5 Best brands on Pinterest to learn from

5 of the best brands on Pinterest

More brands are using Pinterest as not only a place to upload shareworthy images, but to promote products and drive conversions.

These examples highlight strategies that continue to perform well as Pinterest expands its commerce and discovery features.

1. Not On The High Street

Not On The High Street is a British online marketplace that curates unique gifts from small businesses. As the name suggests, these items aren’t available in mainstream stores.

The brand’s Pinterest profile attracts millions of monthly views by using a mix of keyword-rich descriptions and product-focused Pins. This increases organic traffic to their account, while other tactics, like seasonal campaigns, drive conversions.

For example, when UK schools broke for the holiday break, Not On The High Street launched a Pinterest campaign focused on teacher gifts. Each Pin had a product image along with multiple descriptive keywords, like “candle teacher gift” and “soy wax candle”:

This strategy not only helps Pinterest users find products using the platform’s built-in search, but it also gets the brand noticed by Google and drives organic search traffic to its board.

2. Sephora

French beauty retailer Sephora uses its Pinterest boards to drive traffic and conversions through product placements.

The brand integrated its entire product catalog into its account and created Pinterest Shopping ads to encourage customers to checkout. Shopping ads automatically target Sephora’s existing audience, so viewers will see the Pins with the most relevant mix of products for their needs.

Sephora structures its Pinterest campaigns to align with different audience intents and funnel stages, combining prospecting, remarketing and dynamic targeting. This strategy targets specific audiences and goals across five separate campaigns. When the campaigns are combined, they cover different parts of a customer’s lower-funnel journey. These campaigns span home feed and search placements, allowing the brand to reach shoppers at multiple points in the buying journey.

Segmenting, retargeting and prospecting, along with content placements on search and home feeds, have enabled Sephora’s campaigns to reach the right visitors at the right time.

Headspace

Despite only having 14.3 thousand followers, Headspace’s Pinterest feed gets over 850 thousand monthly views. The brand follows one of the platform’s key strategies—Pinterest Boards.

Headspace has created a library of premium mindfulness content with everything from guided meditations to sleep content and breathing exercise. These pins are separated into folders with titles like “Headspace for Kids” and “Headspace Courses” so they’re easy to find:

These Pins are free for anyone to use to manage stress or increase mindfulness, but they also play a bigger role in Headspace’s marketing strategy.

While Headspace offers a selection of free content, full access to its mindfulness library requires a paid subscription. The free content on Headspace’s Pinterest board is a great way to encourage potential users to try before they buy–giving people a preview of what they’ll get if they do choose to subscribe.

Affirm

Affirm is a buy now, pay later service shoppers use to buy products from their favorite brands online.

It partners with retailers across numerous industries—everything from auto and home goods to clothing, electronics and travel. In a recent Sprout webinar, Social Media & Brand Marketing Lead Deandre Moore explained how Pinterest helps the brand meet its primary demographic despite offering such a wide array of products.

“Our primary demographic are Millennials, so we look very heavily at Instagram and Pinterest. I personally think that Pinterest is very overlooked and it’s a great platform when it comes to driving traffic and conversions, especially from a paid perspective.”
– Deandre Moore, Social Media & Brand Marketing Lead, Affirm

Moore says figuring out what content Affirm’s audience engaged with helped the brand shape its Pinterest strategy. For example, the team noticed there were conversations online about people creating vision boards, so they created a travel campaign inspired by the trend.

“We saw there was this concept of manifestation and how people were thinking for the year,” Moore said. “There were so many different reasons why people travel. We took all that information in and we really used it to craft our copy and creatives. It’s honestly one of our best performing assets of the year so far.”

The New York Times

The New York Times’ Pinterest profile might not be what you’d expect. Rather than hard-hitting news stories, its Pins focus on fashion, travel and cooking.

While some of the other brands on our list use Pinterest as a bottom-of-funnel strategy, The New York Times’ account focuses on brand awareness and content distribution.

A primary strategy for the NYT is repurposing content from its main news site to target audience segments interested in more culture-focused topics. It then uses press photographs to create individual Pinterest boards focused on specific people and events, including major cultural moments and recurring fashion and lifestyle coverage. This approach allows the brand to extend the lifespan of its visual storytelling beyond the news cycle.

It’s a great example of thinking outside the box and using Pinterest as a platform to get content in front of different audiences.

Deep dive: successful strategies top brands use

There are some Pinterest-specific tactics and strategies brands can use to find success on the platform.

Pinterest’s own guidance encourages brands to create full-funnel strategies to cover target audiences across the customer journey. It’s important to look at this full-funnel strategy from an organic and paid perspective.

Organically, brands should determine what content and products their audience is searching for. Like the earlier example of Not On The High Street, keyword targeting is perfect for adding specific product phrases to match intent on Pinterest’s search bar.

Find these by using Pinterest’s built-in keyword tool, which you can find in the Ads section of your Business account:

This will uncover what keywords your audience is using, monthly volume and any similar keywords for products. For paid placements, Pinterest suggests different content formats are more successful than others across each of the funnel stages like building awareness, driving consideration and securing conversions:

Alongside a full-funnel strategy, there are other Pinterest tactics to drive results:

• Optimized product feeds: Your products, Pin structure and metadata feed into Pinterests’ algorithm, which will then rank content based on relevancy. The better your data and organization of each Pin, the more likely it is for Pinterest to recommend your content.
• High-impact video: Tools like Premiere Spotlight, the platform’s exclusive ad placement service, can help brands get better video ad exposure and compete with other brands during a customer’s buying decision.

Like any marketing strategy, the best way to make your Pinterest efforts successful is through experimentation. Try different Pin formats, target audiences at certain funnel stages and use the brands we mentioned as inspiration for growing your presence on the platform.

Analyzing impact: How Pinterest drives business results

Recent Sprout Social research shows Pinterest continues to stand out as a positive environment for discovery, particularly among younger audiences.

This result is no accident, with Pinterest investing in features like its ‘body type ranges’ tool to give users the choice to self-select what shape mirrors their own in search results to boost body positivity.

Along with brand awareness, recent Pinterest platform upgrades are helping businesses drive conversions. Pinterest continues to expand its commerce and measurement capabilities, including:

• Mobile deep links: Direct people to specific product or landing pages.
• Shopping videos: Combine video discovery with product tagging.
• Conversions API: Send conversion events securely to Pinterest for improved attribution.

With all of these conversion-focused tools, it’s clear Pinterest is more than just a place to save aesthetically pleasing images—it’s a platform for brands to drive real results.

Takeaways for your brand’s Pinterest strategy

Now is the time to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon and build a successful strategy around organic and paid content.

The brands we highlighted prove no matter what goals you want to achieve, Pinterest has an avenue to achieve it. Whether it’s building brand awareness or driving conversions, Pinterest can capture audience attention at any stage of your marketing funnel.

To learn more about how to be successful on the platform, check out Sprout’s article on building a Pinterest marketing strategy.