purchasing decision.

Bonus tip: the importance of content

Pinterest is based on appealing images that inspire users and help them discover new products and brands. Thus, your primary goal is coming up with the overall design of your gallery.
Choose a color palette that would correspond to your brand. Remember that warm-colored images work better than cold-colored ones so try adjusting your Pins to this rule. As well, Pinterest favors the images that fall under the 2:3 dimension so consider it as well.
While polishing the look of your Pinterest profile, don’t forget about your overall social marketing strategy: it is essential to keep the content consistent across channels. You can read more about social marketing for e-commerce here.
Overall, the secret of success on Pinterest lies in the visual appearance of your profile and how well it reflects your brand idea and the message to the users. Promote a lifestyle that is associated with your brand and don’t hesitate to support your imagery with content from other pinners – after all, Pinterest is all about community and you are about to become part of it.