In 2010, three months after their initial launch, Pinterest had managed to acquire just 3,000 registered accounts.
Today, the company employs more than 800 people and boasts more than 200 million monthly active users. Unlike many Silicon Valley startups, they chose to grow slow and focus on their most dedicated fans. This slow growth was seen as a problem by many experts, but now many expect to see the company go public in the next year.
Just Another Social Media Platform?
If you aren’t an avid Pinterest user, you might think it is just another social media site you’re ‘supposed’ to use to grow your business. There is Instagram and Youtube and SnapChat and Reddit and Twitter. It can feel overwhelming for business owners who feel like they have to be everywhere online. Additionally, stretching yourself too thin makes you less effective everywhere.
Here’s the thing – Pinterest is and always has been targeted to a few specific types of users. If your target audience isn’t on Pinterest, you are better off focusing your marketing time and dollars elsewhere.
However.
There is a good chance at least a portion of your audience is on Pinterest – and they might be highly active. Today, I want to talk about who is on Pinterest, how you can use it to grow your business, and what questions you should ask yourself to determine if it is the right place for you.
Who Is On Pinterest?
According to Omnicore, the average Pinterest users are mostly women in the US with a median age of 40 years old and an annual salary above the 50K mark. This is the demographic most people expect to find on Pinterest.
But, the numbers show a different story. Before you base your decision on the ‘average’ user, take a look at these interesting stats about the demographics of Pinterest users:
- 60% of Pinterest households have children under five years of age
- 50% of Millenials use Pinterest every month.
- 40% of users have an income over $100,000
- 50% of Pinterest users have made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin
If you’ve assumed Pinterest is nothing more than middle-age suburban moms looking for dinner recipes (which it is awesome for, by the way), you are sorely underestimating the platform.
And it could be causing you to leave money on the table.
Sure, you can find a tasty lemon garlic roasted chicken recipe and learn how to maximize space in your small apartment on Pinterest, but you can also learn how to fix your water heater, learn about the history of robots, or even get marketing advice.
Don’t let your outdated perceptions of who Pinterest users are cloud your decision. There is a lot more to Pinterest than many business owners realize.
How To Grow Your Business With Pinterest
The demographics of Pinterest are changing, and so are the opportunities for business owners. Here are a few of the most effective Pinterest marketing strategies.
- Host a Pinterest Contest: Get your audience involved by asking them to Pin one of your images to their board for a chance to win a prize.
- Use Promoted Pins: Just like boosting a post on Facebook helps increase your reach, promoting a Pin helps your pin reach more people in your desired audience.
- Use Rich Pins: Sharing a recipe, product, or article? Rich Pins put the most important info up top and make it easier for your audience see what matters most.
- Add a “Save It” Button: This button allows your audience to Pin your content to their favorite boards. This is an easy (and free) way to increase traffic to your content.
Think Pinterest can’t work for your brand? You might be surprised by how well the platform can work for a variety of different business types.
Pinterest Success Stories
Pinterest can help you reach many different goals for your business. You can use it to increase traffic, drive purchases, or even build your email list. Here are a few examples of businesses in different niches who have used Pinterest to grow their business and details on how they made it happen.
DaWanda
The team at DaWanda, a marketplace for unique products and DIY crafts, saw a 100% increase in referral traffic. They also find that Pinterest leads to 13% increase in order values over other social media platforms so that traffic is translating to a rise in revenue. They did this by adding a “Save it” button and integrating Pinterest into their seller portal.
Classy Career Girl
Anna of Classy Career Girl, a site dedicated to helping women build a successful business or career, used Pinterest to triple site traffic and double followers. She did this by creating beautiful pins in PicMonkey for every article they published. Just a few minutes of time led to a drastic increase in traffic.
Bank Of America
In 2014, the banking giant was looking for a way to reach millennials who were just beginning to focus on their financial journey – perhaps looking to buy their first home or start saving for retirement. Through Promoted Pins, they were able to reach 6 million unique users and generate thousands of action on their website.
6 Questions to Ask Before Joining Pinterest
The examples above make it clear that Pinterest can work for many different business types – but is it right for your business? Before you decide to invest time and money into building a Pinterest strategy, ask yourself the following questions.
- Is our audience on Pinterest? There is no sense in wasting time on a platform that doesn’t make sense for your market. However, the demographics of Pinterest users are more varied than some realize.
- Do we have the bandwidth to do Pinterest well? If you can’t invest the time to publish great content with striking visual images, don’t bother. You will stretch yourself too thin and have little to show for your effort.
- Do we already have high-quality content to share on Pinterest? This is related to the bandwidth question above – if you already have fantastic content, the time investment required to do well will be smaller.
- Does our site load quickly (on desktop and mobile)? A slow site is one of the quickest ways to drive users away from your site. Before you start trying to drive more traffic, make sure your site is fast enough.
- Does our site perform well on mobile? Google has begun to roll out mobile-first indexing, and if your site isn’t ready, you should focus your resources there before diving into another social platform.
- Do you have any spammy links, broken links, or other black-hat SEO practices? Before you start trying to increase traffic to your website, make sure you aren’t at risk of a Google penalty. Some site owners don’t even realize old strategies put them at risk of penalties today.
Should You Launch a Pinterest Strategy?
If you answered ‘yes’ to most of the questions above, Pinterest may be a good use of your time. For most businesses, the commitment required to be successful on Pinterest is relatively low, particularly after the initial time investment to build a process.
If your audience is on Pinterest, you have a well-performing site and high-quality content, then Pinterest may be a good choice to increase traffic and drive sales.
Once you get started, consider hosting a Pinterest contest or sweepstakes to gain followers and increase re-Pins. Woobox allows you to build Pinterest campaigns for free. You don’t pay until you are ready to launch!