← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
How to get started on Pinterest if you're a new e-commerce brand
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If you're running an online store and you are not on Pinterest yet, or you've set up an account and it's just sitting there collecting dust, this episode is for you. I am Kate all host of this podcast here, the Simple Pin Podcast where we talk all strategies related to Pinterest marketing. Before we dive into the episode, I just want to call out Q1 of 2026. This may be your breakout quarter when it comes to to Pinterest. I want Pinterest to be an amazing growth engine for you. From building a high performing account from the ground up because maybe you're new, or to creating images that stop the scroll and get clicks and saves. We want to help support you with your organic or your Pinterest marketing. And right now some of our ads are delivering 5x, even 10x return on ad spend. So we have you covered when it comes to Pinterest expertise. If you are ready to hire that out to an agency with over 12 years of Pinterest experience, you can simply click the link below to book a call with our Discovery call team. It's just a call to get to know you. You get to know us and figure out if this is the next right step for you in 2026. Alrighty, let's dive back into the episode. Okay, so E commerce. E commerce is huge on Pinterest and there's a lot of store owners who are stepping back and going, I don't know. In fact, I just did a great podcast with Andrew of ecomfuel. I'll link that below in the podcast too as well. Because a lot of E commerce owners set Pinterest aside. They think this is not for me, it is just for recipes or weddings. My product won't sell on Pinterest and and I'm here to tell you that is not true. So I'm going to break down today what you need to know to get started as an E commerce brand on Pinterest. But I'm also going to wrap it up by addressing those who have already started. And maybe you're a little bit frustrated. You might be seeing growth but no sales. I'm going to talk about that at the end. Number one, why does Pinterest matter for E Commerce? Let's talk about why Pinterest should even be on your radar. Because here's the thing. Pinterest isn't social media. I know it might look like it, but it's actually a visual search engine and that kind of changes everything. When someone's scrolling Instagram or TikTok. They're usually killing time, but when somebody's on Pinterest, they're actively searching for solutions. They are planning a wedding, redecorating their living room, looking for the perfect birthday gift or maybe even something specific for travel that they're about to take. The intent is completely different. Pinterest users are in a discovery and planning mode, which means they're much closer to making a purchase decision. Here's some stats that might surprise you. Pinterest has almost 600 million monthly active users. That is an 11 to 15% jump year over year. And they're not just browsing, they are buying. In fact, one in three online shoppers on Pinterest earns over a hundred thousand dollars in annually. And those are the people with purchasing power. But here's my favorite. 80% of weekly users find inspiration for purchases on Pinterest. That's right, they are actively looking for things to buy. And 85 to 90% of usage happens on your phone. I would actually say it's probably even closer to 95%, which means when people are pinning, they're out and about. I have actually been in a location, taken a picture of something and to see if I could actually buy it because maybe it wasn't for sale or maybe it was decor. Also, video is doing amazing on Pinterest right now. I did a Google search the other day and actually a video came up right below the AI overview, right next to YouTube and Instagram. So we'll dive into video in just a minute. All right, number two, setting up your Pinterest business account. You want to have a Pinterest business account because this allows you to get all the amazing features on the platform. We're not using a personal account here. A business account is free. It gives you access to analytics, Pinterest ads, and most importantly, all the shopping features that you're going to need so people can buy directly from your pins. When you're setting up your storefront, think of it like. Or when you're setting up your profile, think of it like a storefront. Your profile name should include what you sell, not just your brand name. Think Luxe Home company and maybe match it with modern furniture and decor. This helps with search, also tells the person when they land on your profile exactly who you are and what you do. Your profile also needs a description to clearly explain more of that title or your brand name. So make sure you fill that out. And here's something people often miss claim your website. This verifies your domain and gives you Access to deeper analytics and it takes less than five minutes. And honestly, it makes a massive difference in how professional your profile looks. I did a review for some merchants at one point and some of them did not have a business account set up or they didn't even have a profile picture. They didn't have a profile name or description. I literally could not figure out what they sold. All right, step three. Create your very first boards or organize the boards that you do have. Think about boards like categories in your store. They need to be really thoughtfully organized. I actually just recorded a great episode all about boards. So I'm going to link that below in the description. So go listen to that next. You want to start with at least five or ten boards that really represent your main product categories and some themes. So if you sell skincare, you might have boards like nighttime skin care routines, Anti aging tips, Natural skin care, or skin care for acne prone skin. Notice I just didn't say our products. I've seen that a lot. That is boring. And nobody is searching for our products. Your board name should reflect what people are actually looking for. Each board needs a description packed with keywords. Do not keyword stuff. But naturally includes some terms that your customers are going to use. So here's a pro tip. Make your first three to five boards at the top of your profile really, really strong. Because people only scroll about three to four times when they hit a profile, a board or a section. So it's always better to have more fewer active engaged boards than a ton of empty ones with like one to two pins. I think we're on step four. Yes. Create pins that convert. Here's where the magic happens. People on Pinterest, when they are scrolling right, they're looking at pins. These are the images that you see on Pinterest. Your pin should be vertical. The ideal 2 to 3 ratio, it's 1000 by 1500. Horizontal images just don't perform best on Pinterest. Caveat, your product pins which are connect, which are selected when your catalog is connected. I'm going to talk about that in a second. So I know I've gone a few steps too far, but they are square. They're, you know, was that a one to one ratio? 