‘Shareable, saveable, engaging’: How brands are using Pinterest to activate the full funnel

Pinterest’s form and functions have changed dramatically since its initial launch in 2010. A shift towards ad tools and leaning into ecommerce has allowed brands to experiment in how they show up on the platform.

At its latest Pinterest Presents event in September, company announced 39% of Gen Z prefer to start their shopping searches on Pinterest. Primark has leaned into this, teaming up with the Pinterest to bring its home collection to life on the platform, allowing users to shop the range via the app. The tie-up drove success for the retailer, with CEO Eoin Tonge explaining the partnership “drove very strong traffic” to its website.

Pinterest director of marketing for Europe, Louise Richardson, told Marketing Week the platform has been increasing audience awareness as a place to shop, amid claims audience understanding of has “doubled” in recent years with “50% of Pinners” already coming to shop.

Fashion retailer Wolf & Badger has also leaned into Pinterest to engage shoppers. Pinterest Performance+, which uses AI to automate campaign creation and manage performance, is one tool Wolf & Badger has leaned into. The retailer uses the tool to showcase in-stock items, automatically re-target previously engaged audiences and generate ad creative. The result has been “maximised reach” and improved performance.

Head of performance marketing at Wolf & Badger, Patrick McDermott, says that though the brand has been on the platform for a long time “from an organic point of view”, it started running paid ads on the platform last year to “drive sales” for its independent designers.

“Pinterest is a very visually striking platform itself. So, it just really lends itself very well to products that we’re trying to sell,” he says.

Hub for discoverability

Compared to other social platforms, McDermott sees Pinterest as a hub for “discoverability” and a bigger part of the marketing mix, used for conversion as well as awareness.

“Anywhere that we can see performance working really well, which we do on Pinterest, [we] put our foot on the pedal a bit faster and get more out of it,” he says.

Currently, the brand aligns content for its boards with the annual ‘Pinterest Predicts’ report, which highlights trends that will perform well on the platform. The retailer finds this content performs “much better”. Going forward Wolf & Badger hopes to add in more storytelling through Pinterest, not just product promotion.

Fashion isn’t the only sector exploring on the platform. Last week, Pinterest UK and DFS launched a gamified, interactive shopping ‘Collage Quest’, giving customers the chance to win their dream sofa. The campaign encourages users to interact with Pinterest collages, with users also seeing more of the brand through a premier spotlight total takeover.

In the second phase of the campaign, DFS will become the first UK brand to launch the latest Quiz-to-Board Pin Extension on Pinterest, which creates a custom Pinterest board based on a user’s profile full of DFS products.

It is more about the evergreen. It’s not about putting an ad live for a week.

Kara Juggins, Tui

Sofology, owned by the DFS Group, has been activating on Pinterest as a key part of its marketing mix. Recently, using Pinterest Performance+ ROAS bidding through an A/B test, the brand unlocked a 55% higher return on ad spend.

Head of brand marketing at Sofology, James McWalter, joined the business a year ago with an eye on doing more on Pinterest, acknowledging that home is a “really big” category on the platform. Right now, he sees Pinterest as a “powerful” but “underappreciated tool”.

He says Pinterest works for the brand due to its “style focus” and customers being “style focused”.

“We don’t lean as much on our commercial offering to try and build our revenue. We build on the fact that we have amazing, beautiful products and we feel like we’re style focused and our customers – basically, they come to us,” says McWalter.

While he acknowledges the platform comes with a challenge of “scaling spend efficiently”, following the success of an A/B test Sofology “doubled down” on its investment, pushing performance levels up 80% year-on-year, particularly in “peak season” of September to February.

In a year’s time, McWalter imagines Pinterest coming “fairly close” in spend to Meta as a tool for conversion and “attracting people through the funnel”. He is pleased to have less “dependency just on Meta”.

Full funnel approach

Being a home for images, Pinterest also lends itself to travel inspiration.

Travel operator Tui saw success in Germany with Pinterest’s travel catalogues tool, turning hotel pictures into shoppable pins with information such as pricing on a pin. The team in Germany delivered a six times higher outbound click-through rate and 80% lower outbound cost per click compared to previous conversion campaigns.

The UK team have been experimenting on Pinterest for the past six years, with Ellie Pearsall, social media manager at Tui Group, describing it as a “journey”. She acknowledges Pinterest is a “different social platform”, where people come to plan and content needs to be “shareable, saveable and engaging”.

“Over the last few years, we’ve been really trying to tailor our content to suit the platform requirements. Definitely this last year, we’ve been working on more of a full funnel approach, rather than in silos,” says Pearsall.

Like Wolf & Badger, Tui uses the Pinterest Predicts report to “adapt strategy to land the travel message on the platform” – most recently leaning into “peaks and mountains” and “golden hours” for content in a trial running this summer.

The trial also saw the brand experiment with the use of influencers – a first for Tui on Pinterest. Partnering with two different creators, content went out on both the influencers’ pages and as an ad from the Tui account. The brand will be assessing what type of content performs best with creators and drives the strongest conversion.

Pinterest’s Louise Richardson previously told Marketing Week the platform sees its creator content as “more evergreen” and “providing utility shopping suggestions rather than pure influence and amplification”.

Tui’s use of influencers on the platform represents the “evolution” in the brand’s approach to Pinterest. Pearsall explains the team have adapted their approach to be “more always on”.

Pinterest is a very visually striking platform itself. So, it just really lends itself very well to products that we’re trying to sell.

Patrick McDermott, Wolf & Badger

Tui Group paid social manager Kara Juggins agrees that Pinterest is a “search engine in its own right” and the travel giant has been “tailoring content accordingly”, aligning posts with what different age demographics respond best to.

For upper to mid funnel activity, Tui’s brand campaign moments are taken and adapted to form “evergreen activity”.

“It is more about the evergreen. It’s not about putting an ad live for a week,” says Juggins, how argues it’s better ads offer longevity.

Tui has gained a “really good steer” from conversion lift tests as to what is driving incremental results.

“The full funnel lift test that we do, combining the brand and the conversion lifts, also helps us get a good steer of the overall funnel effect,” says Juggins.

Pearsall agrees brand lift studies help to demonstrate effectiveness on Pinterest. Based on a campaign last November, the brand found that by taking a full funnel approach pin ad recall rose by 4.5 points and an uplift in consideration of 7.4 points, which is “really strong” for Tui. The team plan to use Pinterest’s AI features to delve deeper into effectiveness going forward.

“From mid funnel, we track cost per qualified land as a metric and Pinterest is always quite steady for us in terms of click-through rate,” says Pearsall.

Tui’s mission on Pinterest now is to “pull forward” its planning so the strategy aligns more with the platform’s yearly calendar, while continuing to take a full funnel approach.