Marketers Struggling with Pinterest: Report

 

Are you considering marketing through Pinterest? You might have second thoughts after reading a report from Forrester Research.

Pinterest has many strong points from a marketers’ perspective, including a large audience that loves to interact with brands. Yet only about half of top brands have created Pinterest boards, and those that have done so struggle to find value, according to the report “Pinterest Is Not Ready For Prime Time.”

“Pinterest is confusing. It’s a bundle of contradictions: at once it offers marketers huge potential and huge frustration,” writes Nate Elliott, a Forrester Research vice president & principal analyst, for Forbes.

Pinterest Advantages

The network offers some noteworthy advantages.

• Twenty-one percent of adults online visit Pinterest at least monthly, Elliott states. That’s almost as many as use Twitter and more than use Instagram and Google+.

•  Pinterest users are willing to purchase products online and engage with brands. Their online conversations about products on Pinterest drive substantial amounts of traffic to brand sites.

• Pinterest’s data has the potential to drive more sales than Facebook’s data. Facebook users generate mostly affinity data, or information about their tastes and preferences, based on their past experience with brands and products. That kind of data is better suited to targeting brand advertising than direct marketing.  In addition to sharing affinity information, Pinterest users share purchase-intent data that Google and other search engines show.

“Just as ads targeted with Google’s data generate outstanding direct response, so will ads targeted with Pinterest’s data,” Elliott predicts.

A Marketing Struggle

But despite its audience and data, marketers are struggling with Pinterest, according to Elliott.

They are not sure what to post, collect few followers, and see little user interaction.

Coca-Cola, for example, has fewer than 5,000 followers on the network and has posted only three times in the past seven months. Its last 50 pins were repined only 11 times each on average.

Marketers cannot take advantage of the platform’s fantastic user data. Pinterest introduced paid ads, which it calls Promoted Pins, this month. Unfortunately, marketers can use only a few dozen interest-based targeting criteria. That limited targeting leads to unclear ad performance. Pinterest can’t cite any success data for Promoted Pins except for an increase in earned impressions.

Forrester recommends companies limit their investments in Pinterest — at least for the time being. If the site improves its ad targeting capabilities, it could offer more marketing value than other social media networks by next year.

Pinterest Responds

Responding to an inquiry from Target Marketing, Pinterest pointed to a Shareaholic report last fall that stated that “Pinterest is coming for Facebook’s throne.” Pinterest is the second-largest referrer of social traffic and its share grew by over 50 percent (up 1.84 percentage points) last year, according to the Shareaholic research.

“While we, and our partners, are excited by the performance of our Promoted Pins beta (30 percent earned impressions, on average, for brand advertisers), we are committed to learning and evolving the product,” stated Mike Mayzel, with partner communications at Pinterest. “This year, we have an aggressive roadmap of new features — including more targeting, measurement and ad formats.”

Bottom Line: Research urges marketers to refrain from putting resources into Pinterest until they can take advantage of the platform’s abundant user data.

Have you had success marketing through Pinterest? Please share it below. Are you considering marketing through the platform? Please comment below.