200 by 200 minimum. So in that case, you really don't have a lot of control over product images. But when you can create your own images, we want them to be vertical. And that is simply because majority of the users on Pinterest. Pinterest engage with vertical type pins. So let's Talk about pin design. Your pin design of those pins should be clean, eye catching and kind of clearly show what you're offering. Text overlay is your friend here. We often call this the copy on the pin. So Pinterest is a search platform. They have visual search so they will read that text on the actual pin image. So don't put a lot of words. Maybe you could say summer 2025 sandal collection. You could have a roundup of the best leather wallets that you offer. Add some explanation to the copy on the pin. Now here's one caveat. The only time I would say for a product business not to add pin copy is if you are in the home decor space. Especially if you're in design, right? Because people want to see the whole image. You can certainly do roundups of quote unquote, the best of whatever or the top 10 throw pillows and yours are included. But when it comes to home design, we find that pin copy on the actual image actually performs with worse than those that don't have pin copy. So that's just one thing to note for those in the home design space. Let's talk about video. I mentioned it in the beginning, but I want to stress this video is huge right now. Nearly 1 billion videos are watched on Pinterest every day and consumption is up 200% year over year. Even better, users are 55% more likely to to buy after watching a product video on Pinterest compared to other platforms. Your videos don't need to be fancy. Think of quick product demos, styling tips, befores and afters, unboxing clips. You could even ask if a user has done an unboxing or they have sent you a testimonial. If you could use that on your pin images. Keep them short and make sure you add captions since most people watch without sound. And make sure that first two seconds grabs people's attention. When you're creating pins, whether static or video, your title and your description matter just as much as your visuals. The title needs to be clear and keyword rich. Your description should expand on that, explain all the benefits, maybe include a call to action. You don't have to say something like click here, but you can say grab this great travel tech organizer for your next vacation. And here's something crucial. Every pin, every pin should link back to a specific product page or blog post on your website. Do not send everybody to your homepage. Match the pin with the most relevant landing page. I cannot tell you how many products I find on Pinterest that don't do not have a link. And then when I use the visual search tool because I'm trying to match that image, I find a bunch more images that don't have a link because everybody keeps saving. That's the beautiful part about Pinterest is that somebody found in my case it was a shirt, this shirt that was so amazing and then there was really no place to find it. And everybody else thought it was amazing too because they had saved it as well. So always, always, always add a link. Somebody messaged me, or maybe it was on YouTube and they asked me about a new strategy that's being taught which I, I actually kind of can't believe this where you don't add a pin link. Please don't do that. Please, please don't just add a link. It is never worth it to gamify something for a short win. When Pinterest is a long term platform, it just, it is counterintuitive to me and I'm sure somebody would say, well it might increase monthly views which might increase more of the saves on my other pins. I don't buy it. Not buying what they're selling. Always add a link. Okay, I'm pretty sure you got that message. After I talk about creating pins, people naturally ask then how many do I create? How many do I pin? If you have one product listing and you can do an unboxing, you can do a before and after, you can do a testimonial, you can do a couple lifestyle shots and you can do up close and maybe features of the products. That's five pins I've just created for one landing page. But here's the key. I have a differentiator in each one of them. It's not the same type of pin over over and and over again. Oh, number six would be a video. So that being said, you can take one product listing and you can actually pull it out and create this six. In fact, this gives me a great idea. I should probably do this in a YouTube video and show you exactly how to do that. So comment below if you would love for me to do that. If you are on YouTube, you can always email us. Hello simplepin media.com as well. All right, a few last minute things I want to talk about. Pinterest SEO. I said this earlier, but I want to reiterate it again. Pinterest works like Google. People search for things and Pinterest shows them the most relevant results. Your job is to make sure your pins show up. In addition, Pinterest has added their new Pinterest Assistant to help users find the products they love. I'm going to share the link to the press release in the show notes. But of course, AI is everywhere. It's helping us assist and do life. Some good, some bad. But in this case, AI will help you find the product that you're looking for. A big thing when it comes to Pinterest is that the user approaches the platform saying I'll know it when I see it. And so having this Pinterest assistant your keywords and a great image really pulls all those together so someone can have an aha moment when they encounter your product. So it's really important to make sure that you're using keywords. Two places to do that. You can start your keyword