Pinterest is poised to transform their marketing game once again. By now you’ve heard about “promoted pins” – those magical pins that appear near relevant searches with a “promoted” label; but Pinterest has something different in mind for their next marketing adventure: selling search advertising (keywords).
Pinterest users typically interact with the platform differently than other social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, given Pinterest’s visual nature. Pinterest’s Head of Global Sales, Jon Kaplan, stated, “they had never cordoned off the search inventory as buyable inventory before. They also had never talked to a search engine marketing agency or search engine marketers as clients,” but now they have decided to do so.
Pinterest users perform over 2 billion searches a month, so the opportunity to build and target these searches certainly exists.
What it means for you
What does this mean for real estate professionals? I’ll use the example eMarketer uses: Imagine you are State Farm and you had a current auto insurance customer, and you wanted to cross-sell them homeowners insurance. You could target your existing auto insurance customers anytime they search for homeowners insurance.
Translating this into real estate, imagine you’ve recently sold someone their first home and you want to target your Pinterest followers any time they search for “homes + zip code,” “new home,” “property,” etc. By using Pinterest’s proposed targeted searches, you could target, and re-target your existing (and new) followers by using a series of keywords to ensure your information (such as available listings, location, and credentials) pops up when the users need it most.
What it does
Instead of the basic targeting options like device, gender, and location, Pinterest is giving users three ways to target their user: customer list targeting, visitor retargeting, and lookalike targeting.
These options are all available through the Pinterest Ads Manager. Customer list targeting is a lot like Facebook’s custom lists: you target existing customers using emails or mobile ad IDs. Visitor retargeting lets you reach people who’ve visited your site. And finally, lookalike targeting allows you to reach a larger group of people who look and act similar to your audience (again, just like Facebook).
The Pinterest blog states, “Businesses who work with one of our Marketing Developer Partners will be able to target these audiences by the end of the month. To make it easier for you to onboard your data, we’re also working with Epsilon and LiveRamp.”
How you can set it up for yourself
The businesses Pinterest enlisted to test these targeting options have already seen dramatic results.
For some, visitor retargeting increased clickthrough rates by three times normal rates.
For others, lookalike targeting increased clickthrough rates as much as 63% and boosted reach up to 30x. It’s time to get a bit more familiar with these features as they could drastically increase the amount of clicks, leads, and follow-throughs your Pinterest page sees. If you haven’t already done so, you can learn how to set up audiences at the Pinterest Help Center or get started today.
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Jennifer Walpole is a Senior Staff Writer at The American Genius and holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. She is a science fiction fanatic and enjoys writing way more than she should. She dreams of being a screenwriter and seeing her work on the big screen in Hollywood one day.
