July 11, 2017
If you don’t stop believing that Pinterest is just for brides planning their weddings, you’re going to miss out on a huge advertising opportunity for your business. Pinterest is ALSO for the maids of honor.
Joking.
Pinterest is for anyone that’s planning for future life events, no matter how significant or mundane. With over 175M active users, it’s time that advertisers stop pushing Pinterest to the side.
At Hanapin Marketing, we recently discussed the latest and greatest of Pinterest with our Agency Specialist. It was a great reminder of the unique value Pinterest brings to your digital advertising portfolio. My goal for this blog is to share some of my takeaways regarding audience reach in the hopes that it will push you to consider the value that Pinterest could bring to your brand.
What Unique Value Does Pinterest Provide?
Pinterest has always been uniquely positioned to stand out among “social platforms,” mainly because it’s not a social platform at all. It’s a planning platform. There’s a social component, but we, the Pinterest Pinners, don’t go there to check in on friends. We go to Pinterest for IDEAS. Yes, it’s “social” in that the ideas are shared from one person or brand to another, but the IDEAS are the focus, not the people behind the ideas.
That being said, as advertisers, our top priority is still the potential reach of an advertising platform. We need to know who is using this platform that might also be interested in my product or service?
Who Is Using Pinterest?
Pinterest has had phenomenal growth over the last several years. In October 2016, Pinterest announced that its community of Pinners had grown to 150m, with 70m of those in the U.S. That’s one of every four internet users in the U.S. The total number of Pinners has since grown to 175M and is about 50/50 in terms of U.S traffic versus international traffic. Those 175M users have pinned 100B pins on 1.5B boards. Sure, 3B of those pins are about getting married. (As a 3-time Maid of Honor, about 1M of those pins are from me) That still leaves 97% of pins to a variety of other topics and industries.
Our Agency Strategist shared several industry breakdowns with us, but here are the ones that surprised me most. I’ve also included some of the first pins that I see in my feed when I use the most common search terms for that industry.
Travel
- Last year alone, 780 million travel pins were saved
- One in five U.S travelers visits Pinterest
Retail – Men’s Apparel
- 1 in 2 active males make a promoted pin purchase across fashion, clothing, exercise, and fitness
Movies
- 1 in 5 people who rented or purchased a movie in the last 6 months are Pinterest users
- 1M movie-related searches
- 2x YoY increase in the volume of saved movie ideas
Finance
- 75M finance ideas
- 12M finance searches
Those industry statistics wouldn’t be as exciting to me, as an advertiser, if the user demographics weren’t diverse. Here are the most recent Pinterest statistics on reach:
Pinterest reach (in the U.S)
- 3 of every 4 moms
- 1 of every 3 dads
- 1 of every 2 Millennials
- 2 of every 5 high-income households
It’s hard to think of a persona that wouldn’t fall into those groups. I think it’s safe to say that your target audience is on Pinterest. Maybe not all of them…but enough of them.
What Do These Metrics Mean For Advertisers?
If Pinterest pins had no correlation to future sales, these audience reach metrics are useless. But would I have written an entire blog post about Pinterest if it had no influence on future sales?
Here are the two statistics that really drive home the value of Pinterest to advertisers.
- 93% of Pinners use Pinterest to plan for things they want to buy.
- 87% of Pinners purchased something because of Pinterest
I think the key phrase here is, “because of Pinterest.” It’s NOT “87% of Pinners purchased something ON or FROM Pinterest.”
I could pin a random pin of a blue sweater in a style that I like. Two weeks later, I could use that pin as inspiration while shopping at Express and I’d buy a similar sweater “because of Pinterest.” The original pin might have been from a blog or it could have been posted by a competitor of Express.
This is one aspect of Pinterest that I think scares advertisers away. “What if I spend MY budget to create beautiful content for Pinterest, potential customers repin the ad, but my pins only become an inspiration to purchase from another brand?” While this scenario might be more painfully obvious on Pinterest, shoppers already do that EVERY DAY. It’s called shopping. It’s your job as an advertiser to make a compelling case for YOUR brand.
Advertising on Pinterest is like Inception. You’re planting an idea in someone’s head and you’re playing the long-game.
According to a study by Millward Brown Digital, people start shopping on Pinterest up to 2 months before they use other platforms. As a Pinterest advertiser, you can plant an idea (your brand) in someone’s head TWO MONTHS before they start using search platforms to find products or services. Use Pinterest to get in their heads FIRST. You don’t even have to worry about the long-term memory of your audience. They don’t have to remember EXACTLY what your brand was because they pinned your ad on their board for future reference. You’re RIGHT THERE when they start to seriously consider purchase options.
What’s The Verdict?
Your audience is on Pinterest and you can influence their future purchases up to 2 months before you could on other advertising platforms. That’s a huge opportunity to get ahead of your competitors (unless they’re ALL already Pinterest ad pros…which I doubt).
If you have the budget for testing new PPC campaigns and you have great content, you should be testing Pinterest ads.