The following article is an excerpt from our playbook on best practices for Pinterest marketing and measurement. Download the full playbook today! 

In general, Pinterest can be highly successful for companies that have an aspirational product with opportunities for attractive visual imagery. That said, many different types of brands are highly active on Pinterest outside of just retail. Companies ranging from vacation rentals to beauty to fashion can succeed on the platform when done well. Smart Creative Social recommends doing a little research before committing to Pinterest at your organization, including finding out:

• Whether you’re already getting traffic from Pinterest through other people posting images from your website 
• Whether your top competitors are using Pinterest
• Whether people are looking for solutions like your business, which you can find out by searching through Pinterest trends

Does Pinterest work for DTC and ecommerce? 

With advertising becoming more difficult and expensive as a whole, many DTC brands are exploring options beyond the standbys of Facebook and Google to help them drive more purchases. Considering many Pinterest users are purchase-ready and have an ample amount of disposable income, advertising on the platform is a smart play for digital-based brands. Additionally, Pinterest offers many features aimed at improving the shopping experience for users, such as a “Shopping List” view that lets Pinterest users keep track of saved product pins, making it easier to follow up on their initial interest. 

Rockerbox Pinterest Customer Story: Gorjana

About Gorjana: Gorjana is a jewelry brand that was founded in 2004 by Gorjana and Jason Griffin Reidel. Created to embody a SoCal ethos, the brand has advanced from a small operation run by its two founders to an established company with 18 of its own stores and a presence in 1,000 others. 

The use case: Gorjana always knew that Pinterest could be an effective channel for them in driving new customer acquisition because they knew their customers were already on the platform and used it as a discovery tool when shopping.

Before seeing view-based conversions, they weren't able to hit the point of scale where they actually saw returns. They were hesitant to spend more to reach optimal scale because they had little visibility into performance. They also weren't able to see if the purchases were incremental/driving purchases from new users.

The result: Rockerbox gave gorjana the insights they needed to confidently scale Pinterest: 

• 2x ROAS compared to Facebook
• Spending 20% of social budget on Pinterest
• Minimal overlap with other social channels

“The Rockerbox Pinterest integration has been a game-changer for us. By leveraging the integration we’re now confident that Pinterest is a ROAS positive channel for us and a key component in scaling gorjana’s growth moving forward.” — Kyle Brucculeri, VP of E-commerce, gorjana

Blending Organic and Paid

Pinterest allows brands to leverage powerful advertising features, but it’s not simply a pay-to-play system. Pinterest’s organic side is just as important for businesses to understand, and using a mix of the two methods can be the most profitable approach. 

Benefits of Organic 

Pinterest essentially acts like a visual search engine, and combined with the fact that posts on Pinterest have an extraordinarily long half life, you have the perfect opportunity to get your content in front of Pinterest users when they’re searching for your exact solution for months after you first posted it. Additionally, most (97%) of Pinterest searches aren’t branded, meaning users are looking for something using general terms and are, in theory, open to discovering new brands. By putting together quality creative, knowing the right keywords for your offering, and using SEO best practices in your boards and pins, you can get considerable mileage for free out of your Pinterest activity. 

Benefits of Paid

Pinterest offers several paid content options, some of which we’ll discuss below, but a big benefit of advertising on Pinterest is that ads are not only non-disruptive to the pinning experience, but they’re welcomed. Many Pinterest users are either there to shop or open to buying if they discover something they want. The visual layout of ads barely differs from organic pins in some cases, meaning users aren’t being distracted from content they actually want to consume as could be the case with some other social media platforms. 

Leveraging Organic and Paid Together

To take advantage of all the benefits Pinterest has to offer, it’s best to create a strategy that uses both organic and paid aspects. The information about keyword performance you learn through promoted pins can actually help you strengthen your organic approach, and while organic may take longer to show results, it can work in the background while you use paid campaigns to drive quicker conversions. 

With the right measurement platform, you can assess the effectiveness of both organic and paid methods to find out what works best for your business, then optimize from there. 

What are companies spending on Pinterest?

When social media advertising works, it’s in a company’s best interest to spend money on it. While individual advertiser spend can vary greatly, Rockerbox customers using Pinterest spent an average of roughly $50,000/month on Pinterest advertising. That may seem steep at a first glance, but overall, these brands found Pinterest to be ROAS-positive, meaning the money they spend on the platform comes back to them, plus more profit, in sales of their product. 

Rockerbox is uniquely suited to help Pinterest advertisers evaluate how effective their spend is because of its ability to factor in not just clicks, but views and other engagement metrics. With Rockerbox, clients were able to see the true impact of their ads, including on average a 15x improved CTA and 13x improved ROAS. 

Want to read the rest of the Pinterest playbook? Download it today from our website.