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Out of all social media platforms, Pinterest may be one of the most misunderstood. Some people just see it as an online scrapbook of the wedding or house decor ideas, but Pinterest is much than just a collection of ideas. 93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest. Thus, it can become a powerful platform to bring awareness to your business. While 81 percent of Pinterest users are female, many men are joining the platform. Actually, about 40 percent of new signups are men. This means that retailers targeting men can also benefit from an optimized presence on Pinterest. Whether you’re just starting with Pinterest or have been using it for a while, use these 5 simple guidelines to optimize your Pinterest account for eCommerce: Have a Pinterest Business Profile The first thing you need to do to optimize your Pinterest account for eCommerce is to convert it into a business account. By doing so, you’ll be able to get access to more advanced features such as powerful analytics and the advertising platform. Also, once you have a business account, you’ll be able to run ads on Pinterest. If you already have a personal account for your business, you can easily convert it into a business one. Just visit business.pinterest.com and click on “convert your existing account.” Then, fill out the form, and, last, verify your website. Verifying it will prevent any other business from creating a Pinterest account with your brand name. Once your account is set up, optimize your profile starting with your profile photo and description. Most brands use their logo as their profile photo and use a small description highlighting what makes them special. For example, how renowned brand Valentino, has optimized its Pinterest account: After your profile photo and description are optimized, you’ll want to create an appealing story by showcasing your brand’s look and feel. The best way to do this is through carefully composed boards. You should have multiple boards focused on different products, collections, featured items, or others. For instance, Gucci has different boards showcasing their collections and their artistic collaborations, as you can see below: While adding pins to your boards, keep in mind that each one of them should have a description including your target keywords. Using them will guarantee your pins are shown for the right searches. Optimize your Website for Pins To strengthen your presence on Pinterest, you’ll want to have as many people pinning your products and content as possible. To accomplish this, you have to optimize your site and make it pin-friendly to encourage your visitors to take action. Installing a social sharing widget like the ones offered by SumoMe or ShareThis can help remind your visitors to share products or content they like. Additionally, add the Pinterest “Save” button or, even better, the hover Save button to encourage pinning. Using the latter will show the Pin button once a user hovers over an image. Your images should also be optimized. Their size is important. If the images are too small or too big, they can easily get distorted when pinned. Opt for vertical images with 735 x 1102 pixels which contain less than 30 percent background. Curalate states that those types of images are repinned the most. Surprisingly, they also state that brand images without faces receive 23 percent more repins. Last, colour saturation seems to be important for pinners. Colourful and bright images get more engagement and repin than dull and dark ones. Use Buyable Pins Buyable pins will allow you to sell your products right within Pinterest without having to take users to your website to make a purchase. This is great, considering that the average order value of Pinterest users is $50 higher than other social media platforms. Also, buyable pins convert twice as much as normal pins that lead to product pages. Thus, having them can boost sales coming from Pinterest. Not taking potential customers to your site may seem like a bad thing, but it does have its benefits. By reducing the steps in the selling process, you’ll make it easier for customers to make a purchase. With buyable pins, users just need two easy clicks to add a product to their bag and check out. The best part is that using buyable pins is free, but you can always promote them to increase exposure to your products. If you use a website platform like BigCommerce, any product your visitor’s pin will become a buyable pin. Pinterest simply uses a product feed which is matched with existing pins to find out which products are already on Pinterest. The platform recommends testing pins in secret boards to find out what types of pins perform best. Facebook Marketing for Beginners Use Rich Pins in Articles Rich pins offer more detailed information about the content being pinned. For instance, product-rich pins show real-time pricing, availability, and the store’s name. So, pinners can