Pinterest has long felt in the shadow of all-conquering Instagram, but has grown steadily in recent years and remains a useful digital marketing channel – especially if you are lucky enough to work in a visual-friendly lifestyle sector such as fashion, beauty, interior design or food & drink.
Pinterest users create image boards around their interests and hobbies making it a great platform for showcasing products that catch the eye. Not sure where to start, though? We have written this blog to help you to explore your options.
The Pinterest Low Down
At the time Pinterest was launched, creators Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp, described the service as a “catalogue of ideas.”
Their goal? Integrating Pinterest content with the ‘real world’ of offline hobbies more effectively than other social media channels.
Functionality centres on sharing images linked by trends, themes and interests. Each image uploaded, or linked from a website, becomes known as a pin. Pins are shared on user-defined boards that become collaborative spaces to share. This model has certainly proved popular. As of March 2021, Pinterest has 478 million global users each month. Its 2020 advertising revenue was a cool $1.7 billion – up 49% from the previous year.
Why is Pinterest Good for Digital Marketers?
Because it uses pins and boards based on user interests, Pinterest is a dream when it comes to targeting customers. Finding Pinterest boards linked your product or service, and the communities that use them, couldn’t be more straightforward.
Make cupcakes? You’ll find users competitively pinning cupcake images to thousands of Pinterest boards.
Selling fashion items? You could be swept along through any number of trendsetting boards and be seen by hundreds of thousands of users with relatively little effort.
Home improvement projects? Yes.
Kitchen appliances? Luxury gifts? Them too.
Being seen is, of course, is all well and good but will Pinterest increase traffic to your website? The answers here are positive too. Most social media platforms provide ‘no-follow’ links. The ‘no-follow’ attribute, introduced by Google in 2005, tells search engines to ignore outbound links tagged from a site to stop spammers benefiting.
Pinterest links have a ‘follow’ attribute directly benefitting your Search Engine Optimisation efforts. If you’re undertaking local SEO, the good news is Pinterest also allows you to advertise geographically too.
Pinterest Top Tips
Check Your Brand Fits
Pinterest isn’t for everyone. It is heavily weighted to consumer lifestyle brands that use imagery to communicate. If that’s not you, you might find gaining benefits an uphill battle. If it is, think carefully about how you want to use image pins to represent you and your values. If you haven’t considered a ‘visual brand’, a Pinterest strategy and an approved set of images is probably a good place to start.
Have Clear Goals
Pinterest is great at strengthening SEO performance and building organic traffic as part of a wider social media and digital strategy. Like all channels however success comes from clarity around who you are targeting and why. You can drive traffic to your website to create retargeted ad campaigns, for example. You can gain engagement to win email subscribers. If you’re an e-commerce site, you can drive top-of-the-funnel acquisition with conversion in mind. Whatever the answer, creating a Pinterest profile without specific goals in mind risks a low return for your efforts.
Test Your Approach
It is relatively straightforward to begin on Pinterest with little investment required. We would therefore normally recommend dipping your beautifully pedicured toe in the water as an initial step.
Three months of activity, for example, will let you test your assumptions, audit results and have data at your fingertips. You can move forward, to paid campaigns perhaps, with confidence.
Pinterest should not be in the shadow of its higher-profile social media cousins. Its unique visual focus is ideal for business leaders with an eye on growth. If you want to learn more, contact the team at Almond who would be delighted to share more top tips with you.
