Despite Pinterest having 431 million active users worldwide, it’s one of the most underrated platforms, and many businesses are missing out on the opportunity that this visual search engine holds.
Pinterest isn’t social media, it’s a visual search engine and this is what presents so much more opportunity than other social media channels. People come here to browse, not yet knowing what they want to buy, they scroll more, discover more, and it’s an authentic place to purchase too.
It’s the perfect place to be if you are an e-commerce business, especially in the home interior space.
Where Instagram is becoming an ever harder landscape to grow on, the party is happening over on Pinterest and this London born lighting company wanted a slice of the pie! Here’s what happened…
Pinterest Growth Case Study
Client: Interior Hardware & Lighting
Background: Instagram was the main social media channel being employed and they had experienced good growth. They had an ‘active’ Pinterest account, but they weren’t posting consistently and thus the platform showed no real value to the business and didn’t feel like it was worth investing in.
Aim: To increase brand awareness & following, traffic and sales to the website.
Here’s What We Did
Integrate the product feed
As an e-commerce brand, Pinterest offers a huge wealth of untapped opportunities if you’re not already using it. Looking at the low hanging fruits offers quick wins, and integrating their product feed was the first thing we did.
What’s a product feed? This essentially displays all of your products from your website on Pinterest. It means you can become a verified seller on Pinterest (showing authority and trust), you can run catalogue ad campaigns, but the best bit? You will start showing up across 1,000s of shoppable surfaces on Pinterest. This is essentially like FREE google shopping ads on Pinterest and it’s the best thing ever.
Ever seen something in an image and you want to know exactly where it’s from, but it’s not been mentioned anywhere in the copy? Shoppable surfaces allows you to click specific items in the image, displaying 100s of similar results.
As a lighting brand, this has been gold dust. With over 4,000 products on their website, with the shopping feed active it increased monthly impressions almost instantly.
Content Creation Plan
Pinterest rewards fresh and unique content, this is content that doesn’t already reside on Pinterest. As part of our content plan with them we developed 3-5 fresh pins every single day for the client, using their own unique imagery and creation of graphics. The way Pinterest works is just like Google, it is keyword driven so keywords play a bit part of the content creation side of things.
Beautiful, visual imagery sells on Pinterest. But if no one can find those images you’re wasting your time. After in-depth keyword research we knew exactly what keywords we needed to target to start dominating those respective searches.
Idea Pins
Idea pins are a HUGE part of Pinterest today. They initially launched early 2021 and they work in a similar format to Instagram stories. Unlike Instagram, they sit on your profile forever, continually gaining traction, impressions and clicks. Pretty amazing, right?
They’re a great way to start gaining impressions for even a young account, they allow you to story tell and you can jump on the back of trending topics. For this client, we starting sharing 3 idea pins a week – this included short form video, lighting tips & advice.
Pinterest Advertising
Starting with a small budget to demonstrate the value of Pinterest advertising, we launched catalogue ads – this focuses on selling specific items and catalogue ads which are more editorial in nature, and feature a lifestyle image with a link through to the website.
We’ve now increased that budget five times as the return on investment is so good. Why is Pinterest different to Instagram and Facebook advertising? It’s a more authentic platform where users are actively shopping. Buyer intent is there whereas on Facebook you are just interrupting users from scrolling and interacting with friends and family.
Pinterest advertising allows you to target cold users and warm them up into customers, retargeting campaigns are also another grey way to re-engage with people who have previously visited your website, but not yet checked out with you.
The Results
- Monthly impressions 44.3k to 672.2k in 3 months, 1.2 millions impressions in 6 months
- 553% increase in direct website traffic
- 6608% increase in revenue from organic & paid
- Following from 90 to 1,100
Pinterest marketing works for the right niches, and for this lighting brand, Pinterest has now become their top social channel revenue earner. In the meantime, their profile has been raised, they’ve been put in front of 1000s of new customers and they are generating regular organic monthly sales from the platform too.
If you are in the home interiors niche and want the same results for your brand, please get in touch and do take a look at our Pinterest Marketing Packages for more information. If you want real, tangible results whilst growing your sales and brand at the same time, Pinterest is the place to be.
