With over 150 million monthly active users and 9,700 pins every minute, Pinterest is the eighth largest social network in the Western Hemisphere.
Many companies still believe Pinterest is a fun social network that people only use on the weekends when they have nothing else to do.
There’s plenty of data that disagrees with this idea.
With an $11 billion valuation and $300 million in revenue in 2016, Pinterest is a social network that means business.
If you don’t believe me, then read the rest of this article, and you will see why Pinterest ads can truly help you grow your business.
Given its size, Pinterest is the social network with the highest density of adult Internet users making more than $75k per year, with 35% of the total population.
Source: SproutSocial
Facebook and Instagram have the largest amount of people within that segment of the population, with 77% and 37% of adult Internet users, respectively. But considering that Instagram and Facebook have between 2 to 4 times as many monthly active users, the comparison with Pinterest wouldn’t be fair.
Source: Pew Research Center
What’s even more interesting is that 10% of Pinterest users make more than $125K per year, and active pinners have a 9% higher average income than non-users. This clearly shows there’s a small yet affluent section of their user base that has a large stream of income that you could target.
Another interesting fact that makes Pinterest attractive for ad buyers is the fact that 67% of Pinners are under 40 years old. If you sell products to a younger audience, Pinterest could be a great platform for your ads placements. This is no surprise, however, as 90% of young adults use social media.
Still, there’s the 33% of Pinners who are more than 40 years old, which also means if you sell products to an older audience you could still use Pinterest to attract qualified traffic.
8fit, a fitness app that attracts young and old alike, used the Promoted App Pins to drive installs and increase the signup rate by 5%, 50% higher than other social media platforms. They achieved these great results while lowering their CPM up to 90%.
Source: Pinterest
Just like most social media sites, Pinterest has more female users than male ones, with 71% of their total user base being female. 60% of their new signups are also female users. Still, Pinterest stands out from the other social networks in one thing: women account for 92% of all pins. This isn’t true of Facebook Likes or tweets, which means Pinterest is mostly used by women. This makes even more sense when the average Pins made by an active female user is 158, 15 times more than men.
Pinterest is, therefore, the perfect place for ad buyers to find affluent female millennials.
This can work particularly well for e-commerce stores that sell high-end products, especially in the food and home décor-related industries, two of the most popular Pinterest categories.
This is the case of DaWanda, a marketplace for gifts and handmade products, which after improving their Pinterest strategy was able to increase their referral traffic by nearly 100%. The best part is, this traffic was able to generate sales, with the average order value from Pinterest being 13% higher than average order value from other social platforms.
Before moving on, it’s important to mention that Pinterest’s advertising system is only available in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite these challenges, as you have seen, Pinterest still represents a highly attractive market for companies with a young and rich customer base.
Most marketers tend to use social media sites only on the top side of their acquisition funnel. Its main use is to attract traffic and create awareness. From there, they take their traffic either to a landing page or to a product page, and then they would try to push for the sale or signup. The process has too many moving pieces which can get expensive and complex. In this funnel, a marketer would need to use multiple tools to achieve a lead or sale, including Google Ads tools, landing page creators, and webinar tools, among others.
As you can see, this is far from optimal.
Pinterest Ads (which includes Pinterest video ads), on the other hand, can be used throughout the whole marketing funnel, from creating awareness, to increase the intention to purchase, to making a sale. There are many categories of products, particularly fashion, in which Pinterest is one of the key marketing tools that touches users at every point in their buying lifecycle.
Living Royal, a Chicago-based socks company, used Promoted Pins to promote their products that were already successful on other channels as well as their brand keywords to increase their awareness.
Just after one month of investing in Promoted Pins, Living Royal increased their referral traffic sixfold. What’s more, the conversion rate of their Promoted Pins was 40% higher compared to the ones from other similar channels and their CPA was 31% lower.
This full-funnel marketing channel explains why Pinterest has been investing in a visual search tool that allows their users to search for products with photos straight from their smartphones. This kind of investment lets Pinterest’s users buy any product they want on a whim. As a consequence, Pinterest could become a serious contender in the industry, along with Facebook and Snapchat.
MADE.com, an online furniture store, used Pinterest’s Rich Pins to help people learn more about their products. Rich Pins work just like regular pins but include extra information, including product name, price, and availability (much more like an ad). For an e-commerce store, these little details can make a big difference, as they can encourage people to take action.
Thanks to the use of Rich Pins, MADE.com was able to increase their referral traffic by 36%. Rich Pins also helped them increase their conversion rate by 51%, their transactions by 106%, and their revenue by 173%.
It’s been proven time after time that images drive e-commerce sales. Since Pinterest is basically a visually driven social network, there’s no doubt, then, that it works perfectly for e-commerce stores.
Up until recently, Pinterest has been a platform on which both users and businesses can publish, collect, and circulate new products and ideas. But since the launch of their ads system, Pinterest has been able to reinvent itself into a place where companies can also increase their sales.
According to Pinterest, “Pinners are just as likely to purchase as users from other social channels, but spend 50% more on average compared to other social channels. They also spend 20% more than users referred from non-social channels, including search.”
Not only that, but 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest. But this isn’t just good news for online stores. 72% of Pinners use Pinterest to decide what to buy offline and 93% of active pinners said they use it to plan for purchases.
Based on all this data, we could safely conclude that Pinterest is a catalyst for purchases. If you can get a potential customer to see your products on Pinterest, that can lead to an eventual sale.
Ezra Firestone, world-class marketer and owner of Boom By Cindy Joseph, was able to make $21,969 in revenue from 520 sales just by spending $775.50 on Pinterest Ads. He was also able to double his other revenue sources thanks to Pinterest, including direct and organic traffic.
One amazing tool that Pinterest offers to make this process even better are Promoted Pins. Pinterest has found that those who interact with a Promoted Pin spend 7 times more than others. Also, 70% of sales that happen thanks to Promoted Pins come from new customers.
What this means for you as an e-commerce store owner or manager is that you can attract new customers that are ready and willing to spend money from Promoted Pins.
Many Etsy sellers have been able to increase their sales thanks to Pinterest Ads. For example, Rachel Ball of Elephantine sells modern, minimalist jewelry. After she started using Pinterest to promote her shop, her average views per week have increased by 22% while her weekly sales have increased by 20%.
If there’s one lesson you can take from this article, it is this: Pinterest is a powerful acquisition channel.
If you have an e-commerce store and want a full-funnel channel that targets young affluent millennials, then you need to start using Pinterest.
Ivan Kreimer is a freelance content marketer on a crusade to end bad marketing advice. He also helps SaaS businesses increase their traffic and leads with content. Follow him on Twitter.
Comments
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.