Pinterest Advertising for Perfume Brands
Pinterest is an underrated social media platform for perfume brands looking to raise brand awareness. Much like perfume brands have underutilized Youtube, Pinterest has a lot of potential to generate organic awareness and traffic to a website for any brand that has the knowledge and resources to execute a marketing strategy on this platform.
Before diving into ways to advertise on Pinterest, let’s review some user stats.
Pinterest has:
537 million monthly active users
Gen Z is the fastest-growing audience, making up 42% of our global user base
Pinterest reaches 40% of US households with an annual income over $150K
70% female userbase
Most popular categories on Pinterest: Home Decor, DIY Crafts, Women's Fashion, Beauty, and Health & Wellness
How Pinterest Works
Pinterest is a social media platform that is very image oriented. It can be thought of as a search platform for images — with a heavy focus on home decor, fashion, and beauty. The platform allows people to repin images that they like to their own profile’s boards which are essentially organized collections of images. Users can create their own boards based on themes and explore other people’s boards. Users and brands can also create their own content and pin it to their boards.
Uses of Pinterest
People use Pinterest to get inspired. To get ideas for design projects or food recipes. Users will often use Pinterest for shopping research and looking for great products to save on their boards. There is a very strong culture of DIY crafts on Pinterest and it seems to be the number one place for home decorating inspiration online.
The 3 Problems with Pinterest Ad’s Platform
The targeting is not nearly as robust as Facebook/Instagram and Google. Pinterest simply doesn’t have the resources, user data, and machine learning capabilities to create deeper ad targeting capabilities. This doesn’t mean fragrance brands cannot see a positive ROAS. We have seen some brands get great ROAS on Pinterest, however, we have also seen brands struggle to make Pinterest ads profitable.
Pinterest has an attribution problem. Pinterest users are planners who enjoy curating unique images and products. They might pin a perfume with the intention of maybe buying it in the future. This can often mean that they make the purchase long after the initial repinning action. That means you can't track performance because the tracking cookies have expired or you're outside the attribution window. Every ad platform has attribution problems, but Pinterest stands out as being very difficult to see a positive ROAS for attribution models — particularly last-click attribution.
The scale of Pinterest will never be able to compete with Google, Facebook, or Instagram in terms of the total number of users. Instagram has 4 times as many users as Pinterest and Facebook has 6 times as many users. This significantly caps a fragrance brand’s ability to scale profitable Pinterest ad campaigns.
What Makes Pinterest An Incredible Social Media Platform for Fragrance Brands
Pinterest isn't the channel for closing sales but it does attract a large audience that will often convert to sales later via comprehensive email marketing and retargeting campaigns. For our clients, the data has frequently shown that this platform is filled with searchers and researchers who are normally not in the buying cycle at the time of browsing, however, Pinterest users tend to be searching for more specific content. This translates to Pinterest providing more relevant search results, whereas Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok provide content based on user signals. Pinterest can have a huge impact on the buyers and their journey to discovering your brand.
One thing that’s great about posting content to Pinterest is that it’s evergreen. Since Pinterest is basically a visual search engine, the content has a much larger half-life, unlike Instagram, where content will be shown on a feed based on the recency of the content. With Pinterest, your content can still gain views and clicks long after posting based on a more keyword-focused algorithm instead of a time-sensitive based algorithm.
Using Pinterest for Organic Brand Awareness
The potential for Pinterest to drive organic traffic to a brand’s website is massive. We have seen consumer product brands generate over 120,000 website visits a month from Pinterest after 8 months of marketing on Pinterest. For a fragrance brand, having a dedicated content creation system will allow you to fully leverage the top-of-funnel brand awareness that Pinterest provides.
Why isn’t Pinterest used more frequently for brands?
Pinterest is made for storytelling and increasing top-of-funnel brand awareness. Ultimately this means the people who are in charge of allocating the marketing budget for a brand will not prioritize Pinterest because the ROI isn’t as straightforward as other advertising channels. Furthermore, the lack of a more comprehensive and robust ad platform means that it is more difficult to scale your brand’s reach on Pinterest. With Facebook, you can immediately start scaling your ad budget to reach more people. With Pinterest, since growing organically is the preferred way to approach this platform, your brand is forced to grow more slowly.
