Finding innovative ways to reach your target audience and get more sales is the heart of what digital marketing is all about. Advertising on Pinterest offers a way to visually connect with your customers and broaden your reach all across the web.
In this guide we will be looking at a few of the best Pinterest advertising benefits and how using these tactics can push your eCommerce business in the right direction. Whether you are trying to attract new customers, strengthen your brand image, or reach your sales goals, this unique social media platform should definitely be a big part of the picture.
What is Pinterest Advertising?
Like most of the big-name social media platforms, Pinterest offers an assortment of powerful advertising options that make it easy to send targeted traffic to your website.
Pinterest is a highly visual platform like Instagram, so the ad creatives flow naturally in user feeds and are completely unobtrusive. Ads on Pinterest look like any other normal pin, yet instead of a little user tag at the bottom, you will see “Promoted by” followed by the usual user information.
Much like other social media platforms, these “promoted” pins function just like ordinary ones in the sense that they can be saved to user boards and shared around the platform. It’s easy to see why Pinterest marketing could be used to improve your online store on multiple fronts.
What’s notable about advertising on Pinterest is that it is already well known that people use the platform to shop on. In fact, it is said to have the highest eCommerce conversion rate of any social media platform. This is due to a mix of factors, such as the demographics on the platform and the positive, inspirational nature of the content that the platform is known for.
While this does limit the effectiveness of certain kinds of products and niches, in general you can utilize Pinterest advertising to strengthen your brand presence and create more customers regardless of the industry you are in.
Why Pinterest is Beneficial For eCommerce
While Pinterest is an excellent advertising platform for just about any kind of business, it truly excels as an eCommerce marketing platform. Users are already on the platform specifically to “window shop” and browse for inspiration. Even more so than Instagram, it’s a platform that seems almost hand-tailored to promote products and encourage shoppers to click and buy.
One of the core features of Pinterest helps to make it such a powerful marketing tool: the ability for users to “pin” what they like to their own boards.
Whereas on most social media platforms, an individual post or ad has a very short lifespan in terms of how long it will organically show up in user’s feeds, Pinterest is completely different. This is because Pinterest is one part social media platform, one part search engine. As long as your pins have a keyword-rich title and description, users can actually find your pin regardless of how long ago it was created. Pins that are several years old are still organically making the rounds on the platform, and as users discover these pins, they place them in their own personal collections to be viewed and possibly clicked later on.
A pin is a great way to promote your products, and with Pinterest’s native eCommerce advertising features, boosting these pins and attracting a ton of traffic is a breeze.
The potential is truly limitless as far as your marketing strategy is concerned. And though there are certainly larger and more popular platforms out there, Pinterest is still growing and enjoys a healthy user base that is active and statistically proven to convert. Utilizing what the platform has to offer for your eCommerce marketing goals makes perfect sense.
Below we will highlight 3 of the biggest Pinterest advertising benefits that are worth pursuing if you want to strengthen your eCommerce store.
1. More Traffic and Sales For Your Store
With any avenue of digital marketing, traffic and sales are always going to be at the forefront of the conversation. Pinterest ad campaigns are often used for this one specific purpose, and with the platform’s excellent targeting options, there is ample opportunity for incredible results.
Why are pins effective at driving traffic? There are a number of reasons:
- Rich pins include plenty of valuable information that provides a sense of authority.
- Unlike ads on other platforms, pin ads feature a wealth of useful information that can inform the user as to what they are clicking on. This results in better CPC.
- A pin ad can be saved by Pinterest users and will remain in circulation even after you have stopped that campaign. Your ads effectively “live on” after your budget has ran out.
- Pins are extremely clickable, and unlike other kinds of social media ads where you might have to click on a specific call to action button, the entire graphic is clickable, as is the title of the pin. This makes it easy for users to click without a second thought.
- Pinterest campaigns synchronize well with your store. If a pin image matches your product graphics and if the pin title matches the product name, it’s like a green light for shoppers. The pin is like a representation of the product itself.
- Both promoted pins and regular pins can “go viral.” This social media x factor is not easily controllable but is something that can bring a ton of traffic and sales your way. You can increase your chance of a pin going viral if you ride trends and invest a lot of time in creating engaging graphics and catchy titles.
- Pinterest has native eCommerce features including product tagging. This means you can essentially display a product inside of a pin and allow users to click on the specific product within the image.
- Pinterest doesn’t have nearly as much competition as other social platforms, especially in certain niche markets. This means that with a solid strategy and the right direction, you can effortlessly outbid most of your competitors, including big box stores that aren’t leveraging the platform properly.