easily see where to buy products and get to product pages with a simple click. They can also get price notification alerts when the price of a product changes. Now that we have buyable pins that allow users to buy products without getting out of Pinterest, product-rich pins have been slightly replaced. However, we can still use rich pins to provide more information about articles, recipes, and apps. For articles, this type of pins shows the article’s headline, author, and story description. For apps, rich pins show an install button that users can easily click to download apps. Rich pins will not only give your pins more visibility, but they will also increase your click-through rate or CTR. Target reported a 70% increase in traffic from Pinterest when they enabled Rich Pins. Last, make sure to use canonical URLs for your product landing pages. This can be done by adding a canonical URL tag in your site’s link. 6 Strategies to drive Traffic from Instagram to Your Website Try Promoted Pins Using Pinterest’s advertising platform can be just what you need to power up your eCommerce marketing efforts. Besides reaching your target audience, you’ll also be able to reach people related to your target audience. When someone saves a promoted pin, other people can see that pin in their Pinterest feeds. This will multiply your exposure and increase your chances of conversion. Pinterest offers three types of ad campaigns with different goals: awareness, engagement, and traffic. As the name implies, awareness campaigns are just meant to get your brand seen by as many people as possible, and advertisers pay per 1,000 impressions. Engagement campaigns will help get people to interact with your pins either by repinning, clicking or doing a closeup. Last, traffic campaigns will help you drive traffic to your site to convert visitors as they land on your product page. The steps to create a campaign are pretty standard. You just need to have a business account, choose your campaign’s goal, pick a pin to promote and select a target audience. Once your campaign is set up, make sure to add a Pinterest tag to your site to be able to track conversions. Best Digital Marketing Courses Online Advanced Certificate in Brand Communication Management - MICA Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing and Communication - MICA Performance Marketing Bootcamp - Google Ads from upGrad To Explore all our courses, visit our page below. Digital Marketing Courses Watch your campaigns carefully to monitor results. See what types of posts are creating engagement to boost those and replace any pins that are not performing well. Vertical, long pins usually perform better than landscape ones. 17 Ways to Leverage Instagram for your E-commerce As with any other social media platform, Pinterest has its own way of working. Its users engage and interact with content differently from the way they would interact on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Wise retailers have to be mindful of the differences between social media platforms to tailor content accordingly. By optimizing your business profile following all the guidelines discussed above, you’ll have a better chance of crushing the competition on Pinterest. Learn digital marketing courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. Featured Programs for you – Advanced Certificate in Digital Branding & Advertising from MICA In-demand Digital Marketing Skills Advertising Courses Influencer Marketing Courses SEO Courses Performance Marketing Courses SEM Courses Email Marketing Courses Content Marketing Courses Social Media Marketing Courses Marketing Analytics Courses Web Analytics Courses Display Advertising Courses Affiliate Marketing Courses upGrad’s Exclusive Digital Marketing Webinar for you – How Marketers can enable Sales for Success? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/abhishek-ballabh.mp4 Digital Marketing Free courses to Learn Influencer marketing free course Introduction to advertising free course Influencer marketing right free course SEO basics free course SEM basics free course Email marketing free course Social media marketing introduction free course How to leverage user generated content free course Content marketing free course Fundamentals of marketing free course Brand marketing masterclass free course Popular Digital Marketing Blogs Beginners Guide to YouTube Marketing : Complete List How to Monetize Your YouTube Channel? Top 5 Actionable Steps The Complete Guide on setting up a LinkedIn Company Page Everything You Need To Know About Digital Marketing A Complete Guide to Digital Marketing Strategy: What it is and How to create it? Digital Marketing Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide To Become an Expert Future of Digital Marketing: How It Goes From Here Importance of Digital Marketing: Top 10 Reasons Your Business Needs it Digital Marketing Challenges: How to Win Amidst the Challenges in Digital Marketing

