175M people around the world use Pinterest every month to plan their lives from what to cook for dinner, to how to plan their next party, to how to renovate the backyard of their new home. Because people use Pinterest to plan, search is an integral tool for helping people seek inspiration and to find new ideas. For marketers, adding Pinterest to their digital advertising strategy will help them reach new audiences and engage buyers earlier in their decision making process to impact both brand and performance goals.
In our recent webinar, Skai clients, Walgreens and iCrossing on behalf of Belk, share their experiences using the platform since its launch in March. Here are some of the highlights:
What motivated you to start advertising on Pinterest?
Kathleen Smith & Tija Berzins, iCrossing:
- Pinterest helps people design their lives and is a great visual platform to showcase a large assortment of products.
- People are always looking to Pinterest for new inspiration and therefore they are open to finding new brands, products and services that they can take action either by visiting their website or retail store.
- Pinterest attracts key retail audiences with a heavy emphasis on seasonality and special events like holidays or back to school.
How does Pinterest fit into your client’s marketing mix?
Kathleen Smith & Tija Berzins, iCrossing:
- We started the program with a CPM campaign, then expanded to a CPC campaign, and lastly, a Pinterest shopping beta – reaching consumers at different stages of the shopping funnel.
- Through testing, we found that having an always on CPC strategy works due to seasonality when you want to push certain product. With being always on, we’re able to optimize creative, test out different audiences, and see what works best.
- The challenge is now to determine what emphasis and budget to put into each bucket – CPM campaigns (discovery phase), CPC (planning/consideration phase), and lower search/MPLA.
How are your Pinterest objectives different than other platforms?
Robyn Phelan & Andrea Kaduk, Walgreens:
- Pinterest is a unique platform because people go there to find inspiration and helpful content in a personalized and fun way.
- Pinterest is the intersection of search and social with discovery and planning being the key drivers of consumer intent on the platform.
- Our Pinterest objectives are to connect with customers in a relevant and helpful manner that ultimately connects our brand with everyday life, encouraging them to visit our website or local store.
What types of objectives are you exploring with Pinterest?
Kathleen Smith & Tija Berzins, iCrossing:
- Running CPC, CPM, and shopping campaigns to achieve the objectives of brand awareness, web traffic, and sales.
- Attaining new visitors and brand awareness:
- Focus on driving new customers to Belk.com
- Using lifestyle images, broad keywords and interest targeting for people who haven’t visited the Belk.com website before
- Pinterest was the most successful channel for driving new visitors efficiently
How are you handling the creative for Pinterest?
Robyn Phelan & Andrea Kaduk, Walgreens
- We take key insights from Pinterest such as the conversation volume, what they’re Pinning, search volume, themes, and even spikes in the conversation and use those insights to not only inform timing of campaign, but also to influence creative concepting.
- By knowing what our customers are saving and searching for on Pinterest, we are able to figure out what to show as a brand, to inspire customers to take a desired action for that specific campaign.
- We also leverage a product feed to dynamically create ads based on any search queries, resulting in hundreds of assets readily available to show the right creative at the right time.
Skai is the only technology that can help retail marketers gets consistent reach and messaging across the media where consumers spend the most time. Skai’s mirroring technology allows marketers to use their product structures across the leaders who do shopping campaigns – Pinterest, Google, Bing, and more. Skai is about positive advertising that is both performance and brand, done directly with the publishers, telling a consistent story without having to scale your team.
Search Ads On Pinterest Webinar Recording:
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