What Is Pinterest? Pinterest as a Marketing Strategy

This platform appeared in January 2010 and owes its name to the English words "pin" and "interest", so that Pinterest would mean something like "stick something interesting on a board with a pin". With its innovative capabilities for posting and organizing images into categories, as well as its powerful visual analytics that find similar content by selecting any part of an image, Pinterest quickly rose to the top of user preferences.

In addition, the ease of configuring boards (those images organized into categories) and enriching them with your own and third-party content made Pinterest a paradise for visual inspiration on a wide variety of topics: fashion, design, furniture, architecture, food, landscapes. , decoration, vehicles, electronics... Come on, there is practically everything. And it could not be otherwise, considering that the network hosts more than 240 billion pins (that is, images or videos) and each month is used by more than 450 million users (a figure that, although respectable, is not compared to the growth levels of other networks, such as TikTok ).

In this scenario, the question for companies is a must: should they use Pinterest as a marketing strategy? Let's go by parts.

What is Pinterest for?

Experts point out that visual content is one of the most powerful tools in a marketing strategy, since images are processed 60,000 times faster than texts ( Neuromarketing.la ). In this sense, with 99% visual content, this network immediately grabs attention. From one image to another suggested by the platform, new accounts are discovered instantly, the most attractive pins are saved, shared through various applications and the imagination begins to fly thinking about how to implement the discovered ideas. Almost without noticing it, users get caught up in a seemingly endless tangle of compelling visual content.

In this scenario it is clear that the answer to the question posed —should brands have a presence on Pinterest?— is answered with a strong statement: it is necessary to take advantage of the power of images and the capabilities of Pinterest to attract new consumers (or female consumers). , one might say, since the ratio between women and men is 3 to 1).

Pinterest as a marketing strategy

Knowing the strengths of the platform (basically the predominance of visual content, the segmentation of the audience and the themes that clearly prevail), below we share some ideas that companies and brands can implement to get the most out of Pinterest. Also check Descargar Videos de Pinterest

1. Pinterest as a product catalog

If one of the goals of using Pinterest is to find ideas or inspiration for the next purchase (whether it's a pair of shoes or a bunk bed for the kids' bedroom), businesses can take advantage of Pinterest boards to create catalogs for their products. The 2,000 boards and 200,000 pins that the platform offers as a maximum for each account represent a perfect showcase to display all the models, designs, colors and varieties of products, which can be purchased with a simple click on the link to the purchase site. to be added to the pin.

Let's look at a concrete example. Through YouScan, a leading social listening platform powered by artificial intelligence, we monitor the topic of clothing on Pinterest. Based on the results obtained with our audience analysis module, we discovered that with almost 2,000 posts between August 8 and September 8, 2022, the Shein brand maintains an active presence in its community of 4.5 million followers, with who share their products, available in their online store through a simple link.

The same result can be seen when analyzing the issue of footwear. MiMao, the Spanish brand that makes "the most comfortable women's shoes," had more than 1,200 posts in the same one-month period, making Pinterest the ideal showcase for its models, a strategy that virtually any brand can follow to attract new customers. In fact, Pinterest offers the functionality to create catalogs connected to eCommerce integrations like Shopify to make it easy for merchants to sell products.

2. Pinterest as a source of creativity

Regardless of the possibility of using Pinterest as a showcase to offer specific products, the platform also represents an excellent opportunity to discover original ideas that can be translated into content, campaigns or marketing strategies for companies.

However, to get to these valuable resources you cannot rely on chance. Monitoring Pinterest with social listening tools allows you to automate processes and create alerts or filters to find those pins that trigger ideas.

Let's look at the example of Starbucks. When analyzing this brand on Pinterest, through YouScan, we can apply a wide variety of filters (geographic targeting, type of image, objects in the image, scenes, people or activities, among many others) that make it easier for us to discover original ideas. The Starbucks cup diaper bag below is a perfect example, along with thousands more that can be found on Pinterest when searching for original brand-related product ideas (of course, this functionality can also be used to analyze what strategies are being used). Implementing the competition and how their audiences respond to them).

Likewise, to validate the popularity of these ideas, it is enough to order the search results taking as criteria the number of duplicates of the pin (the more duplicates, the more viral the content), a YouScan functionality that allows you to optimize the time dedicated to the analysis of the information. And get rid of manual monitoring.

3. Pinterest as a collaborative space

Another of Pinterest's great strengths lies in the possibility of including the pins of other accounts or users on their own boards. Why is this an advantage? In the first place, because by including the material of others in your own board, you implicitly recognize its value, its quality, what it contributes to our own boards (which is appreciated by the original creator). And on the other, because it is a way to continue offering valuable content to our followers without having to deal with creating it. Furthermore, there is the possibility of participating in group boards, which allow us to increase the visibility of our pins and our account, especially if said boards have many followers.

4. Pinterest as a traffic trigger

Finally, the possibility of including short texts and links to external sites (web pages, blogs, forums, etc.) in the pins allows companies to have a permanent source of backlinks that help them better position their pages in search engines and get more visibility (especially if they include relevant keywords on boards and in pins). Such is the case of the Mexican portal Bodas.com.mx, which in the last month published 109 pins on topics such as the steps to plan a wedding, tips for creating centerpieces, what type of flowers to use or fashion trends for guests , all of them with their respective hashtags and URLs to your website.