Use Pinterest to Expand the Reach of Your Adventure Brand
When it comes to adventure brands, outdoor brands, and brands that rely on travel and tourism… what communicates the magic of the experience better than stunning photos, immersive videos, and insightful content?
Luckily Pinterest offers the perfect social media platform to support that kind of marketing effort.
By following Pinterest best practices, you’ll unlock the incredible personalized power this social platform can tap into for a targeted and highly engaged audience. We’ve created a deep-dive of best practices for Pinterest for adventure brands, and also metrics that show the power of social media, specifically Pinterest.
Pinterest Grew 37% in 2020!
As of January 2021, Pinterest ranks as the 14th largest platform in the world in terms of global active users. In 2020, Pinterest saw a surge of new and engaged users on its platform. Could it have been cabin fever during the height of the pandemic, with adventurous dreaming of future travels, perhaps? These users have stuck around and are supporting the power that Pinterest has for reaching new audiences across many different industries. The importance of Pinterest increased significantly during the pandemic and shows no signs of abating as we move into a slow, global, re-opening. Pinterest demographics are up 50% year-over-year for Gen Z and 35% year-over-year for Millennials. Shoppers on Pinterest grew 50% in the first half of 2020 alone.
Source: The Global State of Digital 2021
What is a Pinterest Board and How Does it Help Your Adventure Brand?
One thing we see often with potential clients who come to us for a social media audit is that they are using one platform while neglecting another while neglecting others that have immense potential for their brand. Think of your social media platforms as a big family–they all get along (for the most part), they all have different views, friends, and techniques, but together they are even more potent.
Before jumping into the realm of Pinterest, be sure to spend time reviewing these 30,000 ft view questions:
- What do your loyal customers like most about your adventure brand?
- Who is your adventure prospect? Ages, interests, attitudes, comfort requirements.
- How are your competitors using Pinterest? What do you like about what they’re doing? What do you not like?
- If you’re already active on Pinterest, what content performs well?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be ready to tackle Pinterest best practices and learn how this medium can amplify your adventure brand.
Pinterest boards can tell a story, similar to your feed on Instagram and your bio on Facebook.
An Example of a Pinterest Board:
In the Visit North Carolina Pinterest board, they have shared their already existing content from their website and other social media channels, as Pinterest posts on their Pinterest account.
An Example of an Individual Pin:
When you click on a specific post on their board, you’ll see the pin of that shared content of a blog, an article, etc.
Click through on that specific Pin, and you will see that Visit North Carolina has shared this image from a blog on their website, as seen below.
The goal of sharing existing blog posts, articles, images, and video content from your existing website or social media account to Pinterest is to attract and engage new audiences. When you optimize your Pinterest content for search – those new audiences will easily find your adventure brand – in a less cluttered environment than the bigger social channels.
Pinterest Statistics
Did you know Women aged 25-34 represent 30.4% of Pinterest users? Adventure brands looking to extend their reach to Millennials and Generation Z, can be confident that Pinterest may have a good source of potential new audiences and customers.
Think visual! Pinterest is changing the way we shop, browse the internet, and find new brands. For an adventure brand looking for new demographics to cater to, Pinterest recognizes this change and wants to help brands see their potential on this widely-used platform.
“This year, managed advertisers will get an enhanced conversion analysis dashboard to dig deeper into downstream conversions and better account for Pinterest’s cross-channel impact.”
Women are the main audience (60%) that interacts on Pinterest. Not surprising, right? Studies show that 80% of all travel decisions are made by women. Pinterest is where many of them are doing their initial research, getting ideas, dreaming, and planning. What is also important to know is that men are coming on strong to Pinterest since 2020. If your adventure brand wants to attract younger, affluent, and middle-income audiences for their trips and products, this is a great place to be. Focused content, the ability to link every single post (unlike in Instagram!), and no political ads. Talk about a win-win!
Source: The Global State of Digital 2021
“Pinterest gained more than 100 million monthly active users in 2020. That’s the biggest increase the platform has ever seen. The influx of Pinners led to a 37% rise in monthly active users between 2019 and 2020.”
-Hootsuite, 2021
So, What Are Pinterest Best Practices?
Again, Pinterest is just another member of the social media family–with some similarities to Instagram and Facebook. However, there is also so much more to Pinterest. Let’s dive into the specific metrics of Pinterest and how your adventure brand can utilize your existing content!
We can narrow down the specific Pins that your adventure brand should be focusing on, using metrics that we already know from Pinners (avid Pinterest users) based on age, gender, and more.
- The best Pins are visually compelling, tell a good story and make people want to learn more. It’s easy to make great Pins—just follow these tips:
- Standard Pins:
- Pick a vertical image
- Use high-quality, vertical images that will stand out in people’s feeds. We recommend a 2:3 aspect ratio (e.g. 1,000 x 1,500 pixels). Other ratios may cause your Pin to truncate, or may negatively impact performance.
