Why should brands be present on Pinterest?

On Pinterest, people are actively looking for ideas and inspiration, but also for a solution, so as a brand it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Inspiring people by giving them ideas. Don’t push your product, but instead give them suggestions on how to use your product. In Belgium for example, over 1 million unique monthly visitors are using Pinterest to be inspired or get ideas for daily decisions, seasonal periods or life moments.

People use Pinterest to plan their future

When people go to Pinterest, they search for a reason. They are actively considering what to do or buy next. When you buy a home or are looking to redecorate, Pinterest will give you ideas on furniture, how to optimize your laundry room or create fun assets for the nursery. This means that Pinterest is used to plan for the future.

It is a discrete form of advertising

Nowadays, people are averse to advertisements. On Facebook, for example, it’s clear when you see a sponsored ad. As a brand, you can advertise your products on Pinterest in a non-pushy way. Even organic pins can generate purchases. A pin is an image, video or carousel, accompanied by a description, a headline and a URL. You can compare a pin on Pinterest to a tweet on Twitter. 75% of the pins come from brands, 50% of people don’t realize they are seeing ads. Not every ad is boosted. You can compare it to SEO on Google, if your pin has a good headline and description and the search term matches the headline or description, your pin will appear in the search results.

It is perfect for organic campaigns

Create boards, add a description and a category and fill it with pins. If you just show your product and place it in the right category, people will find it organically. If they are liking what they see, they will click through and go to your website. It’s as simple as that. For example, if you sell personalised cufflinks, you can create a board with examples of these cufflinks and place it under the category “weddings”. When people are looking for a “wedding gift for the father of the bride” your pin will appear. A colleague of mine has a food blog, Hap en Tap, she only creates organic pins of recipes that she makes. She reaches 476K monthly unique viewers and generates almost 2 million impressions a month.?Pinterest can generate plenty of traffic to the website with organic content. Hap en Tap has an average of 500K website visitors each year. Pinterest generates 43% of the website traffic and is thereby the biggest referrer.?So, a small business with not a lot of resources can come a long way with good organic content.

It is ideal for lesser known brands

As a smaller brand, you can first create organic pins, make boards and see how people interact with your content. Later on, you can start by sponsoring pins. You can easily start small, or you can set up a well thought out campaign. Let me give you an example; if you're a brand that sells makeup and you have a product line of eyeliners. You can create content, such as images of every eyeliner with an explanation of what they do and post these pins organically. You can also create a few infographics for example about the best eyeliner for your eye shape and how-to videos about creating the perfect winged eyeliner. You can analyse how people interact with your content. Later on, when you launch a new product, you can create a campaign around it, work with a funnel to push people towards conversions. For example, if you launch a new lipstick. You know from your organic content that the how-to videos generate plenty of views. You can start by showing people interested in makeup a video where you explain how to create  perfect red lips, then you can retarget the video viewers, as well as the people that have already interacted with your organic content with a pin of the lipstick. Because these people have already interacted with your content, you know that they will convert more easily.

It is easy to target the right people

When you set up a sponsored campaign, you can easily reach your target audience. You can select the audience based on their interest or on keywords. Keywords are the search terms people use while on Pinterest. You can go really narrow, or really broad, depending on your objectives.The age group 25-49 years old are most present on Pinterest.On Pinterest, when you set up a sponsored campaign, you can target people based on interests but also based on keywords.If you are a florist, for example, you can target people based on an interest in flowers, home floral arrangements, wedding flowers etc… but you can also use keywords such as flower decor, home flowers, flower decoration DIY… It all depends on the content and the objective of the campaign; or you can A/B test both to see what works best for your brand. For example, a florist can create a video where he shows how to make flower decorations for your dinner table. He can set up the campaign twice, in campaign A he targets people with an interest in home floral arrangements and in campaign B, he targets the keywords: home flower decorations DIY, how to make flower decorations… to see what works best. Pinterest gives you the opportunity to reach people in a discrete way when they are actively searching for ideas. It’s also a plus when you as a brand are present on multiple platforms to create more awareness. With organic pins, you can come a long way. Find out how people interact with your content, A/B test when necessary. Grow your account and see what works best for your brand. If you decide to start with Pinterest, make sure that you adapt your content to Pinterest. The perk of Pinterest as said before is that people don’t realize they're seeing content made by brands. Start by creating an account and fill your home feed with content that fits your brand identity. Good luck!