research simply in the Pinterest search bar. Start typing in relevant search terms. It auto suggests really popular searches. Those are gold. Write them down and then use those. You can also use the Pinterest Trends tool. I'll link that below in the description. Or you can go to trends.pinterest.com this is such an important tool, like really important. It actually is being updated. It's amazing. So go there and look for shopping trends. It's. It's amazing. All right, shopping features. Now all the things that I've talked about up until this point, if you're a creator listening to this, you could probably do all the things I just talked about and have a smoking Pinterest strategy. It would be great. But for those who have a self hosted shopping platform and what I mean by self hosted is you are not Etsy, you are not on something like teachers pay teachers. You are using Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, all the commerce. Or maybe you created your own commerce platform. This is what I mean by self hosted. You need to connect your catalog. You need to go one step deeper in this relationship with Pinterest to connect the feed. Because this is where the money is. And here's why. When someone searches and they see a product that is yours, it has the right cost, it has the right link. And if it has, if you have inventory, it's still there. If you don't have inventory, it goes away. So this product feed, this relationship that you and Pinterest now have together in the shopping feed allows all of your inventory to be updated every 24 hours. Which is such a huge solution to what I was talking about earlier. When someone saves a pin and it doesn't have a link, but I really want to buy it. Missed opportunity. This allows you to no longer have missed opportunities on the platform. It literally removes a lot of the friction where I can just click to buy your cute little ceramic mug. I can see the price and I can go straight to checkout. I have just done a whole podcast on shopping features. I'm going to link that below too. One really, really important piece is that Product Feed and Verified Merchant are two different things. The most important, if you do nothing else as a product seller, please, please, please connect your product catalog. Just, just do it. If you want to take it to the next level and get Verified Merchant, I have it on my account. I have a cute little like red check mark and it says Verified Merchant. I have a few extra features with that but. But don't. It can be a little clunky to get approved for that. I've heard hit or miss from people having an easy time to not, not a good time. There's a lot of things that go into that. So I'm going to link to that podcast I just did. You can go look into that and see if Verified Merchant is the next right step after you've connected your shopping catalog. Pinterest ads. I love Pinterest ads. I know for a lot of people they're, I don't know, they have mixed signals from people about them. So they just don't know, right? Here's what I would say. Do all the things that I've just suggested until, like make sure you are set up right and then dive into Pinterest ads. Maybe on your best performing organic pins. You can use a lot of Pinterest targeting retargeting options. You can reach people based on interest, keywords, demographic. They are very robust now. So I want to just say to you that if you are looking to scale faster with your products on Pinterest, this is where the money is. Don't be scared of Pinterest ads. And yes, they are nothing like Facebook ads or meta ads, but they're equally as awesome. They just take a little bit more time. We got this question and I want to address this before I wrap up. And this is what I talked about in the beginning. Both some of our clients and some of the queries we get through customer service have been saying they feel tired of Pinterest because it's not bringing in sales, but they've only been trying for a couple of months. So there are benefits on Pinterest besides immediate revenue. One of our clients just left recently. We're so sad about it. She's so happy with all the work that we're doing. And her traffic is actually up, but she hasn't made sales yet. So Pinterest, as it might remind you, takes 6, 9, 12 months to really see good forward movement. If you are seeing traffic go up and you're seeing increased engagement in just a couple months, that's a good thing. That's what you want. If you want it a little bit faster, I suggest you dial that toggle of Pinterest ads to up your game and and to target them even cleaner, clearer, better, faster. And the fact that your traffic might already be up is a great indicator that there is a appetite for your product. Pinterest is never, ever, ever going to explode overnight. But if you do stay consistent, you'll start to see traffic pretty quickly, but you might not see sales right away. But some of our clients are getting 30 to 40% of their website traffic from Pinterest now and this can be really high converting. Some people have been doing Pinterest ads with us for two years because they just keep performing so great. They don't want to turn it off. So don't sleep on Pinterest. I know your future customers. They're already there. They're searching for exactly what you have to sell you. You just need to show up. Okay, all right. I am going to link below in the show notes all the things that I talked about, but we want to be a helpful resource for you. So please, if you're on YouTube, ask questions below. We would love to help you make sure you like and subscribe as well. I'm going to be doing a little different kind of formula in 2026 for how we structure podcast and YouTube. I'll be doing more tutorials, more deep dives like what I talked about here in the middle, the middle of the episode with pins and some examples because we realize people need that. If you're listening in the podcast, thank you so much. Go ahead and hit follow if you're on Apple, subscribe if you're on Spotify or any other platform so you don't miss an episode as well. Note for those who are podcast listeners, I'm going to be doing short mini episodes in 2026 of Some Thoughts I have week by week by about where Pinterest is at, where it's going, how it affects creators and e commerce business owners. So make sure you're subscribed over there as well. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening and watching.