How Pinterest Helps Small Businesses Skyrocket Their Traffic and Revenue

Pinterest is a visual social media platform that has become popular for business owners and marketers who want to share images and videos, in the form of “pins”, with their audience.

While its growth has been slower than other channels, Pinterest recently reported a 25% increase in monthly active users. And according to Statista, it now has over 265 million users.

Image Source: Statista

You can market your products and services for free on Pinterest or use paid ads to reach more pinners. But you need to do more than create an account and publish some pins to get results. You need an comprehensive Pinterest marketing strategy.

In this post, I’m sharing seven reasons to market your business on Pinterest.

1. Pinners are ready to shop

Users on Facebook don’t like to see posts from businesses in their feed. They’re seen as interruptions that stop them from seeing posts from their friends and family.  

Pinners want to see content from businesses. They are actively looking for ideas of things they can do, make or buy. This gives businesses an opportunity to shorten the buying cycle and convert fans into subscribers and customers.

Image Source: NY Times

2. Pinterest drives qualified traffic

Traffic is the lifeline of every online business. There’s no point in having a website if no one visits it.

And while other social platforms can bring traffic to your website, many bloggers and businesses credit Pinterest as their #1 social media traffic source.

One blogger even got over 14,000 subscribers and a million page views from Pinterest.  

The reason that Pinterest can drive so much traffic is that it’s a search engine. With over 2 billion searches every month, there’s a good chance people will find your pins.

Create beautiful graphics, add the right keywords to pins, and link them to blog posts or sales pages.

3. Product pins make it easy to sell products

Rich pins provide more detail about your pin. With product rich pins you can display product prices, availability and descriptions on pins from your website.

In the feed, product pins include a shopping icon under the image and next to the seller name.

When someone clicks to the expanded view, they can see the details about your product and where to buy.

Product pins are great because pinners are shoppers. Whether they’re looking for a specific product or just searching for ideas, Pinterest activity often leads to a sale.

Consider this:

• 76% of Pinners save items to purchase later
• 55% of people use Pinterest to shop and buy

4. Promoted pins can kickstart your engagement

You can drive a lot of traffic with organic pins. But there are times when you’ll want to give pins a quick boost to trigger more repins.

That’s where promoted pins come in.

Promoted pins are similar to Facebook ads. You can target audiences based on keywords, interests and activity. You can even set up retargeting campaigns with custom audiences based on:

• Website visitors
• Email subscribers
• Pinterest engagement
• Actalike audiences (similar to Facebook lookalike audiences)

Pinterest shows pins with a lot of repins high in the feed. When you promote new pins, you can expect to see more “free” clicks and repins as a by-product.

5. Pinterest activity can bring indirect traffic

Links from any social channel are “no-follow”. All this means is that they won’t improve your rankings on Google.

Still, Google looks to social channels to decide if a site is popular. Links from Pinterest are like a vote that people like your website. And don’t forget about image searches. Pins show up there too.

You’ll likely get indirect traffic from pinners who find your website and link back to it in their content. The more pins you share, the more links you can get indirectly.

6. Pinterest encourages collaboration

Boards are where it’s at on Pinterest.

Even though group boards don’t pack the punch they used too, they’re still a great way to drive traffic without having a huge following.

The idea behind group boards is to create a space where multiple contributors share their content. They tend to grow fast because they have a lot of pins.

When you join group boards, everyone who follows the boards can see your pins. This is huge! You don’t have to spend months building a following to drive traffic.

You can spot group boards by the circle in the bottom left of the boards:

7. Pinterest is great for market research

Pinterest keeps going back and forth on repin counts. Sometimes they decide to show them in the feed. Other times they take them down.

It hurts when they’re down. Repin counts matter.

Half the battle of running a business is knowing what your customers want so you can build it for them. As a content creator and marketer, anything that helps you tap into that quickly is a game-changer.

Seeing pins in your feed with a high number of repins is like having a personal research assistant handing your audience to you on a platter. Don’t waste it!

Use it to drive your content strategy. Create posts, pins and products around the topics they love most. And watch your traffic and business skyrocket.

Wrapping it Up

Pinterest is a goldmine for businesses who understand how to use it. You can drive an incredible amount of traffic without having to be “social” like Facebook or Instagram.

When you’re just starting out, I recommend following other pinners in your niche. See how they use Pinterest for their business and model your strategy after that. If you follow this guide, you’ll be on your way to more page views in no time.

Just remember these tips:

• Be strategic about what you share
• Create beautiful pins
• Optimize them for search
• Pin frequently and consistently
• Find your best pins and share more like them
• Rinse and repeat 🙂

 

What are your thoughts? Any ideas you want to share? Let me know in the comments!