Pinterest is a useful and convenient way of promoting your company’s services and products. It recently introduced new-look business pages and terms of service that allow users to make commercial use of the services on offer. This includes product promotion, sales and leads generation and numerous other commercial uses.

To get started, your personal profile will have to be updated into a business account. If you don’t have a personal account already, you can dive straight in by opening a business account.

Here are a few tips on how you can get started using Pinterest commercially to most effectively promote your business.

Theme your merchandise
Your products may be better promoted if you group them around a theme. This can be based on colours, materials, designs, ingredients or anything else you desire. When you’ve settled on a theme, choose a number of different boards based on it. A colour theme, for example, will have products of the same colour pinned to one board, and so on. Set the boards up and start pinning the appropriate products to them, and remember to add a decent description. This will help potential customers find products based on a favourite colour.

Highlight the most popular products
Buyers are attracted to popular products as they know that such products are selling well and they’ll want to get in on the action before stocks run out. So create a board for your most popular products and let your customers know in the description attached that these are your big sellers. Pin a few images of the most popular items to it, along with their descriptions, and you could also rank them individually for that added professional touch. Be sure to keep the board updated regularly because incorrect or outdated information never goes down well.

Generate a few leads
To use your Pinterest page to get some leads generated, start off by creating quality content such as case studies or detailed reports that include an opt-in form. An effective cover image for that file should then be a good image of the product, which will then be pinned on a board where your premium content will be shared. Essential to this is a call to action embedded in a short description of the product, whereby visitors are invited to sign up on your website. This should all generate more leads and increase traffic landing on your home page to ultimately drive increased sales.

Gain followers
Like all businesses, your aim is to generate sales and leads for your products and services, and for this you need to build an audience. You can then start promoting your products after gaining an audience potentially interested in buying them.
The best way to gain audience on Pinterest is to set up a board dedicated to the products you’re most interested in selling. Pin products just the once to avoid giving the impression of over promotion. Once you’ve pinned up a product, include with it all the comments, repins and initial likes to give it social kudos and encourage others to check it out.