Pinterest Ads Best Practices for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs)

Pinterest says it best: People come to Pinterest to plan their best selves. 

As a planning and inspiration platform, Pinterest can help SMBs target prospects as they plan for big things. 89% of weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase, and the platform has 459 million monthly active users. In short, Pinterest can influence what people buy.

Pinterest Ads are visual-first formats that showcase products in the same layout as an organic pin. This non-intrusive way of introducing your product can be served directly to your target demographic’s feed as they are making plans.

Holiday searches on Pinterest compared to a leading search engine shows prospects searching Pinterest earlier in the year. Source: Pinterest

How Can your Business Use Pinterest?

Aside from creating boards to curate ideas for your audience featuring your products, these paid solutions on Pinterest offer advertisers flexible ways to reach your target audience when they’re searching for your type of product or based off of their interests in boards. The key to Pinterest creative is keeping your content inspirational, positive, and actionable. Here are three ways your business can engage with Pinners beyond organic pins.

Pinterest Ads: Help Pinners find their next new favorite thing by putting your product in front of them on their feed. Ads offer four optimization goals:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversions
• Offline Sales

Pinterest Shopping: Pinterest allows advertisers to upload a catalog of products to enhance the online shopping experience. After uploading your catalog, you can layer in paid ads to help your products be discovered by the right buyers.

Idea Pins: This new format allows video content creators to be discovered and engage with Pinners. Idea Pins are short-form mixes of videos and/or images with the ability to add voice-over recording, allowing creators on Pinterest to showcase the process/steps for creating. This type of fresh content reminds us of how Instagram stories and TikTok engage with users.

Recommendations and Expectations for Pinterest

Depending on your business, Pinterest can be a powerful brand awareness medium, especially with its reputation as “The Last Positive Place on the Internet.”

Key demographics that use Pinterest. Source: Pinterest

We are finding that we like Pinterest as a brand awareness platform when targeting the platform’s key demographics. Since much of Pinterest’s user activity happens within the platform (think Pinning, saving, sharing, etc.), we find value in metrics that showcase how many times the ad was seen, compared to other social media platforms.

We also find that the earlier and longer Pinterest campaigns run, the better. As a long-tail, planning platform, Pinterest is where prospects go to plan a purchase.

• What kind of kitchens do they like?
• What kind of decorations would look good in their space?
• For building a custom home, what kind of finishes have other people tried?
• What are key features in wedding venues for perfect photos?
• How can your brand use Pinterest to inspire users in their planning and purchase journey?

Interested in including Pinterest into your media mix for ongoing brand awareness and consideration? Let’s talk.

Helpful Resources

• Pinterest Ad Creative Best Practices
• 5 Pillars of Creating Planning on Pinterest
• Advertise on Pinterest