Pinterest Advertising: What It Is & Why You Should Be Using It

From fashion inspiration to meal prep tips, Pinterest is a treasure trove of stunning visuals, lifehacks, and more. With an astounding 335 million active monthly users, it’s also a valuable marketing tool for businesses in a variety of industries. After all, many of those users have the potential to become customers and even brand loyalists.

The platform itself is easy to use, and for people who have adopted it into their lives, it’s become an essential social media site for all sorts of hobbies and interests. In other words, if you’re looking to reach your target audience, you’ll likely find them on Pinterest. Even better, Pinterest offers paid advertising capabilities that allow you to promote your pins to specific users based on their demographics, behaviors, and more.

Below, we’re taking a closer look at:

• What Pinterest Advertising Is
• The Benefits of Pinterest Advertising
• How to Use Pinterest to Increase Brand Authority and Awareness
• How to Use Pinterest to Engage with Your Audience

Let’s dive in!

What Is Pinterest Advertising?

Much like advertising on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, Pinterest offers various ad types that marketers can use to get their products and other content in front of specific Pinners. These include:

• Standard Promoted Pins – Static images that behave the same way non-promoted Pins do. However, they are boosted and targeted to ensure a wider reach.
• Promoted Video Pins – Short videos that appear in the home feed, within search results, and in the “More Like This” section.
• Promoted Carousel Pins – Carousels with two to five images that users can swipe through. This ad type appears wherever standard Pins can and are an excellent option for showcasing multiple products or selling points.
• Promoted Shopping Pins – Ads that allow brands to upload products from their catalog and turn them into Promoted Pins. This is ideal for driving conversions, as they enable Pinners to view product information quickly.
• Promoted Collections – Collections ads that appear as a combination of one large image and three smaller ones. This allows you to show your products in action, cross-sell different items, and more.

Benefits of Advertising on Pinterest

Whether organically or through paid advertising, it’s critical to get traffic to your site to increase sales and leads. Because Pinterest drives more traffic to sites than LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube combined, promoting your Pins is a great way to reach a wider audience. Even better, virtually every page on your website can be converted into a pin, including your blog posts, FAQs, and individual product pages.

The visual-first nature of Pinterest ads also allows them to blend seamlessly into the platform, fostering a better experience for users (and better results for advertisers). Plus, Pins have a long lifetime value, meaning they’ll circulate for weeks and even months as they keep getting “re-pinned.”

Of course, with any advertising campaign, you want to get the most value for your ad spend. According to Pinterest, Promoted Pins have a 2.3x more efficient cost per conversion than ads on other social media platforms. Additionally, retail brands often see double the return on ad spend than they would on Instagram or Facebook.

Using Pinterest to Increase Brand Authority and Awareness

Pinterest enables marketers to give their brands a legitimate online presence. Once you get verified, you can customize your Pinterest options to your business, providing educational and relevant information to your audience along the way. Pinterest gives companies the ability to humanize their brands by following and engaging with other similar accounts and their followers.

Additionally, Pinterest offers a variety of targeting tools to ensure your ads are served to people who are likely to be interested in your brand. Choose from six main options, including:

• Automated targeting, where Pinterest selects a target audience based on information from your Pin.
• Demographics, which allows you to target users based on age, gender, location, and language.
• Interests, which lets you target users based on topics they like, such as women’s fashion or baking.
• Keywords, which targets users based on the search terms they use.
• Customer lists, which allow you to upload a list of users who have already engaged with your brand.
• Actalikes, which are audiences that are similar to your existing customers in terms of interests and behaviors.

By selecting the right targeting option for your goals, you can make sure your ads are seen by the right users at the right time, increasing your brand awareness.

Using Pinterest to Engage with Your Audience

One of the best ways to help your audience feel involved with and connected to your brand is to create aesthetic boards that showcase your products and services. It’s important to design promoted and non-promotes pins that will be shared on similar boards, so you can expand your brand’s reach and interact with other like-minded consumers who may not have found you otherwise.

Pin Your Way to Better Results with Pinterest Advertising

Ready to take advantage of everything Pinterest has to offer for your paid advertising campaigns? The experts at Zero Gravity Marketing are here to help. Contact us today to learn more!