Pinterest Advertising: Is It Good for Generating Sales?
Pinterest is a popular photo-hosting social network where users from all over the world can post pictures and photos they like, distribute them among collections, and share with other users. Like any other social network, Pinterest can be used to promote your business.
How does Pinterest advertising work? That is what we are going to discuss in our article.
Why Is Pinterest Interesting for Sales?
Pinterest is a popular social network among those who love nice pictures. There is no interactivity as with Instagram users, but there is an opportunity to make visual content viral. Infographics, author’s illustrations, original photographs – all of these have a chance of gaining great save rates.
Thus, Pinterest can and has to be used for the promotion of a business.
The main difference between Pinterest and other social platforms is that users save content for the future. Users can search for images in the following ways:
- description (keyword);
- interests (built-in intelligence independently selects pictures identical to those that the user tagged earlier);
- categories (there are many categories on Pinterest with content sorted between them);
- boards of those to whom the user is subscribed.
Pinterest: Facts & Statistics
Do you know that 90 % of users utilize Pinterest to make up their mind about making a purchase? That is, they save pictures of the products they like (usually clothes and shoes) to choose the best items later.
Also, 78 % of users claim that the visual information that brands display on their boards is helpful to them. Is that not a reason to use Pinterest to generate sales?
Of course, the platform is not suitable for all types of business. Therefore, before you start investing your time and money into promoting a business profile on Pinterest, it is crucial to make sure that it is right for you.
How Effective Can Promotion on Pinterest Be?
Are Pinterest ads effective? The effectiveness of promoting on Pinterest depends directly on several factors:
- selection of pictures;
- keywords used to describe pictures;
- setting up targeting;
- matching the target audience of the business to the target audience of Pinterest.
What Kind of Businesses Can Pinterest Help?
It is best for promoting products on e-commerce sites. The platform covers all stages of the sales funnel, from familiarizing the consumer with the product and ending with the decision to make a purchase.
This tool also works with offline products/services, but in this case, you will have to find out how often the local target audience uses Pinterest for their purposes since it is not popular in all countries.
An important note: Before you think about using Pinterest for promotion, make sure Pinterest ads are available in your country. The list of countries that support it can be viewed here.
Examples and Criteria for Successful Advertising on Pinterest
One of the most striking examples of successful interaction between business and Pinterest is Polyvore, an online store offering clothes and accessories, which is now closed. It was one of the first to use Pinterest to create collages with outfits. Later, global giants of the fashion media business, such as Marie Claire and Vogue joined this practice, however, not for sales, but to increase brand awareness.
Let’s consider several criteria for a quality Pinterest image:
- Correct form. The vast majority of pins are in portrait orientation. You can either make the pin even taller (it is usually ideal for infographic pins) or wider (you do not need to get carried away here, consider mobile users with narrow gadget screens).
- Attractive colors. Behind the scenes, it is believed that the main color scheme of Pinterest is pastel shades. You can stand out favorably against their background if you use the brightest, contrasting tones.
- Legible font. Remember that the prominent users of social networks are the owners of mobile devices. Therefore, the font must be visible.
- Animated elements. The animation is a relatively new trend on Pinterest. It is quite challenging to implement it without the help of professionals; however, it is worth it. Just check out this pin from Adidas. It stands out favorably from the rest.
- Presence of people/people’s faces. Yes, yes, no matter how strange it may sound, having people’s faces in the Pin helps to increase the rate of views, saves, and completion of targeted actions.
For Whom Is Pinterest Not Suitable?
Mostly, it is a local offline business. In principle, promoting on Pinterest is most relevant for e-commerce- here you can immediately indicate a link for the store.
How to Use Pinterest For Advertising: A Short Guide
So, let’s take a look at six easy steps for launching your first Pinterest ad.
Create Your Board and Wait a While
First, you need to create a board with your brand or company name. In addition to creating a regular profile, you need to register your business account. Also, define your target audience, confirm the ownership of the pins, and you can use the designer tool to create collages that will help you sell.
