Pinterest Marketing: How you can use Pinterest as a business

By now, every marketer should be familiar with Pinterest. The social platform, on which users can mark their favorites like on an online pinboard and compile and share them in personal pinboards, now has 431 million active users worldwide every month. (With a turnover of 847 million US dollars in the fourth quarter of 2021, Pinterest can already be counted among the big players in social media networks, even if the figures do not yet reach Facebook and Instagram. No wonder Pinterest is also becoming more and more interesting as an advertising platform.
 

What is Pinterest & who uses it?

Pinterest functions as a kind of visual search engine – with the aim of collecting inspiration for specific topics. Users can enter search terms and are then shown corresponding images, which they can collect on virtual pinboards. In addition, users are shown images in the Home Feed that correspond to their respective interests. Pinterest users can also follow other users and view their pinboards.
 
Pinterest itself states that 60% of users are female. Just under 40% of Pinterest users are men. Pinterest serves as a source of inspiration. What distinguishes Pinterest from other social networks and makes it particularly interesting: Brand content does not interfere on Pinterest, it is part of the content and inspires.

Pinterest is one of the most popular social networks worldwide

Advertising on Pinterest: Pinterest marketing offers these opportunities

Want to use Pinterest for your business? There are essentially two ways to do Pinterest marketing:

1. Generate organic reach on Pinterest.
2. Running ads on Pinterest.

 
Pinterest marketing can also be done completely for free. Simply create a free business account on Pinterest and fill it with content. That is, create pinboards, create and pin images. Other users will then see these pins and become aware of your business. To achieve more attention and reach, however, it is worthwhile to place paid ads on Pinterest. This way, you can reach far more users.
 

Pinterest Ads: Place ads on Pinterest

You can advertise your pins on Pinterest. For this purpose, Pinterest offers various ad formats:

Ad Formats on Pinterest

Pinterest currently offers five different ad formats:

• Standard Pins: present images in portrait format.
• Video Pins: Video ads on Pinterest.
• Shopping Ads: Promote products in a targeted manner
• Carousel Ads: Multiple images in one ad.
• Collections: Combine lifestyle images & product images.

Standard Pins on Pinterest:

Standard Pins allow you to upload images in portrait format. An aspect ratio of 2:3 is recommended here, for example 1000×1500 pixels. To present your brand in the best possible way you can integrate your logo discreetly in this image. With text overlays you can place short text on the pin. Also, you can integrate a link (for example, to your website).

Standard Pins are the easiest advertising option on Pinterest

Video Pins: Place video ads

If you want to advertise with moving images, you can place video ads on Pinterest. These are ideally between 6 and 15 seconds long. The important thing here is to get the user’s attention right at the beginning. You should also choose a meaningful cover image.

Shopping ads on Pinterest

With Shopping Ads, you can promote your product pins in a targeted manner.

Shopping ad on Pinterest – here using Levi’s as an example

Carousel Ads: Multiple images per ad

With Carousel Ads, you can upload multiple images per ad. The user can then swipe to see more pages of the ad.

Carousel Ad on Pinterest using Filling Pieces as an example

Collections: The Hybrid Format

With this ad format, you can combine both product photos and lifestyle images – and deposit multiple photos.

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Example of a collection. Ad of the Souleway brand

Define target group: The targeting options.

To avoid wastage you should define your target audience on Pinterest. Pinterest offers six different targeting options:

• Automated targeting: Pinterest searches for your target audience based on the Demographic characteristics: Targeting by age, gender, location and language.
• Interests: Reach users based on the topics they like. These ads are displayed to users on their home feed.
• Keywords: Play ads based on search terms. These ads are displayed to users in search results and related pins.
• Customer Lists: You also have the option to upload customer lists to reach users who have already interacted with your website or Pinterest content.
• ActAlikes: Use ActAlike audiences to find other users with similar interests and behaviors as your existing customers.

Running Pinterest Ads: Here’s how.

