How to Create a Pinterest Sales Funnel For Your Business

A sales funnel is a key marketing concept that helps lead customers from the big picture down to the specific products which they want to purchase. This technique has been used online for decades, think about your website as an example:

1. Your customers start on your homepage.
2. They click no a category of your products.
3. A bit of browsing leads them to a few things they like.
4. Your customers choose a product they like.
5. After reading about the product in your description they hit the shopping cart button.
6. Purchase made!

You can do this with your Pinterest business account, and truly help guide your customers to what they want from you.

Step 1: Create the top of your Pinterest sales funnel

I’m going to be creating a sales funnel for an imaginary company of my own. To keep it in my wheelhouse, my store sells cool urban shoes. I’m going to call my store Sick Kicks.

The first thing I want to do is establish the theme of my Pinterest board. This is social media marketing, you can’t rely on nothing but static images of your products. For Sick Kicks I’m going to focus on talking about the latest releases of shoes as they appear on the feet of athletes, musicians, and other celebrities. My overall plan, at the top of the funnel, is to appeal to those who like athletes and celebrities.

Nike have chosen to focus on one demographic on Pinterest - women. This forms the top of their sales funnel. The Nike Women board itself has chosen to focus exclusively on showing their gear in use by real women. Even the shots of celebrities are of them in more casual settings. As soon as you look at their board, shown below, you feel like you’re on their level.

Step 2: Break your categories down into boards

You’re allowed to create several different boards on Pinterest. Each board may contain whatever you want. The simplest Pinterest marketing plans will simply break it down by the same categories as their website.

For example, Sick Kicks could have a board for men’s sports shoes, men’s casual shoes, women’s sport shoes, and women’s casual shoes. But since Sick Kicks is going to focus on the athletes, rather than the product, I’ll need to create entirely different boards.

For example, Sick Kicks will want a basketball board, a skateboard and extreme sports board, a football board, a musicians board, and a random celebs board. As long as I keep true to these themes, and pick relevant images with their shoes, I’m free to post away.

Take a look at how Nordstrom created an entirely different type of board, the Color of the Year, and have committed to following that theme: everything purple! Sorry, ‘orchid.’ They chose a theme for the board, are staying true to it, and posting away with relevant content to their fans who are interested in purple items:

Step 3: Choose your content

Social media demands shareable content, not marketing messages. This is why I’ve chosen to focus on athletes and celebrities with Sick Kicks, not the products themselves. My pins are ready made for sharing.

The general rule for an social media marketing strategy is the 80/20 rule. That’s 80% useful content, or other people’s content, and 20% your own marketing message. Sick Kicks will get away with around 80% photos of athletes and celebrities wearing shoes we sell. The remaining 20% will be what’s left over for images of our actual shoes. Ignoring the 80/20 rule can destroy your social proof.

If you want to learn how Pinterest marketing is really done, studying Lowe’s is a wise time investment. They may violate the 80/20 rule - in that they may actually feature their products even LESS than 20% of the time.

Their Build it! board is one of the most popular places to go for building tips - it just so happens that everything on the board is for sale at their stores. They just don’t shove your face in it, and they even pin stuff from other boards, such as HGTV, to theirs.

Step 4: The final push to your website and sales goals

It’s not all fun and games on Pinterest. Real sales can be made directly from there and we’re going to start making that happen now.

Looking at the last step, where only 20% is of images of your own product shots, you’d think that only 20% of the pins you put up are going to be sales pins - but you would be wrong. You can add your website link, right to a landing page, and quote a price for each pin if you wish. But there is a better way to do this.

Rich Pins are meant specifically for those who have products that they are selling. You can choose your best content and make it a Rich Pin. This will include the price for your product. Now every time you change the price, such as when a sales is going on, everyone who has pinned that Rich Pin to their board will be notified of the change. This is a bottom sales funnel technique that looks like the bottom of a black hole as it continues to pull people in!

Let’s get back to Sick Kicks for a moment. I’ll have my overall account strategy of athletes and celebrities at the top of the sales funnel. Let’s go into the basketball players board and break down what to expect in there for the sales funnel:

1. Not every pin will be a sales pin.
2. Pins that are chosen for sales will be ones I personally add as Rich Pins.
3. Let’s say my most popular pins are images of basketball players dunking. Each Rich Pin will feature a player dunking, the price of the shoe they’re wearing, and a link to my website where the shoes is sold.
4. Those pins that do not have prices should not be ignored. They’ll need my interaction, a good description of the action, I’ll need to pin them from other boards to build connections, and I’ll need to promote them just the same.

If you need a real example that you can follow I’ll use Sephora, another popular brand on Pinterest.

We’ll start by looking at their Eye board:

• Not every pin is a sales pin. Some are inspirational eye makeup shots of models and fans. Some are contests and promotions. Fewer still are actual product images of what they sell.
• Rich Pins, such as this one, feature the price and a link to the website where you can find it.
• Their Rich Pins are all static shots of their products. They still get over 100 repins, a fairly good number considering how many products are at this high number on the board.
• They still have many pins which aren’t about direct sales at all. Check out this pin with over 1000 repins, it’s just talking about an interesting type of eye makeup application. No sales pitch at all.

If you’ve read this far you can see now how to start with the broad strokes of your Pinterest board plan at the top with an overall theme. That you need to break your products down into categories that are relevant to Pinterest. Then you need your content to follow the 80/20 rule as you push people to buy your product, taking full advantage of Rich Pins to pull people in again and again.