Pinterest have been putting in work over the past year. They’ve made it easier for brands to collaborate with creators, easier for creators to make engaging content that reaches a wider audience and easier for Pinterest users to find relevant content on the platform.
If you’re not using Pinterest marketing in your current strategy, then it’s probably a good time to start. Registering your brand name across all social media platforms when you start out is a good idea to protect your brand assets and authenticity.
The great news is that the changes at Pinterest have made it the perfect platform for beauty, hair, cosmetic and wellness brands to share their content and reach a global audience. It has a mainly female audience and has huge opportunities for search and visibility.
What Is Pinterest?
Pinterest is an image/video sharing and social media service that enables creation, curation and collection of content. It provides inspiration to more than 400 million people globally on everything from beauty through to food, fashion, weddings, homes and more. It’s also a place for Pinterest Creators to share their content.
It’s also become a destination to discover new brands, life hacks, beauty inspo and to buy direct from brands. Content is saved to discoverable boards and collections (though you can make private ones too), you can be as niche or as broad as you like.
Pinterest also strives to make itself a positive section of the internet, with steps to ban weight loss ads, focus on inclusion and celebrate a diverse range of voices and experiences on the platform.
What’s New At Pinterest?
Pinterest have introduced a host of new tools that are perfect for beauty brands and e-commerce brands to take advantage of as visual industries. As well as this, you can keep an eye on the latest trends on site at trends.pinterest.com. This can be extremely useful to pick up on the latest topics, trends and viral content.
Here are some of the new tools and hacks that you can utilise for your brand:
Idea Pins
Since TikTok burst onto the scene, every other social media site out there has also moved into short form video content, including Pinterest. They introduced Idea Pins in 2021 and they get incredible reach compared to other organic pins.
You can pull together collections of 20 images or short videos (up to 1 minute long each) with voiceovers, music, captions and tutorials. You can also tag brand and products on there too.
As a beauty brand, adding your product catalogue to Pinterest so it can be tagged in Idea Pins and can be shoppable across the site is a great idea. You can also share your product collections as Idea Pins, product tutorials and the type of content you’d usually add to TikTok or Instagram Reels.
Idea Pins stay on your page and on your boards (they don’t disappear like Snaps), you get analytics and other users can save them to your page. Using keyword-rich title descriptions and tagging relevant categories is important as they’re searchable.
Make sure any influencers you work with tag your brand and your products in any Pinterest content they create using your products. Pinterest also makes is really easy to share content and add to your own boards.
Find out more about Idea Pins.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing used to be allowed on Pinterest, then they stopped it and now they’ve brought it back in their ToS. Pinterest users can now use affiliate links in their content without having to jump through loads of hoops.
Influencer marketing, passive income and affiliate marketing is huge. I think Pinterest marketing probably realised they had made a mistake.
If your beauty brand has an affiliate programme, then make sure your affiliates know that they can use Pinterest as well as other social channels. It’s a good opportunity to offer discount or affiliate codes that can be shared.
Skin Tone & Hair Texture Categories
Pinterest uses AI to categorise skin tone and hair texture on images so that users can see content that represents them when they search on the platform. It offers a more personalised experience and more opportunity to match brands with an audience.
This is a great opportunity to showcase your beauty brand on different skin tones and hair textures – Pinterest will do the rest. Searching for beauty, skincare and cosmetics will come up with skin tone options whereas searching for hair related topics will automatically categorise them into protective, coily, curly, wavy, straight and shaved/bald.
More Opportunities for Monetisation
At the recent Pinterest Creators Festival, it was announced that there will be new ways for creators to earn money from content creation based on trending topics. One option will be a marketplace offering where creators can select trending topics, read a brief and create content based on it.
They’ll then receive payment for this, making it much easier to monetise Pinterest content without seeking out brand partnership or affiliate activity. This puts them more in line with other platforms like TikTok where creators get paid directly for their content.
Other Pinterest Marketing Opportunities
There are other tools that you can utilise on Pinterest to help with your marketing strategy, targeting your audience and driving sales. Some of these tools are also useful for protecting your content too.
Pinterest Advertising
Like other social channels, Pinterest allows you to advertise. It’s pretty similar to other social media advertising and can be targeted. They’re image and video ads so think creatively.
You’ll need a Pinterest Business account to advertise on Pinterest – find out more about Pinterest advertising.
Content Claiming Portal
If you own the copyright to content, and you’re worried about it being plagiarised then the Content Claiming Portal on Pinterest can help you to stay in control of your content. If you don’t want the content shared, Pinterest will remove all similar images.
You can also report to Pinterest if your content is being used on the platform without permission.
Analytics
Like pretty much every other digital tool out there, Pinterest gives you access to analytics so you can check how content is performing. Whether it’s traffic, audience or engagement you’ll find it in the analytics section. You’ll need a Pinterest Business account to access Analytics.
Is Pinterest Marketing Worth It?
I think that Pinterest is an underrated social media channel and marketing platform, especially for visual or creative brands (like hair, beauty, skincare and makeup brands).
Here’s why I think Pinterest marketing should be part of your strategy:
- Good for search, traffic driving and SEO (especially for images)
- Opportunity for huge reach with advertising and Idea Pins
- Millions of users worldwide
- Ability to reach niche target audiences easily
- Amazingly creative influencers and creators on the channel
- Investment in shoppable pins, brand tagging and product tagging for an ecommerce browsing and buying experience
- Ability to track metrics and audience behaviour
- Integrates with other ecommerce and social channels