by Ronald Dod

17 Dec 2018

Blogs

5206

Looking to find more ways to use social media to grow your eCommerce business? Want to leverage your Instagram following to sell more products? The right content strategy and tools, along with audience engagement, can dramatically improve revenue generated from your Instagram activity. Discover 17 ways you can use Instagram to grow your eCommerce business: 1. Source Content from Your Audience One of the simplest ways to boost sales through Instagram is to cultivate a brand image that is human—making you appear more approachable. User-generated content does just that. Encourage your fans to share content featuring your products. This shows real people enjoying what you sell while also showing your products in use and in context, so customers can more easily picture themselves using them. 2. Create Lifestyle Images with Products You won’t always be able to capture user-generated content, so be ready with your own. Take lifestyle photos that also show your products in use in settings that resemble real life. InCase regularly creates and shares lifestyle shots of its products, like this image from it’s Instagram account: Quality lifestyle images can grab the attention of users as they’re scrolling feeds. It’s another approach providing customers with examples of how individual products can be used. 3. Feature Employees and Go Behind the Scenes Customers love to see the people behind the scenes. It can help them form a more personal and human connection with your brand. Use images and videos to take followers behind the scenes, providing a peek at how your company operates. Warby Parker shares this kind of content on its Instagram, like this image from a recent Store Leader Summit: Share images that show the personality and people behind your brand. Show off your personality, feature company events and outings, and introduce the people who pack and handle products or manage customer service. You can do this with prerecorded or live video to help grow engagement and build trust, which ultimately improves conversions. 10 ways to Optimize Landing Pages for Better Conversion Rates 4. Have Fun with Holidays Whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, or National Hot Dog Day, there’s always something to celebrate. To avoid exhausting fans with a steady stream of product shots, make some fun posts around the holidays. It doesn’t have to be intricate. A free tool like Canva makes it easy to throw together a quick image with a text overlay that you can have at the ready for any holiday. 5. Go Beyond Static Images Remember, you’re not limited to images on Instagram. Video does exceptionally well for engagement. When the platform first introduced videos, there were more than 5 million of them uploaded within the first 24 hours. Videos is a great way to show products in context, either to promote the product or provide helpful tips and info on how products can be used. 6. Feature Upcoming Products and Promotions The people following you are the ones most interested in what you have to say and share—those are your loyal customers. Reward them with exclusive promotions and information that only they can get on Instagram. You can even run exclusive contests and giveaways on Instagram, like Halo Top: Giveaways are a great way to boost your reach as engagement rises and posts are shared. This encourages sharing and makes your followers feel special when they know they’re seeing discounts first or getting access to something specifically because they follow you. Making customers feel valued builds loyalty, which can improve your customer lifetime value as they purchase more and talk up your brand. 6 Strategies to drive Traffic from Instagram to Your Website 7. Use Hashtags to Maximize Reach Hashtags can be used in Instagram to promote and track campaigns (unique hashtags), or you can ride the tails of existing, popular, regularly used hashtags to improve your reach. In fact, in a survey of posts from the top brands on Instagram, 70% of hashtags are unique and branded to those companies. Insellycom uses a mix of common, branded, and product-specific hashtags: Use hashtags to make your content more search-friendly and easy to find on Instagram. Just be sure to use relevant hashtags—and don’t be afraid to use multiples. Content studies have found that engagement and interaction are highest on posts with 11 or more hashtags: 8. Don’t Ignore Filters Even if you’re already taking great pictures, don’t neglect using the built-in filters within Instagram. Studies have shown that 60% of top brands use the same filter consistently, and many more use no filter at all. Yet, several filters have been shown to get more likes and engagement than others: Test out different filters with your audience to see if engagement changes. 9. Be Mindful of When You Post There’s really no perfect time to post to Instagram, but there is data showing ideal windows when engagement tends to be higher during certain days of the week. TrackMaven’s research revealed that the weekends are ideal days to post, with evenings around 5 p.m. EST capturing higher engagement. Don’t just run with those numbers, though. Check your own customer and social insights to see when followers are most active to align Instagram posts with your specific audience. 5 Tools Every Social Media Marketer Needs To Know About 10. Give More Than You Take Engagement is a key part of social media, so don’t just post a range of content. Take the time to respond to comments, talk to your followers, and be sure to set time aside every day to check out the posts of your followers. You can also use repost and share the content from your followers. Buffer offers a simple guide to walk you through doing this (since it’s not a native feature): According to data from Iconosquare, 65% of consumers feel it would be an honour to have a brand engage with their content and like their post. Stay active with comments, likes, and reposts to keep your brand (and products) on their mind. 11. Use Strategic Calls to Action Any content you create and post should have a purpose behind it as part of your overall strategy. Some of that content will be intended to drive follower action toward a purchase. While Instagram doesn’t allow active links within captions, you can still create a call to action. You just need to get a little creative about how to move them from Instagram to your site. The simplest solution is to place a link within your Instagram bio that points to a specific landing page, product, or category page for whatever campaign you’re currently running. HubSpot uses the Instagram bio link strategically, as do many eCommerce brands: 12. Post Frequently Just like the timing of your Instagram posts, there’s really no concrete schedule you should follow. You can’t really get the frequency wrong. Generally speaking, though, more posts on a consistent basis tend to provide the most engagement and a greater return. In 2016, Forrester reviewed post frequency on social media and found that the top brands were posting an average of 4.9 times per week. This was a 50% increase over the previous year. That doesn’t mean you should run out and start posting once or twice every single day just to get it done. Quality always trumps quantity. Be reasonable and honest with yourself about how frequently you can post without sacrificing the value of the content. 