There’s nothing more soothing than scrolling through Pinterest looking at all the perfectly tailored images. But what if your brand was part of the mix? While Pinterest certainly isn’t the first platform you think of when you hear “social media advertising,” it can be a solid option for brands looking to reach certain demographics. Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of advertising on Pinterest relates to its competitive pricing that allows you to get more bang for your buck. Intrigued yet? Read on to learn more about advertising on Pinterest in 2021.
What Is Pinterest and Who Uses It?
Pinterest is a unique app that effectively combines the features of a social media platform with those of a search engine. Pinterest describes itself as a “visual discovery engine” that helps you find creative and practical inspiration ranging from things like recipes, home decor, fashion, and more.
Pinterest allows you to search for “pins” and then save them to “boards” with different categories. You browse through different pins with eye-catching visuals before clicking on the pin for more information or a link to an external website. For example, you could have a wedding board, a baking board, and a crafting board. Saving pins to boards allows you to easily access them later or even create an “inspiration board” filled with beautiful pictures to inspire creativity.
While Pinterest isn’t as well-known as other platforms, it still has a huge user base with over 416 million monthly active users — more than half of them in the United States alone. That being said, the platform is working on expanding beyond the borders of the United States, with more than 80% of sign-ups coming from other countries in 2018.
Pinterest is a great platform to use if you’re trying to reach women as your target customers as 71% of Pinterest users are female. More specifically, mothers tend to use this platform — 80% of American mothers who use the internet also use Pinterest. Diving deeper into demographics, 70% of Pinterest users have a college degree and a majority of users earn more than $75,000 a year. In terms of age breakdowns, 34% of Pinterest users are between the ages of 18 and 29 while 35% of Pinterest users are between the ages of 35 and 49.
Based on this information, if you’re looking to target high-income 30-something American mothers with a college degree, Pinterest is probably your best bet!
Why Advertise on Pinterest?
It’s understandable that demographics alone probably won’t convince you to start advertising on a platform like Pinterest. But worry not! Pinterest offers other benefits in addition to reaching your target demographic.
- In 2019, Pinterest generated over $1 billion in advertising.
- 97% of all searches on Pinterest are unbranded — giving you an essentially untapped opportunity to get your brand and content out there for the whole world to see.
- Shopping is a top priority for 48% of Pinterest users. This is a huge improvement over other platforms where people aren’t really looking to shop, like Facebook.
- Consequently, 50% of Pinterest users have made a purchase after seeing a promoted pin that aligned with their interests.
- Pinterest is largely seen as a platform where you can discover new brands and try out new products.
- Pinterest is particularly popular during certain times of the year, like Valentine’s Day and Christmas. If you have a seasonal business, Pinterest is the perfect advertising solution for you.
Different Ways to Advertise on Pinterest
Pinterest is a diverse platform that offers several different formats for advertisers to utilize. We’re going to break them down for you so that you can choose the right approach for your business:
- Image: This ad format involves showcasing your products and content in a vertical or square image format.
- Video: This ad format involves eye-catching graphics to better engage viewers and provide them with more information about your brand and products.
- Shopping: This ad format involves showcasing specific products by converting them into pins and allowing users to shop that exact product on your website.
- Carousel: This ad format involves combining multiple different images that viewers can swipe through to learn more.
- Collections: This ad format involves combining video content with product images to show a real-life application of your products.
Cost of Advertising on Pinterest
So you know all about the benefits and types of advertising on Pinterest…but how much does it cost? The cost of advertising on this platform depends on your campaign goal. There are three different goals to choose from: building brand awareness, boosting engagement, and increasing web traffic.
You can expect to pay between $2.00 to $5.00 per thousand impressions (CPM) if you’re trying to build brand awareness. Boosting online engagement will cost you anywhere between $0.10 and $1.50 per engagement. Finally, driving web traffic will also cost you between $0.10 and $1.50 per engagement.
Pinterest advertising, like other social media platforms, utilizes a bidding model for ad placements. This means that you bid against other competitors for specific keywords and placements. As a result, your advertising costs will vary depending on how much competition you’re dealing with.
For example, say you’re an interior decorating company looking to build brand awareness. This would be a very popular search on Pinterest, and as a result, you can expect to spend around $5 CPM rather than the minimum of $2. On the other hand, if you’re more of a niche brand looking to advertise on less popular searches, you could end up paying around $2 CPM.
Pinterest Advertising Best Practices in 2021
In order to take advantage of this unique platform with its visual searches and competitive advertising options, you need to follow a few best practices to ensure that your content is appropriate and effective:
- Really focus on your visuals since it’s the entire basis of the app. Quality, lighting, and resolution are things to prioritize here.
- Use the rule of thirds where you divide your images into thirds across the vertical and horizontal axis for more visually appealing content.
- But don’t forget your copy — that’s still important too! Short blurbs should give viewers basic information about your brand and leave them wanting to learn more.
- Come up with detailed descriptions for your pins that utilize things like keywords and hashtags so that they’re easily searchable.
- Continuously track the performance of your ads through Pinterest’s analytics. Different data points include impressions, saves, clicks, and likes. Take note of campaigns that are under-performing and make any necessary adjustments to get things back on track.
Using a Pinterest Advertising Agency for Increased Success
If you’re really looking to improve your Pinterest game in 2021, you should consider using a Pinterest ad agency. Even though Pinterest offers an easy-to-use advertising platform, handling this on your own can be overwhelming and unrealistic. After all, odds are that you’re also advertising on other platforms, so can you really afford to dedicate all your time to a single one? Probably not.
That’s where agencies like MuteSix come into play. MuteSix is a performance marketing agency that helps brands scale with creative, targeted media buying and data-driven results. When it comes to handling your Pinterest advertising, MuteSix can help you determine and achieve bold goals and visions for your business.
MuteSix is a full-service agency that will handle all the work from start to finish. We begin with an audit and analysis of your current strategies as well as your industry. From there, we focus on robust creative development to help your content stand out amongst the highly tailored and visually-appealing content found on Pinterest. Next, we test different targeting mechanisms to ensure that we are reaching the right people with the right content to achieve the best possible results. Finally, we optimize and scale to help move your company in the right direction.
We have tons of experience on this platform and have helped our clients enjoy massive success. Take our client Lunya, for example. We came up with a cost-effective strategy for Lunya to increase web traffic and conversions. The results speak for themselves! Lunya experienced more than six million impressions on Pinterest with a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 5.46.
This is just one example of how we can make Pinterest work for you. Feel free to check out a whole host of others, including testimonials, on our website.
Conclusion
As you can see, Pinterest is an economical advertising tactic that you should definitely be using in 2021. This is a less expensive — yet still effective — method that also allows you to avoid much of the competition seen on larger platforms like Facebook and Instagram. However, just because Pinterest is a smaller platform doesn’t mean that you should take it less seriously. Instead, you need to be seriously prioritizing and investing in your Pinterest advertising by working with an agency that can provide you with the best possible results and return on investment.
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