The numbers vary depending on the source, but the average person takes hundreds of photos on their phone every month with the intention of culling and sharing the best and most meaningful of these on social media. Image-enhancing tools have made anyone with a smartphone and a few apps a visual storyteller. The world of visual communication has exploded in just a few short years and the impact of this has been huge across all mediums.
Content creators attempting to get their messages across can leverage the power of the picture to create meaningful and effective ads with much greater potential for producing higher engagement. Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter all leverage visual elements to varying degrees to drive ecommerce, the familiar icons now a permanent feature across most marketers’ digital identities. A less used icon is the curly “P” denoting Pinterest, the 291 million users strong social media platform known as a tool for people to discover interests, share ideas, and inspire. Now the “P” also stands for Powerful. As the world’s largest digital catalog, it has advantages over other social media platforms that may not be apparent at first glance. Known for being “un-social,” in core philosophy, Pinterest has avoided many of the mistakes made in the race to win by other meteoric social platforms. “Sometimes slow and steady can win the race,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at research firm eMarketer. “By not creating a public forum, they have avoided a lot of the downsides.” Lipsman also notes of Pinterest, “Generally there is a more positive, upbeat vibe to it. It’s not a place where people might feel bad about themselves.”
Digital Scrapbook & Curating Tool
The ideas people find, save, and share on Pinterest are the basis of the user interaction. These “pins” operate in roughly equivalent ways to interfacing with Facebook and Instagram in that Pinterest allows businesses to create ads around custom audiences, interest groups, and keyword targeting. But unlike other platforms, the attribution reporting on conversions and revenue includes a campaign-wide lookback window, whereas most platforms have inflexible lookback windows that are fixed. The reported return on ad spend changes daily, the window allowing marketers to actually see the number of conversions and how they should be attributed for which days. The second Pinterest power source is it’s highly engaged user-base. Around 70% of women on Pinterest use and save style pins every week. This combined with strong purchase intent makes Pinterest a natural fit for ecommerce, it currently ranks third place for generating daily referral traffic from a social media outlet. It may have been easy to underestimate this platform in the past, but times have changed, and the unique value of Pinterest has come into its own.
Exposure on Pinterest comes from inspiring users hitting the “share the pin” button as often as possible, allowing the platform to connect potential customers with page links and networks, showcasing products and websites. Success means motivating the pinner to take action that makes them part of your advertising team. Promoting on social often means paying on a cost per view basis, but Pinterest charges on cost per click making it more comparable to direct response marketing where campaign goals are action-oriented. Unlike other social media platforms, video ads automatically autoplay on Pinterest, maximizing the viewing potential of the creative and increasing the odds of engagement. Plus, on Pinterest, you can choose the aspect ratio that best suits the creative that you want to present. Instead of worrying about cropping your creative to fit the page, and risk losing key visual cues, Pinterest allows more flexibility in video formats than Facebook and Instagram. Making Pinterest work for you still starts with visually appealing pins that help catch attention and inspire. A successful Pinterest Pin advises how to use a product or service, so in order to make the most of the medium one must disguise marketed pins as organic pins.
Shopping Directly From Images
Pinterest is making the most of its current momentum, introducing new technologies to further streamline the tools most valuable to an ecommerce funnel. For example, they’ve removed the human element from “Shop the Look” pins, automating the process of matching product links to the pins users are exploring in order to create recommendations. Bypassing the human-in-the-loop process began with home decor, but there are big plans on the horizon.
“In the long term, the scene images are great resources to learn the relationship between objects, i.e. what objects complement each other or go well together in a certain style. We hope to leverage this rich data of object occurrence and build a sophisticated object graph for every object in the world, making Pinterest a personalized stylist for home, fashion and more,” said Pinterest engineer Kunlong Gu earlier this year.
Since 97% of the 1000 most popular searches on Pinterest are non-branded, this automated product referral tech means consumers are connecting faster and able to see instantly how a particular item “will work” in the larger context of their home, wardrobe, and other environments, removing the hesitation that comes from having to gauge appropriateness against a more abstract background. Product pins take users to information like price, availability, and website information giving pinners everything they need to take action and buy. Ease of product discovery is what really makes planning for Pinterest a strong ecommerce play. There are also buyable pins that can be created by an advertiser, allowing users to click through a pin to a checkout page where they can purchase immediately.
There is an approval process for buyable pins that must be applied for through the advertiser’s ecommerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, but it’s relatively easy to get the pins going. There are no specific number of followers required to make buyable pins, and personal accounts can be transitioned to business accounts making it easy to keep an older profile if needed. Pinterest has been highly effective for products and services, and an increasing number of businesses are adding the “share on Pinterest” button to their websites all the time. Overlooking Pinterest means missing out on untapped potential. With around three-fourths of pinners having made purchases after engaging with business content on Pinterest, it can be an amazing way for advertisers to win.
Curious on how to grow with Pinterest? Contact us to discuss a media strategy for your brand.
