Craft Business Tips: How Pinterest Can Help Increase Your Sales
Pinterest is a great visual bookmarking tool which you’ll no doubt have heard of already. You may have whiled away quite a few hours before now browsing all those beautiful pins that can be found on there.
But as well as being an interesting place to check out when you’re looking for an amazing craft tutorial or gluten-free dinner recipe, Pinterest is also an incredibly valuable marketing tool for craft businesses. In fact, pretty much any business could benefit from developing a Pinterest strategy.
In this post, we’ll be exploring why you need Pinterest for your craft business and how to start using it to your advantage.
Why Pinterest is crucial for your craft business
If you have an online craft store e.g. Etsy or Artfire, you can utilize the power of Pinterest to bring more traffic to your store and in turn, increase your product sales.
How Pinterest works
Pinterest is a search engine, just like Google or Bing. There’s a search bar at the top of the site, where you can type in whatever it is that you’re looking for. When you perform a search, the results show up in the feed below – aka pins (images) of what you’ve just searched for.
You can follow other Pinterest users who post great pins that you like – and they can follow you. You’ll see pins from the people that you follow in your feed and vice versa.
When you see a pin you like, if you click on it, the pin will (in theory) lead to a website post or page where you’ll be able to find out more.
If you use Pinterest to pin images of your products, when people click on one of your product pins, they’ll be taken directly to the place where they can find out more – your store!
Your strategy for using Pinterest to help grow your business doesn’t need to be complicated. In a nutshell, you’ll want to carry out the following activity:
- Continually grow your following (people who like your pins and products).
- Promote your products.
- Get other people to promote your products on Pinterest for you.
Let’s break those activities down below…
How to grow your Pinterest following
Fill in your profile fully and then set up some boards of your own on various topics relating to your craft business.
For example if you run a jewelry-making business, set up a board for your own products and then set up some more for areas you’re interested in e.g. beading, silversmithing, beads, wirework and more. 20 boards is a good number to start with.
Then start following other people who pin the same kind of pins that you will. For craft businesses, that means anyone who pins images relating to your niche. Going back to the jewelry-making business example, look for people who pin images of jewelry.
You can follow a couple of hundred people per day before you hit the daily following limit on Pinterest. Some of those pinners will follow you back.
Then, start repinning content that you see on Pinterest and pin from other websites too. You’re more likely to get followers on Pinterest if you pin other people’s content as well as your own product pins from your store.
If you only pin your own content, your followers may get bored of seeing the same type of pins from you and could therefore unfollow you!
So, as a general rule of thumb, pin 80% of other people’s pins and 20% of your own. In terms of when to pin, do it regularly! Pin every day if you can, even if it’s for 10 minutes.
There are pin scheduling tools available on the internet (like BoardBooster and Tailwind) to help with spreading out your pins over time. With tools like these, you can pin in bulk on a weekend if you want to and then forget about it for a week or so.
How to use Pinterest to promote your products
We’ve briefly mentioned setting up a separate board on Pinterest to promote your products, but let’s explore this in more detail.
All of your boards, including your product board, should look really pretty with beautiful pins on them. Beautiful pins will get repinned more often on Pinterest.
So what is a beautiful pin? When it comes to Pinterest, a beautiful pin is an image that is vertical, not horizontal, eye-catching, bright and sharp. Close up images work well, with the focus slightly off-center.
Images with a text overlay can also work really well, but take care not to clutter up the image with added text. You can use PicMonkey or Canva to add text to your images for free, if you want to.
When it comes to your products, take photos according to the criteria above. Make sure that your online store contains at least one image that is vertical, eye-catching, bright and sharp.
This means that you will be able to pin great images of your products and other people will be able to do the same. Every time you create a new product, photograph it and add it as a pin to your Pinterest product board.
You can upload pins directly to your product board on Pinterest, making sure to add in the URL of where the product can be purchased online. Or add pins directly from your store online (install a pin it button for your browser).
As well as creating a product board on Pinterest, you could create a “Work in Progress” board. This means that you can share bunches of pins of your work in progress to generate interest. Just make sure that you include a URL back to your online store as before. Within your online store profile itself, ask people to follow you on Pinterest so they can keep up-to-date with your work.
How to get other people to promote your products
This is where the power of Pinterest can really come into play. The more followers you have and providing you’re pinning beautiful pins, other pinners will repin them. That means other people will repin – share – your product pins with their own followers!
Repins will expose your products to a wider audience than just your own followers. But wait, there’s another way for your products to reach even more people!
By joining group boards on Pinterest, you can continually pin your product pins (and “Work in Progress” pins) to those group boards. There’s no need to pin other people’s content to group boards, just your own.
If you do this, not only will you be getting your products in front of your own followers, you’ll also be getting them in front of an even larger audience.
You’ll be pinning your pins to group boards that could have thousands of followers – brand new audiences that may really love your products – and who may share them by repinning your pins to their own followers too!
Joining group boards is a must to expand your reach. There’s a way that you can search for group boards really easily – simply check out PinGroupie – a free tool where you can search based on Pinterest group board descriptions.
Once you’ve found group boards where you think you can promote your products, contact the board owner, and ask to join. When they add you as a contributor, you can start pinning.
Finally…
Having an effective Pinterest strategy in place could really take your craft business to another level. Start with the basics – setting up your profile fully, set up your own boards and create great images of your products so you can turn those images into beautiful pins.
Then, use Pinterest to your advantage. Follow other pinners who may like your products and pins and be proactive in searching for and joining group boards.
After a few months of Pinterest activity, check out your traffic and sales stats for your online store and enjoy seeing how many visitors and buyers have found you via Pinterest!
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