- You can use video ads on Pinterest too. While static images are still the go to medium on the platform, the careful use of a video can stand out in a static feed and act to draw the eye very easily.
- When your website is verified with Pinterest for rich pins, all of the pins you make on the platform will have your brand’s logo next to them. If you are a recognized name in your space, this simply invites a user to click and find out what you are offering.
2. Create an Active Community Around Your Brand
Content on Pinterest is great for building brand awareness and developing an active community that goes beyond simply traffic and sales numbers. While Pinterest isn’t an overly “social” platform, this actually works to your benefit, because it fosters a more positive environment.
There are a lot of ways you can use this social media platform to attract customers and strengthen your brand authority. For instance, you can create boards specifically for informational purposes related to your products. These boards could link directly back to your blog rather than your product pages.
Another great feature is that Pinterest allows users to upload photos and comments to your pins in order to review or “try” the product in question. Much like an Amazon review or Etsy review but a little more personalized, this is a great way to communicate with prospective shoppers or those who have already bought your products. When users find these pins and see happy customers and intrigued fans, it lends a ton of credibility to your business.
While the most common reason to run a Pinterest ad campaign is to get more traffic and improve your sales, you can also choose a different kind of campaign that focuses solely on user engagement and followers on the platform itself. You can actually work on making your Pinterest account almost behave like a separate arm of your store, with collections pages and a customer support system that amplifies your brand.
Pinterest advertising is a great way to help users find your products and connect with your brand on a more personal level.
As mentioned above, verified pins actually include your logo right on them (if that’s what you have set your profile picture to). This can be a powerful way to build brand awareness, because as your pin reaches more users, it will spread the visibility of your brand automatically.
Another great feature of Pinterest is that it allows you to set up collaborative boards with other users.
This has plenty of applications, such as influencer partnerships, brand collaborations, and even boards you share with your users just for fun. These “group boards” as they are called can also give you the freedom to promote content other than your own. It’s important to note that as a Pinterest business account, you are still free to share any content you see on the platform on your own boards. This can engender trust with your followers, as they will see that you are invested in your own niche.
Although it might seem as though other social media platforms would be better at building out your brand on, Pinterest works amazingly well for raw brand awareness and creating a positive community that is specifically eCommerce focused.
3. Index Your Products All Over The Web
This is perhaps one of the most underrated benefits of Pinterest as a platform. We mentioned earlier that Pinterest acted partially like a search engine, and that content is discovered on the platform by way of keywords and descriptions.
This much is true, and alone it stands as one of the best Pinterest advertising benefits as it gives you control over how searchable your content is on the platform. However, the fact that eCommerce SEO is factored into the equation extends beyond the platform itself, and onto Google.
Unlike the majority of social media content out there, Pinterest boards or collections pages actually rank well in Google itself. What this effectively means is that as your Pinterest account grows, if you optimize your account properly within the scope of an eCommerce marketing campaign, you will actually have a chance at ranking your Pinterest content organically in Google. This is equivalent to ranking one of the category pages on your own website, and can be an incredibly powerful way to increase traffic to your website and improve all aspects of your eCommerce business.
Of course, because Pinterest is a visual platform, you can also get your individual pins to rank in Google Image search results as well. Since pins have permanence and will outlive your ad budget (especially if they have been pinned by other users), you can theoretically create an ad that may also appear in image searches depending on the keywords that are used. While these are periphery benefits, they do stand as possibilities to strive for when working on a Pinterest advertising campaign.
Getting Started With Pinterest Advertising Services
From beautiful graphics that are expertly targeted to specific eCommerce demographics, to informative-rich boards that have the potential to rank in Google, it’s obvious that if you aren’t already advertising on Pinterest, you need to start immediately. This platform has crazy untapped potential for helping your business grow.
If you want to start utilizing this incredible social media platform for your eCommerce store, you need a team of digital marketers that actually know how to get the most out of the platform. Despite how lucrative the platform can be, most marketing agencies overlook Pinterest because it isn’t the trendy or popular option. However, with comprehensive Pinterest marketing services, you will be able to reach more potential customers, strengthen your brand, and drive highly targeted traffic to all of your hot products.
For Pinterest services that cover all aspects of marketing on the platform, including board creation and custom pin graphics, Genius eCommerce® is the team you need. We are social media marketing experts that focus on eCommerce specifically, which means we know how to put together ad strategies that cater directly to businesses just like yours.
If you have always wanted to get started with Pinterest advertising but weren’t sure how to go about it, now that you see the benefits of doing so, you need a skilled agency that will get you noticed on the platform. Contact our team of Pinterest experts if you are ready to reap the benefits of social media marketing.
