Are you seeing your competitors doing great on Pinterest? Do you also want to drive traffic
and sales from this platform to your eCommerce site?
But from what I see all over the place is that eCommerce site owners really struggle
with understanding how to approach Pinterest. They make a ton of mistakes and often miss
a lot of opportunities because they are trying to apply the same strategies they have used
on other platforms. In this video, I will show you how your marketing
on Pinterest should be different and will cover the most typical mistakes eCommerce
sites make on Pitnerest, that can cost them wasted time and effort, lost traffic, and
sales.
Hi! I’m Anastasia, I’m a Pinterest marketing expert and you can find me at anastasiablogger.com.
On this channel, I share my Thursday Pinterest tips, so if that’s what you want to learn
about, Subscribe and click the bell button to get notified when my new tutorials go live.
So if you have an eCommerce site and you don’t see how Pinterest could work for you, you
should look around better – a lot of shops in your niche might be already on Pinterest.
And you could probably miss a huge potential because the majority of Pinterest users are
in the United States, so it’s an audience with a purchasing power above the global average,
and 83% of weekly active Pinterest users said they made a purchase based on content they
saw from brands on Pinterest. That’s right I said 83% (!) of the weekly active users.
Meaning they are using Pinterest platform at least once a week.
And I know for sure there will be at least one comment below the video asking where I’ve
got these stats – as long as I can’t give you a long link right here in the video, I
will give you the link to the source of this statistics in the blog post that I published
on my site to compliment this video with a written text for those of you who like to
read. You’ll find a link to my post in the description below the video.
I promised you to show the biggest mistakes eCommerce sites make when they start their
Pinterest accounts.
And the first mistake is very common:
1. Applying Strategies from other platforms on Pinterest
Ok, I might sound like a boring school teacher now but if you are not ready to invest your
time and effort into Pinterest because for you, it’s yet another platform, and you
just hope to set a Pinterest account in half an hour, automate some stuff and forget about
it for the next 6 months, you better close this video now.
You are going to waste 15 minutes watching my tips and you will not implement anything
and will not get any results on Pinterest if you treat it like your last priority on
the list of other platforms to market your products.
So, most of the mistakes eCommerce sites make on Pinterest are just the consequence of this
very first mistake. People assume it should not take any time and effort but at the same
time they somehow expect extraordinary results. And when they don’t get them, they say oh
Pinterest is useless – it doesn’t work for our site or our niche. Well, most probably
YOU didn’t make it work. Which is good for your competitors, they will get more traffic
and sales from Pinterest.
Now, let’s move to more specific mistakes. The mistake #2 is
2. Using “BAD” Images that Don’t Work on Pinterest
I will explain what I mean by this. You can’t imagine how strong is the push back I receive
from eCommerce site owners when I say you have to create images optimized for Pinterest
– high-quality vertical images, and ideally they should have a text overlay in the top
part of the pin.
eCommerce site owners send me emails, ask me questions on Youtube, on Facebook, even
some students who already enrolled into my paid Pinterest course, are still doubting
they should add the text overlay and they should make vertical images.
Well, I get it. It’s so much easier to just set some kind of semi-automatic image posting
of product photos from your eCommerce site. But easy doesn’t mean you’ll get great
results. A lot of times, the product images on eCommerce
sites look like this:
http://prntscr.com/ru0egu
You can see here a lot of the images in the search results are horizontal, small pictures
linked to product pages on eCommerce stores. People look at these pins and know for sure
if they click they’ll land on a sales page. When you scroll down this page, which pins
catch your attention? These small ones that look all like one another? Or maybe these
vertical pins with text overlay that by the way showed up in the top search
results.
In most of the cases, these “bad” pins are even placed on a white background and
users can’t see how this particular product could fit into their life. For a sofa, it’s
best to place it in a interior of a living room I guess. For some clothes, it’s best
to show them in a lifestyle photo or on a model rather than just a specific shirt on
a white background.
I’m almost sure that most of these small images ended up on Pinterest because the site
owners set up Pinterest catalog feature that is automatically posting their product pins
from the site the platform.
It’s not so bad to have this set up given this functionality is available on Pinterest
but don’t expect amazing results when you are automating your Pinterest marketing to
a point when you don’t even create or upload any pins – you just send whatever images
you have on your site automatically.
So this account has the catalog set up but they are still creating vertical images as
well.
By the way I get a lot of questions about how to set up a Shop tab for an eCommerce
store.