- Use text overlay for images that pertain to a video or blog post that would be similar to what a trip planner would be searching like “The perfect weekend trip to Ohiopyle”
- Remember to add your adventure brand’s logo to your Pin!
- Standard Pins:
- Video Pins:
-
- Start strong and make it actionable
- Lead with a clear hook within the first few seconds to capture people’s attention.
- Choose the right length: Make sure your videos clearly and succinctly communicate your ideas. For organic content, we recommend videos between 15 seconds and 1 minute long. For video ads, 6-15 seconds works best.
- Best practices with Pinterest videos are very similar to best practices for YouTube videos.
- Remember to add your adventure brand’s logo!
- Story/Idea Pins:
- Story/Idea Pins are a multi-page canvas to share your ideas. They last forever, and help you grow your audience.
- Think video first: Video is great for telling a story and helps you connect with your audience. Start with a video on your first page to stand out in people’s feeds. Just make sure to add text overlay, since some people watch with sound off.
- Make your own content: These Pins are for your adventure brand’s original content—no need to add links or content from other sites. Plan your content like a real story, with a true beginning, middle, and end. And make sure to include everything people need to act.
- Adding your logo throughout the story is suggested.
See more Pinterest Best Practices for Businesses here from Pinterest.
“Make Pins that perform – The best Pins are visually compelling, tell a good story and make people want to learn more. It’s easy to make great Pins—just follow these tips.”
Possible Ways Your Adventure Brand Can Set Up Pinterest Boards
Let’s look at the key stages of the customer journey for an adventure tourism brand. The customer journey is also known as the sales funnel.
- Dreaming: At some point, we all start to dream about that next escape, that next vacation. If your adventure brand works more with gear, think of the dream phase while posting your gear on Pinterest. Users will be thinking of what their trip will be like with your gear, the places your gear can take them and more!
- Planning: And eventually we stop dreaming and we begin to gather the details we need to make informed, educated decisions on our next adventure. This is probably the most important phase for use of Pinterest. You are helping with resources, for the planning phase, in order to get customers to adventure with you.
- Booking: Armed with the planning we’ve done, we feel confident in booking—sometimes in pen, sometimes in pencil.
- Experience: We go on that amazing vacation or adventure tour that we’ve been planning for so long.
- Sharing: After we’ve made memories, we want to share our experience with others through a variety of ways; word of mouth, social, and reviews to name a few!
Your target audience, your goals for your brand, and the market you are catering to will heavily influence the Pins that you will create. Is your adventure brand selling a product that could use more eyes?
With customers preparing to venture out of the pandemic, we see record-high online sales across the board. Between April – October 2020 Pinterest saw an 85% increase in engagementacross shopping surfaces within the application. Shopping-ad formats are one of Pinterest’s strategic priorities going forward in 2021.
Pinterest rolled out their automatic bidding in October 2020 on their ads platform. In that Q3 alone, Pinterest saw a dramatic almost 50% increase on ad spend being funneled through this platform.
Example Pinterest Ad:
Blue Fin SUP Boards is shown below, teaming up with influencers to sell their product on Pinterest. By using the already existing content they have on their website and adding a Pinterest channel, they are extending their reach to potential new audiences with far fewer competitor crowds than other bigger channels.
Their Bluefin SUP pin is directly going to send users to Blue Fin’s website, where that potential customer can look through their entire selection.
Maybe you have incredible content that isn’t being showcased enough, or want to specifically reach the demographics of Pinterest, and are having trouble reaching them amidst the crowded competitive landscapes of Instagram, Facebook, or youtube.
“92% of advertisers rank the platform first for reputation”
“Pinterest leadership says it pays to be positive. “That positive environment translates to better results for you—because people are more likely to feel positive about, remember and trust brands who show up in positive places,” says Jim Habig, global Head of Business Marketing, in a blog post.”
Romantic Asheville has a great blog that showcases the many adventures that one can find in Asheville, NC. With such an array of potential customers, Pinterest can be an asset to sharing stunning visuals.
Each Pin that Romantic Asheville creates is generated from either their website or existing social media accounts. Talk about the great leveraging of existing content! You don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) reinvent the wheel to get your brand’s content up on Pinterest.
Once a user clicks on a Pin, again it will direct that user to their website, and in this case, their blog regarding “Top 15 Quick & Easy Parkway Hikes.”
So, Are You Ready To Start Pinning?
If your target audience, or one of your target audiences, is younger, affluent, enthusiastic travelers and adventure-seekers, then Pinterest could be a good additional channel for your social media toolbox. Take all your great content, and make sure it goes not just to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google My Business – get it on Pinterest, too. The great thing about Pinterest is that your content is already created and Pinterest can extend a hand to leverage this content. Posts can be linked, and have stunning visuals, unlike Instagram. If this sounds like your adventure brand’s target market, Pinterest is waiting for you. Have fun building up your adventure brand story and sharing it with new audiences!
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