Top 5 Brands on Pinterest for Valuable Insights

5 Leading Brands on Pinterest

Increasingly, brands are utilizing Pinterest not just as a space to share captivating images, but to market products and drive sales.

Check out these five brands that are leveraging Pinterest to run effective campaigns in 2024.

1. Not On The High Street

Not On The High Street is a UK-based online marketplace that showcases unique gifts from small businesses. As its name indicates, these items cannot be found in mainstream shops.

The brand’s Pinterest profile attracts over 10 million monthly views through a blend of keywords and product-specific hashtags. This boosts organic traffic to their profile, while strategies like seasonal promotions enhance conversions.

For instance, when schools in the UK closed for the holiday season, Not On The High Street introduced a Pinterest initiative aimed at gifts for teachers. Each Pin featured a product image alongside multiple descriptive keywords, such as “candle teacher gift” and “soy wax candle”:

This approach not only aids Pinterest users in discovering products via the platform’s search functionality but also boosts the brand’s visibility on Google, driving organic search traffic to its board.

2. Sephora

French beauty giant Sephora utilizes its Pinterest boards to generate traffic and conversions through product displays.

The brand has integrated its complete product catalog into its profile and has developed Pinterest Shopping ads to prompt customers to make purchases. These ads automatically cater to Sephora’s established audience, showcasing Pins that align with their shopping needs.

In addition, Sephora employs Pinterest’s Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive (MECE) framework for its content campaigns. This methodology targets specific segments and goals across five distinct campaigns. When combined, they address various aspects of a customer’s lower-funnel journey. The five individual campaigns include:

• • Home feed targeting using open targeting
  • Search targeting with open targeting
  • Home feed remarketing for website visitors
  • Search remarketing for site visitors
  • Dynamic targeting based on page interactions and add-to-cart actions

Segmenting, retargeting, and prospecting, along with content placements on search and home feeds, have allowed Sephora’s campaigns to engage the right users at the optimal moments.

Headspace

With just 14.3 thousand followers, Headspace’s Pinterest account garners more than 850 thousand monthly views. The brand adheres to one of Pinterest’s central strategies—Pinterest Boards.

Headspace has curated a collection of premium mindfulness content featuring guided meditations, sleeping resources, and breathing exercises. These Pins are categorized into folders with titles such as “Headspace for Kids” and “Headspace Courses” for easy access:

These Pins are available for anyone to utilize to manage stress or enhance mindfulness, but they also serve a larger role in Headspace’s marketing approach.

The Headspace app does not offer a free plan; users can only experience it through a limited-time free trial prior to subscribing. The complimentary content on Headspace’s Pinterest board effectively encourages potential users to sample before purchasing—providing them a glimpse of what awaits upon subscription.

Affirm

Affirm is a buy now, pay later service that enables shoppers to purchase from their favorite brands online.

The platform collaborates with retailers across various sectors—ranging from automotive and home goods to apparel, electronics, and travel. In a recent Sprout webinar, Social Media & Brand Marketing Lead Deandre Moore discussed how Pinterest assists the brand in reaching its core demographic while offering a diverse product range.

“Our primary audience is Millennials, so we heavily focus on Instagram and Pinterest. Personally, I believe that Pinterest is often underestimated and it’s an excellent platform for driving traffic and conversions, particularly from a paid perspective.”
– Deandre Moore, Social Media & Brand Marketing Lead, Affirm

Moore indicated that understanding the content that resonates with Affirm’s audience was crucial in developing its Pinterest strategy. For example, the team recognized an uptick in discussions about creating vision boards, prompting them to initiate a travel campaign inspired by this trend.

“We noticed this idea of manifestation and how people were visualizing their year,” Moore stated. “Many reasons drive travel. We absorbed all that information and utilized it to tailor our copy and creatives. It’s genuinely one of our top-performing assets this year to date.”

The New York Times

The New York Times’ Pinterest profile may not match your expectations. Instead of hard-hitting news reports, its Pins emphasize fashion, travel, and culinary topics.

Some other brands on our list use Pinterest primarily for bottom-of-funnel tactics, but The New York Times’ account prioritizes brand awareness and content dissemination.

A key strategy for the NYT involves recycling content from its primary news website to engage audience segments interested in cultural topics. It then employs press photographs to form unique Pinterest boards devoted to specific individuals and events, such as its coverage of the 2023 Met Gala and detailed celebrity portraits.

This exemplifies creative thinking and utilizing Pinterest to present content to varied audiences.

Deep dive: successful strategies top brands use

There are Pinterest-specific methods and tactics that brands can adopt to achieve success on the platform.

Pinterest’s official recommendations urge brands to develop comprehensive strategies that encompass target audiences throughout the customer journey. It’s vital to view this full-funnel strategy from both organic and paid aspects.

Organically, brands should identify what content and products their audience seeks. Similar to the previous example of Not On The High Street, keyword targeting is an excellent way to incorporate specific product terms that align with user intent in Pinterest’s search feature.

Discover these by using Pinterest’s integrated keyword tool, available in the Ads section of your Business account:

This tool reveals what keywords your audience is using, the monthly volume, and any related keywords for products. For paid placements, Pinterest recommends various content formats that perform better than others across different funnel stages, such as raising awareness, encouraging consideration, and securing conversions:

In addition to a full-funnel strategy, other Pinterest tactics can enhance outcomes:

• Optimized product feeds: Your products, Pin structure, and metadata impact Pinterest’s algorithm, which ranks content based on relevancy. The higher the quality of your data and organization of each Pin, the more likely Pinterest will recommend your content.
• High-impact video: Tools like Premiere Spotlight, Pinterest’s exclusive ad placement option, can help brands gain better video ad visibility and compete effectively during a customer’s decision-making process.

As with any marketing strategy, the key to ensuring your Pinterest initiatives are successful is through experimentation. Test various Pin formats, target specific audience segments at different stages of the funnel, and take inspiration from the brands we’ve mentioned to grow your presence on the platform.

Analyzing impact: How Pinterest drives business results

Research from Pinterest shows that its popularity is increasing—particularly among Gen Z.

According to Sprout Social’s Q2 2024 Pulse Survey, 51% of all consumers believe that Pinterest content exudes more positivity compared to other social networks, including 60% of Gen Z users. This outcome is intentional, with Pinterest introducing features like its ‘body type ranges’ tool, allowing users to select body shapes that reflect their own for better search outcomes that promote body positivity.

In addition to increasing brand visibility, recent enhancements on the Pinterest platform are aiding businesses in driving conversions. The platform’s strategy focuses on elevating conversions and growing traffic on a brand’s page through tools like:

• Mobile deep links: Direct users to a specific section of your website for purchasing products or performing other actions.
• Shopping videos: Brands can now engage audiences through video while directly linking to featured products.
• API access: Facilitate direct conversion reporting to Pinterest using a secure link for greater accuracy.

With all these conversion-oriented tools, it’s evident that Pinterest serves more than just a platform for saving visually appealing images—it’s a space for brands to achieve tangible results.

Key Takeaways for Your Brand’s Pinterest Strategy

Now is the perfect moment to hop on the Pinterest bandwagon and develop a robust strategy encompassing both organic and paid content.

The brands we highlighted demonstrate that regardless of your objectives, Pinterest offers pathways to achieve them. Whether the focus is on creating brand awareness or boosting conversions, Pinterest can effectively capture audience interest at any stage of your marketing journey.

For more insights on achieving success on the platform, refer to Sprout’s article on formulating a Pinterest marketing strategy.