Did you know that 84% of weekly Pinners come to Pinterest before deciding what to buy next (source: Gfk, Path to Purchase study, Nov. 2018) & 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest?
Pinterest Beats Facebook and Instagram in This Key Metric
This new data speaks for itself. According to Cowen & Co. recently found that Pinterest is the leader among social media companies when it comes to U.S. product searches and shopping beating Facebook and Instagram. That’s pretty impressive since it reaches a smaller audience than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, with 250 million monthly active users.
I’m thinking why would Restoration Hardware not give a crap about Pinterest? I’m absolutely baffled because clearly people want their stuff. Look at the screenshot below. You’ll notice that so many Pinners have created boards around “Restoration Hardware”. That should give any brand or business an indication that they could be making more sales if they leveraged Pinterest and learn how to sell on Pinterest.
Restoration Hardware is just one of many brands that are completely ignoring Pinterest. I guess that’s great news for their competition!
Pinterest Management Services Reveals Why All Home Decor and Fashion Verticals Must Leverage Pinterest Marketing
Fortunately, for those of you who are in the home decor and fashion verticals you are going to get a bigger boost from Pinterest because so many of your competitors are not on Pinterest. You see, Pinterest’s goal is to make it easy for people to shop for anything that Pinners see while they’re looking for inspiration. With that in mind here are eight different ways people on Pinterest will find your products:
1) Shopping Search
Product Pins will have up-to-date pricing and stock information, with links that go directly to the checkout page on the retailer’s site where you can buy in a few clicks. Just look for the new shopping tag icon (as shown below), and you’ll know it’s in stock. Product Pins are replaced with the older Buyable Pin format.
According to Pinterest with more in-stock Product Pins, there are more products to search. Just search for a product like “midi skirt”, “men’s watches” or “outdoor furniture” and shopping results appear on the top of home feed. To start shopping, click “see more”.
2) Shop a brand
Shop a brand (pictured below) is a new dedicated section from retailers that is starting to roll out beneath Product Pins. You’ll soon be able to dive into a brand’s catalog by clicking “more from [brand]”.
3) Personalized shopping recommendations with “More Ideas”
Alongside style, home, beauty and DIY boards, Pinterest users will see in-stock ideas related to what they’ve been saving, to match their style.
When Pinners click “More ideas” Pinterest will show you some shopping ideas they have picked for you. Pinterest users can tap on the + sign (via mobile) so they can add the image to their board, or they can click the pin to go straight to the check-out on the retailer’s site.
4) Catalogs
What is Catalogs?
Catalogs allow businesses to easily upload their product catalog, organize their products, and allow Pinners to discover and shop their content.
With Catalogs, businesses will be able to mass generate product pins and organize their product pins into product groups. They can promote those product groups as Shopping Ads through Ads Manager.
Who can use Catalogs?
- Only business profiles with a claimed domain will be allowed to use Catalogs.
- In order to use Catalogs, you need to be able to provide a data source and your own hosting. Click here for Setup to review specific requirements for setting up your data source.
- At this time Catalogs is currently only available for retail and ecommerce businesses in US, CA, UK, IR, AU, and NZ.
What is a data source?
- A data source (also commonly known as a product catalog, product feed, or data feed) is a file consisting of a list of products and corresponding attributes that are structured in a specific way, to be processed for dynamic pin creation.
- A data source is required to use Pinterest Catalogs. See the data source specification page for details on the technical requirements to create a data source for Pinterest.
- Pinterest cannot support multiple data sources per profile at this time.
5) Visual search tool
One of the ways people discover products on Pinterest is with the visual search tool. In fact, Pinterest is seeing monthly visual search jump activity from 250 million in February 2017 to 600 million in February 2018. When using this feature on mobile devices just pinch to zoom in on any object you see within a Pin to automatically start a visual search and instantly discover similar Pins.
Pinterest users can also use the Pinterest browser extension to do visual searches with any image you see on Google Chrome or Firefox.
When you click on the visual search tool as shown on the top image (red arrow pointing) Pinterest will show you similar results as shown below.
6) Shop the Look
Another ambitious visual search tool Pinterest has produced is called Shop the Look and it is specifically designed for fashion and home decor pins.
Shop the Look pins have white dots hovering over the different parts of an outfit or a room. When people tap on the white dots Pinterest will show the exact or similar products featured in the pin. When they’re ready to buy, your customers can click through to your site to check out. As a Pinterest Management Services expert I love this because this is another way to make more sales on Pinterest.
If you have a Pinterest business profile, Shop the Look allows you to manually tag multiple products within the same lifestyle image. Here’s how to do that:
- Click the red + on the top right corner on your profile page and click “Create pin”.
- Upload an image and add a Pin title, description, destination URL.
- Click on the grey shopping tag.
- Click the product you want to tag.
- Add the product URL or affiliate link – keep in mind that we do not support URL shorteners.
- Pick a product image.
- Repeat steps 4-6 for all products you want to tag in this Pin.
- Click “Done”.
- Choose a board to save your Shop the Look Pin to.
You can edit the placement of the white dots at any time by clicking in the pin close up. Edits should show within a few hours of editing the pin.
When you add a product URL via the add a Pin flow, you’ll create a Product Pin that lives on a protected board. Only you can view your protected boards, and they are not visible to other people on Pinterest. You can access your protected boards by scrolling to the bottom of your profile, past your secret boards.
7) The “Lens”
Pinterest rolled out its first visual search tool called “Lens” in 2015. It’s a real-time visual search tool embedded in the camera of the Pinterest App. It allows you to discover products and services anytime you point your Pinterest app & phone camera at something.
How Do I Use The Lens?
Did you ever spot something you loved but couldn’t find the words to describe it? Pinterest has solved that problem with the Lens. Well, all you need to do is open the Pinterest app on your mobile device and tap the camera icon in the search bar. Next, pinch to zoom or tap on a specific object to focus your camera on (as shown on the image above), tap the button to snap a picture and voila Pinterest will show you pages of images of those exact or similar objects (as shown on the right image above).
Top categories for Lens searches:
- Fashion
- Home decor
- Art
- Food
- Products
- Animals
- Outfits
- Beauty
- Vehicles
- Travel
Top trending Lens searches:
- Tattoos
- Nails
- Sunglasses
- Jeans
- Cats
- Wedding dress
- Plants
- Quilts
- Brownies
- Natural hair
As you can see there are several ways Pinners uses Pinterest to look for things they want to buy to help them with their own unique style and taste.
BONUS: ONE WORD: TAILWIND.
Oh man, Tailwind is definitely a game changer!
(And a total MUST in my opinion if you really want to grow your account … which means you’ll be growing your website traffic by butt loads as a direct result!)
This amazing tool saves me SO much time. I used to spend at least 30 minutes every single day on Pinterest, and now I only get on it ONCE A WEEK for 0 – 15 minutes.
It makes scheduling awesome content for your followers super fast and easy! 🙂
PIN THIS BLOG POST ON YOUR PINTEREST IF YOU FOUND IT HELPFUL. 🙂
Ummmm … do you know how much I’d appreciate that?
I’d really appreciate it. Like a lot.
To pin on Pinterest, simply hover over the image below and click on the little “P!”
Whew!!!!! How’s THAT for a lengthy Pinterest guide?! Are you still alive? Are you still breathing?
Good. I’m assuming you answered “yes.”
And if you didn’t … well … does that make me a murderer because I killed you with boredom?!?!
DOH!
Thanks for reading, yo. Have any of these tips worked for you? Are there any tips that I missed? DO share in the comments below!
To Your Success!
Martine
