In the current socio-economic situation, many businesses are struggling to find new ways to attract customers and sell their products. Their physical shops are closed and they had to move to online stores and online promotion. Since social media is one of the most effective places to advertise your products, various platforms are trying to be helpful. The most recent example in this respect is Pinterest.
How Does Pinterest Work for Retail Shops?
If you are not fully familiar with this platform, it allows you to create collections of images called Pins. Pins can be shared from various websites or uploaded directly into Pinterest.
For some time now, Pinterest has hinted that, given their position as a visual social media platform, they want to incorporate shopping features in the basic functions. This prompted many major brands to create Pinterest accounts and share collections of their products.
Keeping their promise, Pinterest created a Product Pin feature that would take users directly to the checkout form on the company website. Later, the social media platform launched the Catalog – a feature where business accounts can upload their product photos to use for ads and Shoppable Pins. The most recent addition, launched in April 2020, is the Shop button.
Why Is the Shop Button a Significant Improvement?
Before the Shop button, Pinterest users could not search specifically for products for sale. They would have to scroll down various Pins and here and there find one from a retailer’s Catalogue.
Now, when users want to buy specific items, they can type in the search term, such as “women’s sports shoes” or “office dresses” and click on the Shop button. The results will be exclusively Shoppable Pins.
Adding More Security to Shopping via Pinterest
However, just like with any other new way of shopping, users are wary about security. There are so many scams on the internet, as well as hackers spying any opportunity to get their hands on people’s credit card data.
At the same time, businesses want to be able to measure the result of their marketing campaigns and attriv
This is why Pinterest recently rolled out a series of new and useful features for commerce, which benefit both brands and consumers. Here they are:
1. Verified Merchant Program
This program works in the same manner as verifying an account on Instagram. Brands can confirm that they operate the respective account and Pinterest makes their products eligible for distribution across its platform for marketing purposes.
Among others, verified merchants will have their products featured in the “Shop the Look” Pins. This type of Pinterest post allows people to tap or click on an outfit they like in a photo shared by another user and find the exact (or similar) items in online shops
2. Catalogue Updates
This update promises to reduce the time between feed ingestion and Product Pin creation. This means that brands don’t have to wait as long as before to see their newly uploaded products featured in Shoppable Pins.
3. Conversion Insights
Social media marketing is meaningless without tools that allow brands to measure their results and whether they have attained their goals. Now they can do that on Pinterest thanks to the new conversion insights that collect data both from organic and paid reach with respect to website visits, sales and checkouts.
4. Dynamic Retargeting
After a few months of testing in the US, the dynamic retargeting functionality is now available to all advertisers on Pinterest. It allows brands to retarget users who pinned or liked similar or exact products or added them in their own Pinterest collections.
Support and Training for Small Businesses
Last but not least, Pinterest wants to help small businesses understand how digital marketing works on their platform. For this purpose, they created a series of YouTube videos, as well as a webinar that helps small business owners make the most of Pinterest marketing, as well as find inspiration to keep their company going during these difficult times.