​Pinterest marketers must focus more on lead nurturing than lead generation, as consumers use the site to engage brands first.

​Visual content marketing helps businesses create conversations about their products and services on popular social media sites. For example, Pinterest owns the lion’s share of visual social media content, and the site continues to prove its value as a commerce tool. However, brands across several industries have overlooked Pinterest, ignoring its ability to improve customer sentiment and drive website conversions.

According to a new study by Digitas and Curalate, fashion retail and automotive brands lack active Pinterest presences​ – they fail to start active conversations with their followers. This supports data from Digitas showing that 70 percent of brand engagement​ comes from Pinterest users​. The data shows that only 18 percent of retailers pin items on Pinterest, yet the network’s average retail fashion pin receives around 46 repins. As for automotive businesses, consumers generate 75 percent of brand engagement on Pinterest, but few companies have active boards to steer social chatter toward socially assisted conversions.

70 percent of brand engagement​ comes from Pinterest users

Not every business sector fails at Pinterest marketing – electronics brands thrive on the site, adding 47 percent of industry-relevant content to the network. These companies see opportunities to leverage visual content’s power through Pinterest, while organizations across other verticals still do not.

Brafton reported on an end-of-year BizRate study that evaluated the motivations and desires of Pinterest users. The data showed that 70 percent of surveyed Pinterest members said they used Pinterest to “get inspiration on what to buy.”

Pinterest marketing can fuel results for B2C and B2B brands with creative content creation capabilities. Graphic design can help any business become more visual online by helping marketers produce infographic content, smaller product-centric images for seasonal sales or snippets from white papers to promote B2B services. Marketers who aren’t thinking visually are missing out on lead generation opportunities, as consumers use Pinterest throughout the sales cycle when deciding​ on​ what to buy.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.