The Importance of Pinterest for Publishers and Advertisers

Utilizing New Mediums

At Perk.com Canada, we’re always looking for new ways to share our content with new audiences. Utilizing traditional social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, are obvious choices, but for some of our brands we needed something different. Sharing high quality photos to boost content engagement was key, but what platform could we use? Enter Pinterest.

How People Use Pinterest

To fully understand Pinterest and how it works you first need to understand what a “pin” and a “board” are. Each individual profile is comprised of a variety of “pins” that are collected and grouped into “boards” that are controlled by the profile owner. A pin on Pinterest is similar to a visual bookmark that links the user to a web page.

Pinterest users can follow profiles that save content that is of interest to them; similar content will then show up on their home feed. This home feed is the heart of Pinterest. It’s where you can see pins in categories you like, pins from your friends, or pins from other profiles you follow. You can save whichever ones you like to your own boards to look at or remember later. There is also a search feed on Pinterest that allows you to search for pins on topics that match your interests.

The Case For Businesses

At Perk we leverage Pinterest for our cosmetics and beauty brand, cosmeticsandbeauty.net. Since Pinterest is a visual medium, it provides lots of opportunity for visually appealing content related to cosmetics and beauty products, which meshes perfectly with the interests of Pinterest users. Our Pinterest profile shares pins that link back to content on cosmeticsandbeauty.net. It is all categorized into boards such as skin, nails, eyes, face, and hair. This allows users to connect with our brand on a different medium, and discover meaningful content on our site.

Integrating Pinterest into your marketing plan is also a good idea, as the platform has seen massive amounts of growth over the past couple of years. According to Dyani Vanderhorst, a partner public relations manager at Pinterest, “there are now more than 200 million people around the world using Pinterest each month – nearly a 40% YoY growth.”

Why Should Publishers Use Pinterest?

Publishers should use Pinterest for many reasons, as it is a completely unique platform.With over 200 million monthly active users it provides access to a large and diverse audience. The way users engage with Pinterest is also very different than other platforms. Many Pinners use Pinterest for ideas or inspiration, and are searching through pins with an open mind. This allows publishers to create intent and grab a user’s attention at the very beginning of the decision making cycle. 76 percent of Pinners use the platform to save items to purchase or use later. This unlocks a new realm of possibilities, as people will remember and cycle back to your product in the future if you make an impact.

Dyani also explained how it’s getting easier for publishers to use the platform: “Pinterest is making it easier for businesses to reach their audience through new formats like Promoted Video with autoplay, ads targeted to search, Promoted App Pins, and additional measurement options with data partners. Pinterest has  also launched Pinterest Propel, a program created to support businesses and agencies new to advertising on Pinterest.”

Creating a Promoted Pin

If you have a business account, creating a promoted pin starts exactly the same way as creating a regular pin.

First, you create the pin by choosing a piece of content or product you’d like to promote. Then you create a pin to visually promote it. After you have created the pin and linked it to your desired product or content, you have the option to promote the pin.

The first step is to choose the objective of the campaign (awareness, website traffic, or engagement), budget, and targeting. Targeting on Pinterest is a bit different than other platforms because the user is looking more for inspiration than an actual answer to a question. Pinterest offers a few different targeting options including interests, keywords, personas, demographic, and device type. It also allows you to target based on your own data such as a customer list, or those who have previously engaged with your brand/product/content. Once the campaign goal, budget, and targeting are selected you are ready to launch the promoted pin.

You might think that at this point the work is done, but it’s not. Pinterest offers analytics to help make sure your campaign is reaching your goals, so you can always review them to make changes to your campaign as needed.

Other Ways Publishers Can Advertise On Pinterest

Promoted Pins are not the only way publishers can advertise their products or content on Pinterest. Many use the platform to reach customers organically by posting organic pins and gaining page followers. The great thing about Pinterest is that it has a large network of users, and every time anyone chooses to save your content or follow your accounts page, the material you share gets sent out to an even larger network of Pinners. It is very attainable to get significant reach on Pinterest without spending a lot of money just by regularly posting useful, relevant, and actionable ideas to engage with more Pinners over time.