Pinterest Is a Search Engine. Build for It Like One.
The channel filed under social behaves like Google with pictures. Treat it that way and it becomes the only spoke where your content keeps working long after you have stopped paying attention to it.
By Jade Mossop, Global Creative Marketing Director
Pinterest is not a social channel. It is a visual search engine that happens to have a feed, and almost every Pinterest strategy I am asked to look at fails for the same reason: it was built by a social scheduler rather than by anyone thinking about search intent.
The pattern is easy to spot. The Instagram asset gets cropped to 2:3, the caption gets pasted across, the board is called Inspiration, and the link points at the homepage. Nothing happens, and the conclusion drawn is that Pinterest does not work for the category. What actually happened is that a piece of content was published against no query, described in language nobody types, and pointed at a destination that did not answer the promise in the image.
The reframe is simple. Every pin is an answer to a search. So the question that governs the creative is not what looks good in the grid, it is what someone is typing when they are two weeks away from buying. That single question changes the crop, the on-image text, the title, the description, and above all the destination. Pinterest sits between search and commerce, which is exactly where a brand can be found before the category fight starts.
This is how I run it inside a hub and spoke system. The article is the hub. LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest are spokes, and each spoke is asking a different question of the same idea. LinkedIn asks who thinks this. Instagram asks what does this look like. Pinterest asks what am I planning. So one article does not become one pin, it becomes a set of pins, each one built against a separate query and each one deep linked to the section of the article that actually answers it. The work is in the mapping, not the design. The design is the easy part.
Here is what is easy to miss. An Instagram post is broadcast once to the people who happen to be present. A pin is indexed, and it gets returned to whoever searches for it next month, and the month after that. The asset has a completely different half life, which changes what is worth producing and how you value the production spend behind it. It also means Pinterest traffic arrives at the planning stage rather than the buying stage, so last click reporting will consistently undervalue it. If you judge the channel on last click alone, you will switch it off shortly before it starts to compound.
Post to social. Publish to Pinterest. One spends your content, the other banks it.
Board and pin structure shown for illustration. Live campaign links removed for this public preview.
