Performance Marketing Expert

Getting Started on Pinterest Ads: Your Ultimate Guide

With 200 million users each month, Pinterest boasts an impressive 40% year-over-year growth and is the second highest referrer of social traffic worldwide. The social platform sits at the intersection of peer sharing, inspiration, and purchase intent, providing a wealth of opportunity for marketers. In the past, more established platforms like Facebook and Instagram, along with “buzzier” platforms like Snapchat, have caused many marketers to overlook the massive opportunity that Pinterest offers. However, with its advertising capabilities, impressive reach, and unique focus on things rather than people, it’s time to pay attention to Pinterest.

Pinterest embraces all of the unique characteristics of lifestyle, culture, art, food, and more, with 61% of its users sharing that the platform helps them be their best selves. In fact, Pinterest outranks Facebook and Twitter in this kind of user sentiment. Additionally, multi-platform social media consumers can easily differentiate Pinterest’s functionality from other platforms, which further contributes to its continuous growth.

As marketers, it is important to understand Pinterest’s potential business impact and the opportunities it offers. This is especially true if your industry is one listed below, as these are the proven Pinterest audience sweet spots!

  • Home and Garden
  • Shopping
  • Food and Drink
  • Beauty and Fitness
  • Travel
  • Pets and Animals
  • Recreation and Hobbies

 

How does Pinterest impact purchase decisions?
Pinners are using Pinterest to find ideas across an endless number of categories and subcategories, and taking action based off what they find. Half of all users have made a purchase after seeing a pin and 55% of Pinners use Pinterest to shop. Even if they don’t make a purchase directly through the platform, 67% of users look at their saved Pinterest boards while in stores, proving that individuals engage with the platform at significant touchpoints in the purchase process.

Who is on Pinterest?
Here is a bird’s-eye view of the current landscape, according to Pinterest:

  • About 70% of users are female and 30% are male (yet male use of the platform has increased by 50% year-over-year)
  • Half of Pinterest’s traffic comes from outside of the U.S.
  • Half of all millennials are on Pinterest and the platform reaches 80% of Snapchat’s millennial audience and 75% of Facebook’s U.S. female millennial audience

 

How can marketers use Pinterest?
Pinners are already posting, saving, and engaging with pins to create their own personal, curated stream of organic pin-able content. Advertisers are tasked with pinning content that is contextually relevant, useful and efficient in grabbing Pinners’ interests. As more brand competition enters the platform, advertisers need to get creative to help fill the funnel and drive purchases. From autoplay video that ‘pops’ in home feeds and drives brand traffic, to rich pins that house top-level product content and send users directly to a page where they can make a purchase, there are diverse strategies to fulfill most traditional marketing goals.

If you have multiple goals to consider, you can create custom integrations to fulfill both primary and secondary objectives. For instance, if you’re aiming for mid-funnel engagement, while increasing brand awareness, a custom solution could use engaging quizzes to generate boards that house personalized content with immense earned media value potential.

For a consumer who’s familiar with your brand but not yet convinced of a product offering, a strategically designed quiz can provide a hub of personalized content, exposing the consumer to high-affinity products from your brand and creating more incentive to purchase. This newly-generated board can then be seen by the user's friends, who may be enticed to either take the quiz themselves or save a pin and start building a relationship with your brand.

Pinterest Best Practices
As you embark on your Pinterest advertising journey, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Be relevant. As with most advertising initiatives, it’s important to do your research and be creative with your visuals and strategic approach. For instance, behaviors and demographics can skew in a variety of ways depending on the geographic region you are targeting. As an example, national solar panel companies may want to only advertise to homeowners in areas that don’t impose legal restrictions for setting up their product.

Think long-term. Like a diamond, a pin is “forever.” A good pin can drive traffic and generate results well after launching. A pin created in 2015 could still be a top performer if the content is appealing, the keywords are optimized, and its relevance remains high. This is a huge differentiator from other platforms where posts generally have shorter lifespans.

Know your audience. Grasping what type of content your audience finds most relevant and helpful is also a big determining factor in overall success. The good news is that you can hop on Pinterest and start searching (or scrolling) to get a feel for what resonates with consumers in your brand’s category. And, as with all marketing initiatives, make sure to test and continually optimize your ads for the best results.

Pinterest offers a wealth of opportunity for marketers to reach their audiences in an engaging and non-intrusive way. To learn more about how your brand can benefit from the platform, reach out to the social team at Rise.

11/17/2017 at 03:10