Pinterest for Brands: Your Omnichannel Future Arrived Years Ago

The Power of Pinterest for Brands: Strategies, Tips, & Advantages

By Bethany Calahan, Senior Paid Media Strategist

One could be forgiven for thinking the digital mediascape is looking a bit bleak. In the era of AI everything, the Dead Internet Theory, and rampant “unplugging,” brands, marketers, and users alike are looking for a place where they can feel human again. A place to re-connect to themselves, to the world, and to the brands, products, and services that meaningfully contribute to their lives.

Enter: Pinterest. Launched in 2010, it’s more suited to the future than ever.

Best known as a source for recipes, home decor, and ill-advised tattoo ideas, Pinterest has been on a years-long journey to be taken seriously as the tour-de-force search engine, social media platform, and advertising channel that it actually is.

Allow us to be your guide to everything Pinterest has to offer your brand, whether it’s in the context of an ad campaign, or a core part of your long-term strategy.

User-Driven Benefit & Advantages

Pinterest’s special sauce is that it’s user-driven. Users add pins (the simple but effective pairing of an image with a link) from websites, digital photo albums, and even other social channels, and organize them onto “boards” – basically, digital scrapbooks dedicated to whatever subject they want.

Boards can be based on the old mainstays: recipes, home design ideas, or the ink you want to get. But writers, artists, and designers can build boards of visual references, story ideas, and project how-tos. It goes deep on travel, fashion, health/wellness, and tech gadgetry pins. And thanks to the healthy overlap between Tumblr users and Pinterest users, there are many, many memes.

Users find these pins by searching with keywords, with Pinterest’s visual search tool, or with their deeply-excellent, algorithmically-driven, “similar to” options that appear beneath every single pin on the platform.

Pinterest offers endless ways for users to expand and iterate on their ideas and for businesses to position themselves to users as essential to these ideas, all in one environment.

Due to the flexible user experience, Pinterest boasts a highly advantageous, qualified, and fiercely loyal audience. Users are not only more likely to purchase something they’ve seen on Pinterest, but also more likely to engage with the content on Pinterest than content from other platforms.

Brands are sometimes hesitant to use Pinterest because they perceive it to be demographically skewed. It’s true 70% of Pinterest’s audience identify as women, though this percentage has been shrinking as more men discover the platform’s benefits. But given that 70-80% of purchase decisions made in the US are made by women, the perceived “girliness” of the platform should not be discounted. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Audience Insights for Businesses: Free to a Good Home

Even if you’re not advertising or posting on Pinterest, the platform can still offer valuable insights and on-trend tips for brands.

The Trends tool shows current trending searches across the platform and in specific categories, to inform your campaign or content strategy with consumer insights and preferences in real time throughout the year.

Every January Pinterest also releases their Pinterest Predicts report, which uses large-scale trends they’re seeing on their platform in search and engagement to forecast what will be the big moments and interests for the upcoming year.

For example, for 2025 they identified “Primary Play” as a key trend for the year in interior design, noting increases in search for “contrast trim,” and engagement with primary colors and hand-painted furniture. They also used their visual search tool to identify that engagement with certain color palettes was on the rise. It’s like the Pantone Color of the Year, but driven by real-time user engagement.

Brands can leverage these insights directly, or tangentially. For example, while Kohl’s literally used the “Fisherman Aesthetic” as the basis for their pin content to highlight their products, Jameson Whiskey used a related trending shade of orange to highlight their new orange-infused whiskey, and set up ads to run against searches for this color paired with terms like nails, clothing, and home decor.

Another great planning resource is the Moments Calendar, which shows when users are planning for different occasions throughout the year, from federal holidays to identity celebrations like Pride Month, and everything in between.

Knowing when people start researching their Christmas plans, or when people start searching for festival outfit ideas, can help inform when to begin posting pins, or when to start putting advertising dollars behind them.

Most valuable of all are the ongoing resources provided by the platform on their blog. Pinterest invests heavily in ongoing studies of how users engage with their platform and then shares those resources with creators and advertisers to inform their strategy, so there’s no guesswork involved on the platform (and beyond).

All That and Search, Too

The gold standard of marketing strategy is omnichannel marketing, and Pinterest offers the single most “omni” platform through its integration of search, social, display, video, and shopping in its native environment.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram boast a mix of creative formats and a blend of shopping with organic and paid social environments. But only Pinterest can do all of that with search, integrating the SEO of your site into the on-platform experience for users.

