How to Know if Pinterest is the Right Platform for Your Brand
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Social media marketing is a massive part of promoting your business. Your customers are using these platforms for everything from grabbing the latest updates from the family to checking the news. They also use it to shop, to check out a brand and much more. That’s why you need to have a presence on them – but that’s a lot of work. Here we are going to chat about my favourite, Pinterest and if it is the right platform for your brand.
Table of Contents
The Pinterest factor
There’s a lot of buzz around Pinterest of late in business circles. Bloggers have known for a while that this is a great place to spread the word about what you do, and many businesses are realising its potential too.
Pinterest’s active user base grew by 26% in 2019 to reach 335 million. It rates third place in the US for social media platforms behind Facebook and Instagram or fourth if you add in YouTube (which isn’t really a social media site any more than Pinterest is).
While women still dominate Pinterest, the growth in male users is increasing. And more than half of users are outside the US so don’t feel that you can only use it if you are targeting a US audience. In fact, 43% of internet users have a Pinterest account, whether active or not.
Pinterest sees 2 billion searches every month and some 600 million of these are visual – it is a visual search engine after all! Video is also growing rapidly on the platform with there being six times as many videos on there in 2019 as there were in 2018. Finally, 85% of users are on mobile so always think small screen when you plan your visual content.
A massive 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded. That means people search for what they want rather than searching for a brand – blue sneakers rather than Nike sneakers. But users have shopping in mind with nearly half of them looking to buy something when searching on Pinterest.
Research your audience
This all means that there’s power in them Pins. But that doesn’t mean you should go all in – you first need to do some demographic research to make sure your audience is there. Look at the information about your audience and your customers – age, gender, location, interests and all that good stuff. Then compare it to the average user for Pinterest and see if you have overlaps.
Most of the time you will but if you are exclusively selling to 80+ males in Greenland, it might not be the right platform for your brand.
Is your brand visual?
The key to Pinterest is the Pins – these are essentially visual representations of your product, service or blog post that needs to catch the eye of the reader. Now if your brand is not at all visual, can’t find a way to make visuals that represent what you do or doesn’t have a photo or graphics friendly content, then it might not be the one for you.
That said, there are still ways to use Pinterest, even for these businesses. Quotes are one good example – they are a great way to engage with people, inspire them and to create brand awareness. And the use of good quality stock photos is a great way to represent even the least photo-able product or service.
Do you have time for Pinterest?
The last thing to consider is if you have the time and resources to dedicate to Pinterest. It does take time to get results from Pinterest, building a profile, getting your Pins noticed and all the rest. You can’t pop in a few pins, see a load of traffic and get lots of new customers.
There is another option – you can use a Pinterest manager to do it for you. This is where someone takes on some or all of the work of Pinterest for your business. Services can include setting up or making over an account, creating new boards, adding pins for new products or posts, finding group boards to further spread content and even running the whole account on a monthly basis for you. If you don’t have someone in-house who can handle the job of Pinterest, then this is definitely an option to think about.
Is Pinterest the right platform for your brand?
Pinterest is a very important part of any marketing strategy. It is different to the other sites out there, not really being a social media site at all. It does require time and work to get returns but it can become one of your top sources of traffic when that work pays off. And it is definitely a fun site to work with!
