Use Pinterest Promoted Carousel Ads To Empower Your Retail Business
With over 200 million regular monthly active users, Pinterest has become one of the largest social media platforms on the Internet. Naturally, this fact has not been lost on marketers. While Pinterest was originally intended as a way for users to collect and display images on digital bulletin boards, it is now used by businesses to display and advertise their products to millions of potential clients all over the world.
As with Facebook and other social media platforms, Pinterest ads come in a variety of formats such as promoted pins, videos, and carousel ads. We’re going to be talking about carousel ads in this post and how you can use them to better empower your business.
What Are Carousel Ads?
A promoted carousel ad is a series of images that are presented as a slideshow that users can swipe through on the Pinterest app. At a glance, a carousel resembles the pins that are normally found on a Pinterest board, except they have a number of grey dots underneath to indicate that there are multiple images. It’s essentially a way to include more images on a Pinterest board while taking up the space of a single pin. Carousel ads have proven to be very successful on Facebook and Instagram, and even LinkedIn has its own version of this ad format, but it just seems like an even better fit for a social media platform such as Pinterest that is based almost entirely on photo sharing.
Even though promoted carousels are fairly new to Pinterest, they have become among the best ways for a brand to promote its products to Pinners. Here are just a few reasons why.
Telling a Story
Perhaps the best use of a carousel ad on social media is to tell a deeper story. Even though there can be a lot of storytelling power in the right image, a series of connected images can have an even larger effect on the average Pinterest user. A promoted carousel can have up to five images. That may not sound like much, but you can tell an engaging short story that will have any user clicking through every image – and even through the rest of your Pinterest board – to learn more about what you have to offer. This will obviously take some creativity if you want your followers to keep clicking or swiping through your carousels; you can’t just have a random collection of five ads to make the concept work for you.
Five Images in One
When you come across a carousel on a Pinterest board, it won’t look any different from any other pins that you might see. As we discussed before, the only real difference is that you will see a number of grey dots underneath the first image. This means that you can essentially save space on your board. Not that you will ever run out of space on a Pinterest board, but the fact that you can essentially have five images in one can make it easier to plan the layout of your board and make it look a little less cluttered.
Optimizing Your Board for Mobile Devices
The slightly less cluttered board that comes from using a well-placed carousel ad will make it that much easier to display on a mobile device. Pinterest is arguably more useful when viewed on a smartphone or tablet anyway since so many people use it when they’re out and about or while shopping, so you might as well do everything that you can to make it easier to use on a smaller screen.
Driving Engagement
It may seem like a small thing, but the act of swiping to view all the images on a carousel can make your Pinterest board more engaging for those viewing it on a mobile device. A well-constructed carousel ad will be simple enough to be viewed at a glance or with the swipe of a user’s finger, but the very fact that a user will have to work to see everything can sometimes make the experience more meaningful and memorable, even if they technically don’t have to work that hard.
Easy and Inexpensive
Even though Pinterest and other social media platforms make advertising as easy as possible, there is still a considerable amount of time, effort, and money that goes into a good social media marketing campaign. In the past, something like a carousel ad might have seemed too costly and too difficult to implement, but Pinterest actually makes it very easy. All you need to do is choose the images that you want to put into your carousel, and you will be good to go. It will show up just like any other pin on your board. You can also attach a call-to-action to a carousel to make it an even more effective advertisement, all without having to spend more time and money on a new ad.
If you want to grow your brand through Pinterest, it’s clear that using promoted carousel ads is the way to go. It allows you to include multiple images in the space of a single pin on your board, and it allows you to showcase your advertisements creatively and in a way that increases engagement for your followers. They’re also incredibly easy to include on any Pinterest board, as well. All you need to do is choose the images you want to include in your carousel, and you can have it ready to go within minutes.
Even though they are relatively new to Pinterest, other social media platforms have been using carousel ads for a while now to great success. Larger brands have made great use of the format on Facebook and Instagram, and they will no doubt do the same thing with the promoted carousel ads on Pinterest. Even if your brand is still smaller or you simply want a more creative way to display your personal pins, you can increase engagement and the aesthetic appeal of your board with a well-placed carousel ad. Log onto your Pinterest account today to give it a try.
Heather Hart
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