Now, let’s talk about the formatting of a board. If you are promoting your brand, then there should be nothing but the author’s high-resolution pictures.
If you are a company that provides services (for example, in the field of IT), you can create an Inspiration folder and add pictures you like in it, which are identical to those in the folder with your author’s content. It will help increase the number of subscribers.
Remember, the profile must exist for at least a month to see the first results from ads.
Study the Statistics of Views
According to Pinterest statistics, this network is used by 52% of Millenials. Also, two-thirds of Pinterest’s users are women (mostly mothers); this gives an understanding of what kind of audience to expect on the board.
Nevertheless, to clearly understand that your pins correspond to the expected target audience, you will need to monitor the statistics of visits- by gender, age, location, gadgets, and focus on these indicators in the future.
Choose the Right Images
In the previous paragraph, we talked about the criteria for determining which images are suitable for promotion.
Quality is equally important. All photos must be taken in a studio, with professional processing and in high resolution (with a minimum width of 600 pixels and a height-to-width aspect ratio of 1:3:5). Otherwise, there is practically no chance that your picture will be noticed in the stream of thousands of others.
Describe Images
At this stage, it is essential to choose the correct keywords for your description. Usually, there are no problems with this. However, creating text in the proper format is critical.
Your description should be as concise as possible (this is a social media site, not Facebook), brand awareness pins, and pins intended to sell products should be described differently.
So, the first option implies a brief disclosure of some history (for example, under the new model of Reebok sneakers, you can write that they have been created under the influence of the classic Club C model).
As for the second option, it is better to briefly mention the problem and the way to solve it, of course, with the help of your product or service. For example: “Can’t grow your hair? Use our new line of Dove products, and you can forget about scissors for at least six months.”
Create Rich Pins
Rich pins also contain information that is synchronized with the data of the product/service on the site and a clickable link. If you are promoting an online store, then 90% of your Pins should be like that.
Business Pinterest
In addition to commercial Reach Pins, there are Rich Pins with recipes that indicate the ingredient measurements, cooking times, and other details. These pins are suitable for culinary sites.
The third type of pins is those with links to articles. They contain the title and description of the article, as well as the starting image. It is ideal for blogging sites.
You can create a Reach Pin in the standard constructor by adding the appropriate meta tag. Here is a detailed guide on how to do this. The Canva service will also come in handy as you will be able to create collages with it. We encourage spending the dollar to save an image of high quality.
Create Ads for Promotion
For this, you have to open the Pinterest ads manager. Everything is clear and understandable. First, specify the purpose of the advertising campaign. It will determine the Pinterest ads cost – for a transition to the site or for a click on the pin itself. Next, you need to select the most popular pin for the last 30 days on your board, and it will be used for promotion.
After that, you should go through the tabs: Terms (keywords, according to the recommendations of Pinterest itself, there should be about 20-30 keywords), Locations, Languages, Devices, and Genders – they are needed so that the service understands which users should see your pin.
By the way, here is an excellent video on the creation of a promoted pin.
The more pins you promote, the greater the chance the ad will work!
When Should You Expect the First Results From Promotion?
As a rule, the initial results from a Pinterest promotion appear within 5-7 days after the launch of paid ads. In general, this is not SEO, the results of which will be visible in a month in the best case.
Promoting on Pinterest: The Pros and Cons
Is it worth it to promote your business on Pinterest? As you understand, such promotion has a lot of advantages, among which are:
- ease of implementation;
- quick results;
- relatively low cost;
- ideal for increasing brand awareness;
- no need to attract specialists.
As for the disadvantages, they are:
- not all niches have this opportunity or themes that allow for visualization;
- the need to create images of the necessary format;
- lack of Pinterest advertising service in some countries (all other users see Pinterest without ads).
As you can see, promoting with Pinterest can help brands expand their target audience and increase brand awareness.
Have you ever used Pinterest to promote your business? Has it helped you in increasing sales? Share your Pinterest advertising best practices in the comments!
