IKEA is leveraging the power of the pin to reach its customers in new ways. Specifically, the Swedish home furnishings retailer uses keyword targeting and Promoted Pins to reach student consumers shopping for dorm room decor. According to Pinterest, IKEA increased its click-through rate by 72 percent from 2016 to 2017. It also decreased its cost per click by 37 percent.
The goal of the campaign, which was run last summer, was to drive traffic to the site and to increase the student-consumer awareness of dorm products; it was also to push visits to their brick-and-mortar retail locations, as the majority of IKEA’s sales take place in-store.
As Pinterest explains, “Back-to-school season is big for IKEA. Students are packing themselves into dorm rooms and small apartments, getting themselves set up for the academic year—hopefully with style and without breaking the bank. To reach all these potential customers, the retail giant knew that Pinterest was a great fit. Half of all millennials in the U.S. are on Pinterest, and 72 percent of people on the platform use it to find ideas for their daily lives. Further, the home category is booming on Pinterest, with a 75 percent increase in home pins in 2017 over 2016.”
For the campaign, IKEA worked with media strategy and execution agency Wavemaker, along with Pinterest marketing partner Kenshoo, and used Promoted Pins to link their product to certain keywords, like “dorm ideas” and “dorm room organization.”
The retailer is the first brand to launch a search campaign through Pinterest’s self-serve platform. Notes the site, “Kenshoo provided the advanced reporting and optimization tools that helped IKEA and Wavemaker save time, understand what was working, and make changes on the fly, like identifying the best-performing keywords and increasing their bids.”
“What blew us away was how many searches contained the word ‘idea.’ This means shoppers are using Pinterest as an idea starter while they're still in the consideration phase,” explained Ashley Rives of Wavemaker. “For any retailer, this is exactly the phase when you want to be reaching them.”
