Until recently, I was like a lot of other marketers in that I didn’t consider Pinterest to be quite as important as the “Big 3” when it came to advertising on Social Media.

I may have been right then but I’m certainly not right anymore.

Pinterest have upgraded their “Promoted Pin” facility and, given their massive audience – estimated to be over 200 million registered users, most of them female, by the way – that makes Pinterest a “must do” destination for marketing campaigns that involve images.

So, what exactly are Pinterest “Promoted Pins” and how can you use them as part of your Digital Marketing Strategy?

At the most basic level, promoted pins are pins that you have posted to Pinterest and which you want to use to reach a wider audience than they otherwise would. The pin that you want to promote must be a public pin – pins saved to secret boards are not eligible.

As with any marketing strategy, first you should decide what your objectives are. Pinterest promoted pins give you three main choices, as follows:

The first of the above choices, ” Awareness Campaigns” are broadly equivalent to Google’s CPM model – i.e. you pay for impressions of your ad at a rate per 1000, (CPM). If your marketing goal is to simply get your name out there without necessarily needing any interaction then this option is for you.

Engagement Campaigns, on the other hand, are charged if the viewer does anything that could be regarded as “engagement”. typically this could include enlarging your pin in order to see it better, re-pining your pin or clicking on it.

Traffic Campaigns, fairly obviously, are designed to drive traffic to your website and you only pay if the viewer clicks the link to go to your site – traditional PPC if you like.

It is a widely held belief that, of the three campaign types, Traffic Campaigns can produce the best return on investment because you could end up paying for people to “engage” with your pin, for example by enlarging it, and then not following up by clicking and visiting the site whereas if you pay by click then a click, i.e. a visit to your website, is what you will get.

Traffic for nothing and the clicks are free!

Another nice thing about Pinterest Promoted Pins is that, if someone shares your promoted pin and that shared version gets a click – you don’t pay for that click! Pinterest’s own numbers indicate that this could give you up to 30% more click, for free as a result of this! There’s an offer you won’t find in Google AdWords, although to be fair they do occasionally hand out vouchers to new customers.

You’ve Been A Lovely audience!

In fact, Pinterest is full of lovely audiences. Like most other social media platforms, Pinterest gathers some valuable information about its members and you can use this information to accurately target those who you want to see your pin. This is particularly true of “interests” as new members are asked to name five interests when joining the service so targeting people who are interested in a particular subject is very easy on Pinterest – great for improving engagement and conversions.

If you have a Pinterest account then you can set up a Pinterest Advertising account and start using Pinterest Promoted Pins today – well worth the effort in my experience and Pinterest have some very useful case studies to help you to evaluate this marketing channel – here’s the link.