Pinterest’s Rich Pin structure uses the schema and metadata of your website to enhance the on-site experience of users. This is most obvious in the example of recipe pins, which pull ingredient and direction info directly into the pin. It can be leveraged even in organic content by pulling in headline and description copy to enhance the searchability of your site’s content on Pinterest.

This builds a two-way street between your site and Pinterest. Plus, since all content can be saved by users and referenced later, your content develops a long tail of value that simply isn’t available on other platforms.

Live Rent-Free in Your Audience’s Head

Content produced for Pinterest is harder-working and more efficient than on other platforms simply because its shelf life is so much longer.
Pins used either organically or in an ad can be saved by the brand and by users for later reference, and remain searchable either organically or in paid before and after advertising dollars are put behind them.

The content continues working for your business after the campaign stops, with users 7x more likely to purchase something they’ve saved on Pinterest, due in large part to the free ongoing engagement and attention received from being on the user’s board.

Pinterest knows that, “For Gen Z, online is real life.” This shapes their behaviors both on the platform and off, informing their next haircut, shaping their travel plans, and visualizing their next home, giving shape and structure to their “aesthetic” and identity.

If 63% of Gen Z users report that they are always shopping, then brands should be always selling. Pinterest offers an environment where ongoing engagement from brands is desired and supported, from the initial impression to the final conversion.

Pinterest’s shopping capabilities go even further, enabling users to shop directly from their boards by linking site catalog data to organic pins to pull in real-time pricing and sale information.

The recommended pins and visual search features highlight shoppable pins for users to easily find products outside their boards based on color and price range, and even filter to match to their skin tone, hair pattern, or body type.

Want to help curate experiences for your audience? Quiz pins, collection pins, carousels, and videos help provide customized formats for now-and-later engagement with your products and content.

It’s Like Social Media. But Better.

Part of whyPinterest marketing is so great for businesses comes from the way it’s an outlier in social media platforms. They bill themselves as “a place where ads don’t feel like ads,” and the data would suggest that is true.

Not only does Pinterest boast 1.5x slower scroll time past ads and 140% higher total attention compared to other social media channels according to 2024 data, the platform as a whole appears to be showing the opposite trajectory of other social media channels in how it makes people feel.

While as many as 40% of people in 2025 are planning to quit or cut back on their social media usage, Pinterest showed in a UC Berkeley study that just 10 minutes spent on their platform every day increases people’s moods, decreases anxiety, and can even increase social behavior offline.

Users demonstrably value what Pinterest provides them, not just in sharing ideas and inspiration, but in improving their mental attitudes, and this contributes to stronger results for marketing efforts.

A recent study showed that business ads displayed on platforms perceived as positive had 1.5x higher likeability from users, drove 15% more time in looking at ads, and increased purchase intent by +94%. And since Pinterest is rated as the #1 social media platform “for instilling feelings of self-worth and purpose,” there is no better place to be advertising.

Real Brands Using Pinterest: A FINE Success Story

In Q2 of 2025, Lobos 1707, a FINE client and an award-winning tequila brand backed by LeBron James, wanted to drive awareness and engagement around Cinco de Mayo and Memorial Day as cultural moments that lead into summer.

FINE developed a strategy for them that leveraged advanced Pinterest Persona audiences, keywords pulled from Pinterest Trends insights, and general interest categories like beverages and event planning to drive awareness with pins highlighting spring and summer margarita recipes made with Lobos 1707 Tequila.

Pinterest drove 29x higher engagement rates than the other social media channels we advertised on during the same period, and users who visited the website from Pinterest were 7x more likely to engage than users who visited the website from the other social media channels – and that was only in the first 60 days.

With additional saves of the pins from paid ads, there are boundless opportunities for our campaigns to continue providing value, drive awareness for the brand, and develop offline purchase intent over time.

The campaigns also delivered better than CPM and engagement rate benchmarks for the industry, showing the value not only of using Pinterest, but of FINE’s brand-led strategy approach where best results are driven by a deep understanding of your business, your audience, and the channels that best connect them.

People Love Pinterest.

Increasingly, users expect more than just to be sold to. And brands are struggling to find their audience in a crowded marketplace. Pinterest has stepped in as a platform that genuinely feels like it’s built both for the marketer and for the user, without having to sacrifice one for the other. It just may be one of the best places for your brand to be.