4 ways to grow your business with Pinterest

Pinterest is without any doubt one of the top social media platforms available to date. The site lets you bookmark images and links to pages. In Pinterest language, these bookmarked items are called ‘pins’. Hence, the name ‘Pinterest’ – where you pin interesting stuff!

The social media platform is becoming increasingly popular every day. Some experts predict that Pinterest will have users in access of 50 million by year 2016. Interesting enough, studies have found ‘pinners’ to be avid shoppers with 93% of them having had shopped online in past 6 months.

What does this mean for your business?

If you are not using the Pinterest for your business marketing, it is probably the right time to reconsider. Here are three handy tips on how Pinterest can help small businesses increase their sales.

1. Invite guest pinners

Not every business has a huge budget to spend on marketing. Luckily, this marketing tactic only requires some efforts and no financial outlay. Your loyal customers can be your biggest promoters on social media. Especially on Pinterest, you can incentivize your loyal customers to create Pinterest boards or probably provide guest pins on your existing boards.

For example, a woman’s fashion clothing store can set up a board for guests to create curated collections of purchased products. You can encourage more customers with loyalty points or percentage discounts for posting pins on guest boards.

This will not only help you win new customers but also convert some regulars into loyal customers.

2. Host a contest on Pinterest

Every human being loves idea of winning something, the satisfaction is always bigger than the value of things that are won. So, its fairly obvious that contest pins are very effective for small businesses. However, please keep in mind that Pinterest has strict and specific rules regarding pin-based contests. As long as you follow the guidelines, it’s all good e.g.: create a contest requiring users to follow your Pinterest page or probably offer to pin their favourite items in your store for a chance to win.

This method is very effective in gaining new followers. At the same time, you get to highlight your products beyond your in-store display.

3. Beat the iron while hot

You might have already heard about buyable pins on Pinterest. This is a relatively new feature that allows Pinterest users to click on a “Buy It” button to purchase an item rather than just pinning it to purchase later on.

It’s about being able to seize the moment and beat the iron while it’s hot which makes perfect sense. There is a lot of buzz about it and probably seen as one of the up and coming game changer features on social media.

4. Makes your pins count

This is more of a quality guideline. It is very important to ensure your pins link back to relevant, high-quality content featuring right pin image or video. Did I say it is very important? – Pins with seemingly irrelevant links are most likely to be demoted.

In conclusion, Pinterest can help you gain new customers, effectively market your brick-and-mortar store online, upsell products and more. However, please keep in mind that patience is the key. When you are marketing with Pinterest, there are no instant results and it can take a bit of time. Some studies show that it could take up to 3 months before your pins generate new site traffic. It is important to be patient and go for quality, not the quantity.