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WebiMax Blog

Digital marketing tips and advice.

Pinterest has released promoted pins. Should your company be using them?

Chris Arter, March 4, 2015

Promoted pins from Pinterest rolled out to the public on January 1st to help small and large businesses connect to the folks that might be interested in their products and messages.  Previous to 2015 Pinterest had tested this feature for a couple years and only a handful of large companies were able to access it, but those companies have noted large spikes in site referrals and web traffic from Pinterest during the course of those campaigns.  So should brands start to utilize promoted pins?  Absolutely, Pinterest is one of the top referral traffic generating websites, so raising brand awareness through promoted pins would be a particularly smart move for many brands.

pinterest on screen

The demographics of Pinterest tends to be higher-earning women who do tend to shop online, and Pinterest users have shown in survey after survey to have higher engagement and be more apt to make purchases than those utilizing other social media networks.  Take Sephora for example, who sold 15 times more on Pinterest than on Facebook.

Sephora is a high-end brand with their own brick and mortar shops.  A small boutique cosmetics brand that can’t necessarily afford to do everything that Sephora does, could still get their products in front of the same group of people that Sephora does online using promoted pins.

Having a great social media campaign on Pinterest doesn’t mean you have to be a multi-million dollar enterprise.  Social Media can act as a great equalizer in that regard.  As of July of 2013, there were 70 million people on Pinterest.  In the U.S. 20% of all women who use the internet have a Pinterest account.  Reaching a small fraction of that audience with a coordinated targeted social media campaign can mean big money for a small business.

How it works:

In a basic sense, you can consider your Pinterest page to be like a virtual store front, and the people who follow you to be the people that know your business exists.  Every time you pin something in your “store front,” the only people who see that pin is that small group of people who already know about your business, your existing followers.  Promoting on Pinterest allows your pins to reach outside that small group of followers, and into the vast sea of people who do not.

  • First you pick the pin that you’d like to promote, then you have options that help your pin reach the right people, things like keywords, location, language, device (web, iphone, android), and gender among others.
  • After that you input your cost per click or (CPC) bid, which is what you are willing to pay when someone clicks through to your page from the pin. You can choose start and end dates and your daily budget.
  • There are some guidelines that restrict what marketers can put in the descriptions, things like pricing and hash tags aren’t allowed.
  • After you have promoted your pin, you can track analytics like impressions, re-pins, clicks, and what you’ve spent. By seeing what works and what doesn’t, you can better mold your campaign, and Pinterest allows you to do this during the campaign.

Sticking with the cosmetics theme, if a brand can get its products in front of a group of people, whom we already know buy cosmetics online, then that brand should start to see their engagement, web-traffic and sales start to increase.   They will start to compete, on a small scale of course, but still compete with the likes of Sephora.  New customers will talk about the brand and products and real organic growth will begin to occur.

All social media helps to raise brand awareness, but Pinterest is geared much more towards either projects, things you have to try, or things you have to buy.  Pins and boards effortlessly take on a format more reminiscent of a catalogue of items with a common theme and less like the Facebook format of scrolling through a message board of ‘anything goes.’  The bottom line is your competitors will figure this out, and your competitors are now anyone who can ship a product.  Also the fact that Pinterest is utilizing a Cost per Click or CPC strategy rather than a Cost Per Impression strategy is a good indicator that Pinterest is looking to provide a product that will also work for small to medium size businesses.

And if  you don't have a dedicated online marketing team working for you, the digital marketing experts at WebiMax can help set your business up with an entire social media campaign that includes promoted pins.  Call today at 1-888-932 4629 to hear how social media and our other digital marketing services can help bring your business to the next level.

Need an Expert Contributor?

Ken Wisnefski is a seasoned web entrepreneur and a frequent contributor to news outlets and business publications. Ken’s vast knowledge of how to make online businesses succeed has made him a sought after consultant from businesses wishing to improve their online initiatives. Contact pr@webimax.com to collaborate!

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