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Pinterest is the misunderstood little sibling of the social media family. It’s more creative, harder to understand at first glance and people tend to forget about it when discussing the achievements and benefits of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

That doesn’t mean you should be outright ignoring this channel though. Pinterest’s benefits may not be as inherently obvious, but some industries have an enormous amount to gain from making it one of their primary marketing channels. 

Integration with other channels

Marketing channels must work in tandem with each other in today’s digital environment. Your strategy needs to be flexible and intuitive, working seamlessly across numerous platforms to promote content that best fits each individual.

Dedicating your strategy to one particular channel isn’t the worst idea if your audience primarily congregates there. You need to show activity throughout multiple channels to have the best chance of attracting as broad a base as possible.

Many of the biggest success stories on Pinterest, including megastar influencer and designer Oh Joy!, used the platform as a breeding ground for building a creative audience, before transferring that traffic across growing similar social platforms such as Instagram has an equally visual appeal. 

The innate shareability of Pinterest’s content is partly why it fairs so well in cross-platform projects, but there is one factor in particular that sets it apart from the rest, Pins. Pins allow users to add content to their boards, share them on other forms of social media and even add them to email.

This makes it easy to subtly include your Pinterest strategy within other marketing content that may not have seemed an obvious fit at first, such as newsletters. Pinterest is built around the sharability of content through pins, with the platform almost automating the sharing of content through these means. This cross-platform pollination of content is highly common.

High conversion rate

For many users, Pinterest is primarily a research tool. As any good marketer knows, research is just one step away from shopping, and a researcher is a very feasibly swayed user. 

Pinterest excels in making the journey from discovery to conversion as simple as possible. A Pinterest user looking to learn more about a product or style through the platform is significantly more likely to convert faster than through any other social channel.

47% of Pinterest users will log onto the channel specifically to shop, meaning it is four times more effective a sales channel than its direct competitors. While these channels may have a larger reach, they don’t necessarily lend themselves to shopping in the same way the visual nature of Pinterest does. 

The best way to convert with content is to make it compelling. The diverse and creative nature of Pinterest’s content makes it the perfect shopping channel. Marketer Blair Gorman speaks on this issue when discussing Pinterest on the marketing podcast, Marketing Speak. He explains that the worse thing content can be is ephemeral, something that Pinterest’s constant stream and catering to inquisitive natures caters to. 

In the same vein, Pinterest is like a visual search engine for creative minds. Its users will turn to the platform for inspiration, but the difference with other platforms is they will act upon that research and convert, likely because they are presented with more of a detailed look at the product and competitors at the same time.

Extremely engaged user base

Every social platform thrives off of a different kind of engagement and has a different picture of what the ideally engaged user looks like. A user who is engaged on Facebook looks very different from one that converts through Instagram. Pinterest users are a particular breed that must be treated as unique, but that is not to say they’re any less engaged. 

Pinterest users thrive off sharing content. Their equivalent of engaging with friends and family or finding new articles to read is sharing images they enjoy to their audience. This means your content is more likely to be spotted, talked about and potentially go viral.

Pinterest has a very diverse demographic, including both younger and older people, a surprisingly high proportion of men considering the public perception of the platform and, most importantly, a high standing in the dream demo of 18-39-year-olds.

This audience is curious about new ideas and open to your content, looking to it to guide their decision-making and defining everything from how they decorate their house to haircuts. 

Marketers love Pinterest for its diverse audience, which is one of the most engaged of all online communities. There are few platforms that will give you better results if you’re looking to improve your engagement metrics.

Mobile friendly

Mobile compatibility is one of the foremost important factors you should consider when selecting a marketing channel. Huge swaths of users are marketed to through their mobile devices every day, it’s the nature of how they’re used and the benefit of social scrolling. One of the best things about Pinterest is how it operates and brings in eyes on mobile. 

Pinterest’s format is incredibly visual and skimmable, almost tailor-made for phone use. 80% of Pinterest’s creative user base likes to use the app on the go, becoming the modern-day replacement for flipping through a design magazine in the doctor’s office.

This opens up a huge amount of marketing potential for teams looking to capture audiences through the app. Like other social media apps such as Facebook, there is already a huge infrastructure of users on Pinterest who will visit every day and treat it like their home base, building communities and acting as the first port of call.

Pinterest’s design and accessibility give it unique advantages to other social media apps, which can turn off users with a constant barrage of bad news and content they’re not necessarily interested in coming from family and friends they follow.

Pinterest, by contrast, is much more communal in its circles. For any team focusing on mobile reach, huge markets are waiting to be snapped up.

Pinterest might not be for you, and that’s understandable. More rigid companies that struggle to find a creative message for their marketing won’t find as much success as design, clothing and arts industries. Hopefully, these points help you remove the mass benefits that Pinterest has to offer all marketing professionals.