When I mention Pinterest, what’s your initial reaction in terms of marketing for B2B?
Not a fit? Our audience isn’t there. It doesn’t convert. etc?
If so, then here’s a little prompt to ‘test and measure’.
We started running small tests on Pinterest in November last year, with the aim of seeing whether we could use Pinterest to build awareness in the B2B space.
First a bit of background about Pinterest. Prevailing wisdom (if you read echo chamber blog posts about it) will tell you it is good for targeting female audiences, in B2C sectors that push to ecommerce conversions, and not much else.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the first part of that. However, I wanted to test whether we could use it for targeting B2B intent. After all, if you are part of a B2B purchase journey, you’re still a person. You are still a consumer. It’s just that your purchase journey is a little different.
And it turns out there’s good opportunities with Pinterest in the B2B space. Not surprisingly it’s in industries that have a visual impact to them, for example food & catering, and commercial interior design (to highlight two industries we are testing with).
But here’s the key insight. Pinterest is great for building remarketing audiences. It’s a top of the funnel play, where you catch people who are interested in a topic and bring them to your site, but with no expectation of conversion at that point. Instead you are going to remarket to them on other channels (eg Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads) with follow up messaging.
For me it’s like Instagram all over again #dejavu. Two years ago we were pushing into Instagram for B2B and people (and some clients) were dismissing us. I even gave a presentation at a user group on using Instagram for B2B at the start of 2018 and people told me I was wasting their time. How quickly things change – most B2B marketing managers today will have at least tested Instagram as part of their campaign tactics, and many have had extraordinary success.
One other thing related to Pinterest. Even if you still don’t think Pinterest is worth considering, be mindful that Google does – look at the results for a high intent B2B search term on Google:
A fair number of people are going to click through to Pinterest – you can get in front of them with Pinterest promoted pins, and push them back to your site. And then retarget them in separate campaigns.
Compare that with advertising directly to those people on Google with Google ads.
Of course, as we always say, you should test and measure. YMMV.
Takeaways:
- If you’re in an industry that has a visual focus, consider how Pinterest could help drive awareness
- Allocate a small budget into testing reaching your audience
- And following them up with remarketing campaigns
Let me know your thoughts.