13. Get Creative with Contests For the most part, your followers are made up of the people who are most interested in hearing from you, but they’re still consumers—and consumers are bargain hunters. Over 40% of users follow brands purely for the promotions and giveaways. Don’t shy away from that. Give your followers what they’re looking for. Contests like this one from Birch Box get your products into customers’ hands, along with building buzz, engagement, and brand visibility: Contests don’t have to be costly. Start by giving away some product. 14. Budget for Instagram Ads Whatever you can do to drive traffic, improve revenue, and boost sales without spending too much is ideal. With that said, you should still try to take advantage of paid ads on Instagram. Organic reach might be low on Facebook but it has remained consistently higher on Instagram. This data from Forrester shows the wide gap in engagement between Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter: Even a conservative budget can improve visibility and new customer acquisition. 15. Switch to a Business Profile If you haven’t done so already, and you’re still using a general Instagram profile, make the switch to a business profile. This gives you access to a sleek-looking Instagram profile that also pulls your information over from your Facebook page if you have one. You also gain access to insights like the number of impressions and clicks to your bio link: Keep an eye on insights to monitor campaign clicks to your bio link. To make the switch in your profile: Go to account settings and click the option to “Switch to Business Profile.” Log into your Facebook account within the Instagram app and select the Facebook page you have admin rights for. After linking your business page, you can select the contact information to be ported over to your business profile on Instagram. upGrad’s Exclusive Digital Marketing Webinar for you – What’s new in Marketing? document.createElement('video'); https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/rumi-ambastha.mp4   Best Online Digital Marketing Courses Advanced Certificate in Brand Communication Management - MICA Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing and Communication - MICA Performance Marketing Bootcamp - Google Ads from upGrad To explore all our certification courses on Digital Marketing, kindly visit our page below. Digital Marketing Certification 16. Share Content More Than Once One of the most common mistakes marketers make is giving content the single-share treatment. How often do you post Facebook or Instagram content once, and then never share it again? You should create a schedule for your content that includes when it goes live, and then when (and how many times) it will be reposted. HubSpot has created an example template for planning Instagram posts like this: Track individual campaigns and bio link updates with a simple Instagram calendar Content will get lost in the feeds for some people, and others simply won’t be logged on in time to see it in their feed. CoSchedule shared data proving this to be an effective strategy. While the numbers will likely diminish with each repost, those additional reposts bring more impressions and clicks on content: Repost content multiple times to reach more of your audience. Top Digital Marketing Skills Online Advertising Courses Influencer Marketing Programs SEO Optimisation Courses Performance Marketing Certification Search Engine Marketing Course Email Marketing Strategy Content Marketing Strategy Social Media Advertising Digital Marketing Analytics Website Analytics Online Display Advertising Best Affiliate Programs 17. Make Your Feed Shoppable With Instagram’s open API, you can use third-party tools to make your Instagram feed shoppable. This reduces the number of steps it takes for a customer to make a purchase, supporting the consumer’s tendency to impulse-buy. Nordstrom is one of the many brands using third-party apps like Like2Buy to make their feeds shoppable: Capture more purchases with the ability to shop within your Instagram gallery. This list of tactics for Instagram should help you improve engagement with your followers and encourage more purchases, especially if you use third-party integration to make your feed shoppable. Be sure to focus on providing more value, responding to followers, adding more variety to your content, and keeping to a frequent and consistent schedule. Roadmap for Learning Digital Marketing Avoid blind automation and simple product promotion. Your customers may be following you for promotions and deals, but, if you go for the human connection and provide more value, you’ll see a far greater return on your investment of time. Digital Marketing Free courses to Learn Influencer marketing free course Introduction to advertising free course Influencer marketing right free course SEO basics free course SEM basics free course Email marketing free course Social media marketing introduction free course How to leverage user generated content free course Content marketing free course Fundamentals of marketing free course Brand marketing masterclass free course Popular Digital Marketing Blogs Beginners Guide to YouTube Marketing : Complete List How to Monetize Your YouTube Channel? Top 5 Actionable Steps The Complete Guide on setting up a LinkedIn Company Page Everything You Need To Know About Digital Marketing A Complete Guide to Digital Marketing Strategy: What it is and How to create it? Digital Marketing Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide To Become an Expert Future of Digital Marketing: How It Goes From Here Importance of Digital Marketing: Top 10 Reasons Your Business Needs it Digital Marketing Challenges: How to Win Amidst the Challenges in Digital Marketing Learn digital marketing courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career. Featured Programs for you – Advanced Certificate in Digital Branding & Advertising from MICA ​

by Ronald Dod

14 Dec 2018