I’m not planning to publish this tutorial because it’s too technical and most of the
shop owners do this with their web developers. Also the exact implementation often depends
on the eCommerce platform you use.
You can start from this page
And you will see that you have to add a Data source from your site.
Moreover, this feature doesn’t seem to be available in all the countries yet.
https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/data-source-ingestion
If you click on Learn more, you’ll see that currently
Only available in these 6 English-speaking countries and is being tested in a few European
languages. Anyway a
data source is a file that contains a list of your products and their corresponding attributes,
may also be called a product catalog or product feed.
https://help.pinterest.com/en/business/article/before-you-get-started-with-catalogs#section-9441 If you dig deeper through this page, you’ll
find here what are the supported file formats and which are the required product fields.
As you can see, for every eCommerce platform or store the implementation might look different
so making a generic tutorial on this topic doesn’t make any sense. And anyway most
of the website owners will not be able to implement this without the assistance of
their web-developers.
Ok, now moving to the next big mistake #4
4. Using Images without any Text Overlay
This is part of the image design but I though it would be really worth mentioning as a separate
point. Because I’ve see shops that invested some extra time into creating vertical lifestyle
images for Pinterest as opposed to small horizontal product photos on a white background, which
is already a big step forward. But then they don’t add any text overlay to their pins.
What happens with pins that don’t have any text overlay – usually they might even get
a decent amount of saves because people like the image or the idea, but these images generate
less traffic to your site. Users have no reason to click-through if you don’t give them
any reason in your text overlay.
In my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course I have a module specifically for eCommerce
sites, and there I show examples of text overlay that will help you generate more clicks your
pins. The idea behind adding a text overlay is showing the user what they should expect
on your site when they click, and also giving them a call to action.
In this module, I also show you other ways how you could get more traffic form Pinterest,
and how to solve the problem of having a limited number of product pages. It’s something
eCommerce sites are often worried about. They keep asking but how can I consistently pin
so many times a day if I only have 25 or 50 products on my site.
Well, there are several solutions for you guys, if you want to learn more, I’ll give
you a link to my course in the top right corner and in the description below this video.
5. Ignoring the Power of Pinterest SEO
I’ve seen a lot of eCommerce sites on Pinterest that have no more than 10-15 boards. So they
have very broad board titles and nothing specific.
So they might have boards with titles “Home décor”, “Interior Desing Ideas” but
no boards that help some of their specific product categories rank on Pinterest.
For example, they could have boards that define different types of products:
“Lighting for Living Room” or something even more specific like “L-Shape
Couch Ideas”
They could also create boards based on the styles. In case of the home décor niche,
we could be looking at “minimalist sofa”
“Luxury interior décor” or “Mid-Century Décor”
It take more time and work to create boards with more specific keywords in the titles
and descriptions, and also to save relevant pins to them. But that’s how you leverage
Pinterest SEO and rank your pins for many different keywords and not trying to compete
just for a few generic keywords that define your niche.
And another mistake very typical for eCommerce stores which can potentially cost them a lot
of traffic from Pinterest. Mistake #6 is
6. Lots Pins with Broken Links
It’s not common for other types of websites to have so many error pages, but with eCommerce
sites this happens over and over again. They have a collection of products, then they remove
some products, others are out of stock or out of production. But your pins on Pinterest
are still linked to those broken pages.
Pinterest is very smart at identifying these problems – I’ve seen it many times when
Pinterest accounts suddenly face a huge drop in traffic and impressions on Pinterest. This
often happens when your Pinterest account has a lot of pins linked to broken pages.
Pinterest doesn’t want to show pins that go to error pages and get frustrated users,
so they reduce distribution of the pins from your account, basically your account gets
a mild penalty. It’s not suspended or blocked, but usually you can see a significant drop
in your account’s performance very fast.
To avoid this, as an eCommerce seller you need to be pro-active and if you know that
some product is gone, don’t leave that page empty. At least redirect it to your home page,
or to a category page that shows similar products so that Pinterest users when they land on
your site, don’t feel completely lost, or deceived by your pin.
This video is getting too long. If you want to move your Pinterest strategy to the next
level, I’ll be happy to help you inside my course program or you could also get a
1:1 consultation with me – it’s when I will go through your Pinterest account, will
analyze your niche and your website, and will tell you specifically what you can improve
to get more traffic and sales from Pinterest.
If you found this video useful, give me a Thumb-up, Subscribe and click on the Bell
button. I will sign off now but you can watch my other videos that are perfectly complimentary
to what I shared with you today. You can click here and there. I’ll see you in the next
videos!