You can run ads quite straightforwardly via the Pinterest Ads Manager. Here you can create, manage and analyze campaigns. The Ads Manager is integrated into every business profile. You can open it by going to the “Ads” menu. Alternatively, you can also access the Pinterest Ads Manager directly via ads.pinterest.com. To advertise pins, go through the following steps:

1. Select marketing goal: You need to set a marketing goal per campaign. This is the goal you want to achieve with your campaign. Here, Pinterest offers the options of creating awareness, building brand preference or achieving conversions.
2. Define targeting: The next step is to optimize your targeting. This ensures that your content is also played out to your target group. And avoid wastage.
3. Define costs and schedule: Now you define how much you are willing to pay per ad, how often your ads should appear and how long they will be played out. You can set a daily budget or spread the costs over the entire duration of the campaign.

Measuring success on Pinterest

Want to measure the success of your ads on Pinterest? Pinterest offers analytics and measurement tools. This allows you to monitor your campaigns – and optimize targeting based on the data, thus improving results.

Pinterest Analytics is Pinterest’s own analytics tool. Anyone with a business profile can use Pinterest Analytics. Among other things, the tool reveals which of your pins are the most successful, with which pinboards your pins are integrated and provides information on the demographic data of your users.
 

Successful Pinterest Marketing: 5 Tips & Best Practice

1. Create a dedicated Pinterest presence for your business. Use your logo & brand name for this. Add your website to your Pinterest profile. Maintain your profile description. Here at the example of Bosch Home DE

   
   The Pinterest profile of Bosch Home DE

 

2. Generate reach with group boards: There are public group pin boards that are maintained by several Pinterest users. If you participate here and add pins yourself in these pinboards you generate more attention for your brand.

   
   Group boards are an easy way to generate reach

 

3. Consistent branding for recognition: by using consistent colors, fonts, logos or layout templates, you will achieve a high recognition value. This is what the kitchen accessories manufacturer Springlane does, for example:

   
   With consistent branding, Springlane ensures recognition value.

 

4. Maintain pin title and description: To ensure your pins are found for relevant searches you should always maintain the title and description when creating new pins.
5. Increase the number of repins: The primary goal on Pinterest should not be to increase the number of followers – but to increase the number of repins. Your own pins should therefore be saved as often as possible by other Pinterest users on their pinboards. You can achieve this by creating content that is relevant to your target group and encourages them to repin.
6. Create pins regularly: Ideally, you should create new pins and be active on Pinterest on a daily basis. Pinterest offers a scheduling tool that allows you to schedule the publication of new pins.
7. Lifestyle images instead of product photos: Pure product photos are not as well received on Pinterest as lifestyle images on which the products are staged.

The advantages of Pinterest marketing

Is Pinterest marketing worth it? Yes – for many companies Pinterest marketing is very interesting. Why? What speaks for and against Pinterest marketing:

Generating sustainable traffic on Pinterest

In contrast to Facebook, Instagram and Co., the content with the correctly tagged term is still displayed to the user months or even years later. So it may well be that a post that is 3 years old is still generating a lot of traffic on the website today, because it is suggested to the user on Pinterest again and again. But this also entails consequences: Because pins that are not timeless perform comparatively poorly on Pinterest.

Timeless themes work best on Pinterest

As already mentioned, daily themes tend to perform poorly on Pinterest. But which themes are mainly found on the network? Due to the demographic distribution, typically female themes are on the rise. From fitness and yoga to handicrafts and recipes to sustainability and decoration, the topics are wide-ranging. Visually appealing photos are particularly important here, as these are the focus of the pinboards, while only comparatively little text per pin indicates the content. In addition, Pinterest now also allows publishers to publish videos, which opens up even more possibilities in the content area.
 

For which companies is Pinterest marketing worthwhile?

Quite clearly: for every company that dares and whose products or services are interesting for a young, well-off target group. However, the social media basics should not be neglected here: The company should – as with any social media channel – invest enough time in maintaining the channel and at the same time not neglect its own website, to which it should be forwarded. With the right tagging and regular content, nothing stands in the way of a successful Pinterest presence.