9 Ways to Advertise Your Fragrance Brand with Pinterest
Success on Pinterest is about playing the long game. Fragrance branding on this platform requires a dedicated strategy and consistent effort. Brands that are able to dedicate the time and resources to this platform will see lower CPM’s and more website traffic leading to Direct-To-Consumer sales.
Consistency
The only way to grow on Pinterest is by consistently creating pins. Out of all of the social media platforms, Pinterest’s algorithm favors consistent posting the most. This means daily pinning. Publishing 2-5 quality pins per day and repinning 5-15 relevant pins — minimum.
Pinterest doesn’t like when content creators publish a lot of pins at one time. This behavior is viewed as spammy and will negatively impact the visibility of your pins and your fragrance brand’s account. Fortunately, Pinterest has a native feature that allows users to schedule pins for future dates and times.
Repinning Strategy
An effective repinning strategy boils down to making thematic boards that are relevant to your fragrance brand and audience, then repin visually appealing pins to the boards. Another consideration when creating boards is to do an analysis of different boards on Pinterest and see what boards have attracted a lot of followers and repins through the pin’s analytics menu option. Then create a board that is similar in aesthetic or theme and overlaps with your brand or audience.
Pin High-Quality Images
Pinterest is a visual social media platform. The pins that your brand creates need to be high quality. Low-quality pins will not attract repins and will not be discovered by new people. Consider pinning creative assets that your brand has already posted to other platforms and media channels.
Find What is Trending
Jumping on trending topics is a great way to organically get eyes on your pins.
You can find Pinterest trending topics here.
Keyword Optimization
Since Pinterest acts as a search engine that finds the keywords you provide, you need to use relevant keywords for the pin. You are allotted a 500-character limit to describe the pin. Pinterest prioritizes natural language so it is not recommended to keyword stuff your pin’s descriptions. If the keywords are not related to the pin it will negatively impact your account’s visibility.
There is no need to overcomplicate this step. Be concise in describing the content of the pin and use keywords people might be searching for. Pinterest Trends will be helpful in getting more concise keyword volume data to use.
Do not use hashtags, Pinterest has publically stated that they serve no purpose.
Make sure to add a relevant Tagged Topic to your pins from the drop-down menu when creating your pin to help Pinterest categorize the pin for searchers.
Content Distribution Through Group Boards
Networking with established Pinterest creators and joining group boards or private boards will help your brand reach a wider audience. The process is very straightforward. Find a relevant group board that gets engagement and has followers and ask the group board host if you can join the board. You can also find private boards that are relevant to your brand and audience and ask the board owner if you can collaborate or join their board. This part can be difficult because many established creators don’t accept direct requests to join their boards. In many cases, it is more efficient to find the host of the board on Instagram and message them there to see if they would be open allowing you to collaborate on a board.
Optimize Your Pinterest Profile
Make sure your profile is complete, with a clear profile picture, description of your brand, and website link. Describing your fragrance brand using high buyer-intent keywords will help you attract users more likely to visit your website and save your pins.
On-Platform Engagement
Repinning, commenting, and liking other pins can help build relationships with other content creators and increase your fragrance brand’s visibility on the platform.
Retargeting Pinterest Users
Retargeting Pinterest users who showed interest in your perfume brand can be a cost effective way of reaching warm audiences. You can create a landing page or use your brands website and install a Pinterest Tag, Facebook Pixel, or Google Tag that tracks visitors who visit the landing page. You can create further event triggers to segment this audience by intent. For example, you create a retargeting audience comprised only of users who visited the landing page and stayed on the page for 6 seconds or more. Or create an audience comprised of users who submitted their information to a lead collection form. This ensures you are only spending money advertising to people who are familiar with your fragrance brand and showed interest in your brand’s products.
Incorporating Pinterest into your perfume advertising strategy can drive brand awareness. From a storytelling perspective, Pinterest is also a good home for perfume branding to an audience that is looking for unique products and personalized experiences.