4 Reasons Pinterest Marketing Is Essential

If you’re wondering whether or not your brand needs to market on Pinterest, the answer is simple: Yes. Yes, you do. By not building your presence on Pinterest, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach your target audience as they make vital decisions in their life.

As an official Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner, we recently attended a special Pinstitute event, during which Pinterest revealed some powerful statistics about their community and how people use the platform. Read on to learn 4 key reasons why your brand needs to market on Pinterest, based on up-to-date stats about how consumers use Pinterest.

1. Your target audience is on Pinterest

Pinterest has long had the unfair perception of being a platform used only by middle-aged housewives. While Pinterest usage by this key advertising demographic continues to strengthen, their audience has been expanding rapidly across demographic segments:

• In the US, 55% of women aged 18-54 are on Pinterest. This is an incredibly valuable audience, as women control over $20 Trillion of consumer spending.
• The number of men on Pinterest double in 2014! Pinterest now reaches more men in the U.S. each month than Sports Illustrated and GQ combined. Here are some of my favorite manly Pinterest profiles.
• ⅓ of the coveted millennial generation are now using Pinterest to plan their future. Which leads us to the next reason you need to market your brand on Pinterest…

2. Life events are planned on Pinterest

Because of Pinterest’s positive, aspirational nature, many use the platform to plan for the future. According to a study done by Millward Brown Digital and Pinterest, 74% of pinners view Pinterest as a tool to help them plan for the future, and 67% of pinners will experience a major life event within 6 months.

With life events being planned on Pinterest, it makes perfect sense that ⅓ of millennial’s would be active on the site. Speaking as a millennial (I was born in 1988), I’ve used Pinterest to plan wedding showers, find the perfect vacation spots, set up my first “grown up” apartment, and helping friends plan for their own weddings.

Because these events were in the planning stages (as opposed to showing them off after the fact on social networks), I was able to discover brands when I was in the buying mindset. That ability to market to the right pinners before purchase decisions occur gives brands on Pinterest a critical window into the consumers’ marketing funnel.

Reaching pinners before a purchase decision means commercial content is welcome in the user experience, not an interruption. This brings us to our next reason why Pinterest marketing is essential:

3. Pinterest is a natural fit for brands

People are going on to Pinterest to find new things to try to improve their future. There’s no reason your brand can’t be part of that conversation. In fact, Pinterest can’t exist without the presence of brands. Pinners want to see your brand’s new fall collection and want to learn how your exercise product will help them shed the pounds.

If commercial content disappeared from Pinterest tomorrow, the network would become much less useful. The same can not be said so easily of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

The same study conducted by Pinterest and Millward Brown Digital also shows that the site is driving purchase decisions in many key categories. Here’s the percent of active pinners citing Pinterest as helping them make purchase decisions by category:

• Food – 79%
• Clothing – 53%
• Home Décor – 60%
• Beauty – 51%
• Health & Fitness – 47%

Pinners are actively looking for your brand to help inform their decisions. This is a major part of what differentiates Pinterest from the other social networks, and what leads us to our final point:

4. Pinterest is a discovery engine

Recently I wrote an article called, “Stop Treating Pinterest Like a Social Media Platform”. Although I was evoking a bit of hyperbole with the title, it’s still important to recognize that users are on Pinterest to discover new things. Pinners are not there to start political discussions or look at pictures from your college roommate’s’ baby shower. They’re on Pinterest to look at beautiful images and search for new ways to improve their life — including discovering your brand’s offerings.

There are numerous implications of this:

• Similar to search engines such as Google and Bing, content will continue being discovered on Pinterest for months or even years after it is first pinned. This helps you build up your ROI from Pinterest over the long-term, increasing your marketing efficiency over time.
• Discovery carries through the entire marketing funnel. From top of funnel inspiration to narrowing down a consideration set and ultimately purchasing an item, Pinterest can help you keep a potential buyers’ attention over time.
• Pinterest marketing allows you to inspire and inform at the same time. This is the dream for many marketers, as it allows you to be at once creative, poignant and helpful. When done properly, the brand uplift can be immense.

Ready to start now? Learn how to schedule Pins, optimize your content strategy, get analytics and more with Tailwind.