We explore how to use Pinterest for your lead generation efforts.
What are the best ways to generate leads? The answers vary; everything depends on your target audience, your industry, and the resources available. However, if there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that social networks are essential in this effort to attract potential customers.
One of the social networks that can best help businesses and brands attract leads is Pinterest. Find out why.
A Background on Pinterest
Pinterest is a visually driven social media platform that emphasises inspiration, creativity, and discovery. It allows pinners to share and discover new interests by posting (pinning) images or videos to their own or others’ boards (a collection of pins usually organised around a theme) and browsing what other users have pinned. It is particularly popular among people looking for inspiration on home decor, recipes, wedding planning, DIY projects, fashion, and more.
Pinterest’s visual nature makes it an excellent platform for businesses to showcase their products or services through images or videos. Unlike posts on other social media platforms, which might have a lifespan of a few hours to a few days, pins can remain relevant and continue to drive traffic for months or even years after they are initially posted. This is because content on Pinterest is often discovered through searches or by browsing related pins rather than being solely dependent on a chronological feed.
And here’s the trick: Each pin can link back to your website, making it a powerful tool for increasing website traffic. Users who find your pinned content interesting or useful are just a click away from your page, where you can convert them into leads or customers.
Moreover, Pinterest offers “Rich Pins,” which provide more context about an idea because they include extra information directly on a pin. There are several Rich Pins types, including product, recipe, and article pins. For businesses, this means you can include more detailed information about your products or services, such as pricing and availability, directly on your pins.
Pinterest in Numbers
Pinterest is a major player in the social media landscape, celebrated for its unique position at the intersection of visual discovery, inspiration, and e-commerce. Here’s a snapshot of Pinterest in numbers, reflecting its scale and influence:
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs): Pinterest has approximately 500 million monthly active users worldwide, making it the 15th most used social network globally.
- User Demographics: Historically, Pinterest’s user demographic predominantly consisted of women (76% of the audience), yet the platform has experienced a notable diversification in its user base, witnessing a rising proportion of men and younger individuals engaging with its content.
- High Income: About a third of Pinterest users have an annual income of over $100,000 (around £80,000).
- Trend Predictions: Pinterest releases a “Pinterest Predicts” report annually, which forecasts emerging trends based on its users’ searches and activities. This report has consistently achieved an 80% accuracy rate over four consecutive years.
- Impressive Growth: Pinterest’s average annual growth is 7.5%, making it the third fastest-growing platform in the world. By comparison, Facebook has grown by about 1.6% a year, while YouTube and Facebook are losing their audiences.
- Positive Mindset: One of the major criticisms of social networks is their toxic effect on users, who complain of issues such as anxiety and depression after spending a lot of time using these platforms. On Pinterest, this does not happen. In fact, 78% of its pinners say they feel good while using this social network.
- Powerful Marketplace: In the UK, 61% of Pinterest users have made a purchase influenced by branded content they encountered on the platform.
- High Return: Pinterest Ads have a return on ad spend (ROAS) that is twice as high for retail brands compared to other digital platforms, offering greater value for your advertising investment.
Furthermore, its ads yield a cost per conversion that is 2.3 times more efficient than that of other social media sites.
How You Can Use Pinterest for Lead Generation
The beauty of lead generation on Pinterest lies in the numerous ways to customise your campaigns and the excellent results that can be achieved.
Ad Formats
- Standard Pins: The simplest form of Pinterest ads, these look like regular pins but are promoted to reach a larger audience.
- Video Pins: Use video content to catch more attention and provide a richer story about your product or service.
- Carousel Ads: Showcase multiple images in a single ad for users to swipe through, allowing for a more detailed narrative.
- Shopping Pins: Make your products easily purchasable directly through Pinterest with pins that link directly to your e-commerce site.
- Idea Pins: Similar to stories on other platforms, Idea Pins allow for multi-page creative content to engage users with tutorials, recipes, or storytelling.
Campaign Objectives
- Brand Awareness Campaigns: These campaigns amplify your brand’s presence, exposing your products or services to a broader audience. The focus here is on maximising exposure and establishing your brand identity among Pinterest users, ideal for launching new products or entering new markets.
- Video View Campaigns: Utilising Pinterest’s visually rich platform, video view campaigns are perfect for engaging storytelling or showcasing your products in action. These campaigns aim to increase engagement and interest by presenting your content through dynamic video formats, making your brand more memorable.
- Consideration Campaigns: Consideration campaigns target users who have shown interest in similar products or services and are likely to want more information about what you offer. The goal is to drive traffic to your website or landing pages, encouraging pinners to learn more about your brand or products, thus moving them further down the purchase funnel.
- Conversion Campaigns: With a focus on driving specific user actions, conversion campaigns are optimised to convert interest into tangible outcomes such as purchases, sign-ups, or downloads. These campaigns are crucial for businesses aiming to increase lead generation, targeting users most likely to take the desired action.
- Catalogue Sales Campaigns: Catalogue sales campaigns integrate your product catalogue directly with Pinterest, enabling automated product pin creation and targeting. These campaigns are designed to drive sales by showcasing your products to interested users, making it easy for them to discover and purchase products they love.
Targeting Options
- Demographic Targeting: Reach users based on age, gender, location, and language.
- Interest Targeting: Pinpoint users based on their interests and the topics they interact with on Pinterest.
- Keyword Targeting: Target users searching for specific terms related to your products or services, capturing their intent at the moment.
- Behavioural Targeting: Engage users based on their past interactions with your pins or website, allowing for retargeting strategies to re-engage interested individuals.
Analytics
Pinterest provides detailed analytics to track the performance of your pins and campaigns, offering insights into:
- Engagement rates, including repins, likes, and comments.
- Traffic to your website.
- Conversion tracking to see how effectively your ads lead to desired actions on your website.
- Audience insights to better understand your followers and how they interact with your content.
Lead Ads: Pinterest’s Hottest Product
Brands looking to generate more leads find a powerful tool on Pinterest: lead ads. They are designed to streamline the lead generation process by capturing user information directly within the platform, without requiring users to navigate to an external landing page. By eliminating the need to visit an external site, pinners can complete forms with just a few taps directly within Pinterest.
This seamless experience significantly reduces friction, which can otherwise lead to drop-offs during the transition from the ad to the landing page. Higher conversion rates mean you can generate more leads for the same budget, making your advertising spend more efficient. Moreover, lead ads auto-populate forms with information from the user’s profile, such as their name, email address, and other contact details, reducing friction.
Lead ads often have higher conversion rates than traditional ads that direct users to landing pages. It’s easy to understand why. Pinners are more likely to complete a form when it’s straightforward and doesn’t take them away from the platform they’re using. However, as covered in our previous blog post, there are pros and cons to these types of campaigns compared to using dedicated landing pages.
Pinterest may not be the most popular social platform, but its high engagement and conversion power make it one of the favourites for companies looking for new leads. Want to know more about lead generation? Talk to our team and find out how we will customise specific strategies for your business, maximising your brand’s visibility and attracting high-quality leads.