If you are unfamiliar with this visual bookmarking platform, it’s worth highlighting that Pinterest has in excess of 100 million monthly active users. This figure is continuously rising; in fact, there was a significant 81% increase in the number of active users from 2015-2016. In addition, two-thirds of the Pins shared on Pinterest came from business websites.
A quick snapshot of Pinterest user demographics in the UK shows that 62% of users are female with the majority aged between 24 and54. If this audience hits a sweet spot within your target demographic or marketing activity, then you will be extremely interested to find out how you can make the most of advertising within this powerful platform.
Creating a Pinterest for Business Account
If you already have a personal account on Pinterest and wish to convert this into a business account for advertising purposes, this can easily be achieved. While it might seem insignificant, choosing your correct location is important – this cannot be changed at a later date and is necessary for predicting chargeable factors such as taxes.
Your Advertising Options
Promoted Pins – by promoting Pins you can reach a highly receptive audience as they have an increased intent to buy. Recent studies have shown that, an impressive 80% of all Pinterest users also purchased a product they pinned. As such, promoted Pins are great for getting your products and content in front of more people in the most relevant places. A tip for this method of advertising is to choose a Pin that is already organically performing well so you can reach even more people. For example, Bank of America reached 6 million unique Pinners in less than 5 months and saw a 2x engagement on their Promoted pins.
How can you ensure your promoted pins generate the correct intentions throughout your audience? In short, the primary purpose of Promoted Pins is to encourage the Pinner to consider the idea, so how do you create the desired action?
- Compelling Images – the best Promoted Pins are helpful, beautiful and actionable. Why not download the creative guide to learn how to make creative pins?
- Text Overlays – Tasteful branding shows Pinners you’re trustworthy, and text makes your Pin more helpful
- Detailed Descriptions – Add extra details and a clear call-to-action so you can create the desired intent throughout your audience and this will positively impact the results of your campaign.
Pinterest users to buy directly from your Pin, the blue “Buy it” button means you can buy. If a Pinterest user is searching for something specific you can use the blue price filter to hone in on the correct Pin, simply swipe through different colours if there’s more than one option available. Pinterest integrates with various ecommerce content management systems (CMS) including Magento, Demandware, Shopify and more – making it easy for you to get started.
Understanding the Algorithm
Like many other social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, Pinterest has been making significant progress with its algorithm to ensure it serves Pins close to users’ interests. Pinterest does this by analysing:
- The quality of your pin
- Quality of the source (blog/website) the pin leads to
- Rating assigned by Pinterest
In order to ensure your Pins generate the desired actions you want users to take, for example, buyable Pins, you must make sure the keywords and content within your Pins are highly optimised using the correct terms.
Use a Vertical Aspect Ratio in your Pins
According to a study compiled by Pinterest, Pins that are longer than they are wide perform extremely well. This is because they physically take up more space on the platform and subsequently generate higher results. This element is particularly true when advertising on mobile devices through Pinterest, in this situation, Pins that are vertically orientated could even require a user to scroll to view the whole pin, increasing exposure time to the pin.
These can result in higher click through rates and sales for the advertiser.
As Pinterest is a visual site, ensuring your graphics are eye-catching and interesting is a simple step in the correct direction. Another way you can track success of campaigns is, for example when using Promoted Pins, to enable conversion tracking to tie actions that people take on your site back to a Pinterest action. By continuously monitoring and optimising campaigns you will begin to observe success.
In summary, Pinterest is a social network that allows users to share and discover new interests by “pinning” images or videos to their own or others’ boards. There are various ways businesses can, and have, utilised this platform to drive success in their marketing activity.
For example Made.com increased their Pinterest presence with Rich Pins and experienced dramatic results in just a few months including 36% increase in referral traffic and 51% increase in conversions. By following our simple steps to setting up your campaigns; you could see a good return on investment from introducing this channel to your marketing activity.