Pin it: Publicis Health Media CEO offers pointers for pharma marketers on Pinterest

A year after Pinterest first began allowing advertisements from prescription drugmakers and prescribers, Publicis Health Media has accumulated several tips and tricks for pharmas seeking success on the platform.

The media agency was behind four of the seven campaigns launched in the closed alpha phase of testing out the new guidelines, which now allow ads for pharmaceutical manufacturers, prescription drugs, online pharmacies and prescription telehealth providers—all of which are subject to approval from Pinterest. In a subsequent analysis of those efforts, PHM pinpointed specific qualities that can improve a campaign’s performance among Pinners.

Among those findings was the discovery that, in general, unbranded pharma campaigns outperform branded promos on Pinterest by about 20% in terms of click-through rate (CTR)—though both branded and unbranded pharma ads had a higher CTR than the Pinterest benchmark.

As PHM CEO Andrea Palmer explained in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing, that result wasn’t exactly surprising: “Unbranded is a simpler message to deliver, but it’s also a little bit more authentic to the platform,” she said.

Interestingly, the difference between branded and unbranded CTRs all but disappeared when branded campaigns integrated maximum-width videos. In fact, across all pharma campaigns, those with max-width videos performed best while those with standard-width videos were even edged out by static ads in terms of CTR.

PHM’s analysis also concluded that Pinterest is currently about 75% more cost-efficient for marketers than other social media platforms. Palmer suggested that the efficiency boost could be due to a number of factors, including that Pinterest has both fewer users and fewer competing pharma advertisers than other platforms—meaning that a single ad may stretch much further on Pinterest than it does in other arenas.

“So, there’s still a little bit of proving-out to be done, but we’ll see if that trend continues,” she said.

In developing a strategy for Pinterest outreach, pharma marketers must take note of the very specific behaviors of the platform’s loyal users. The audience skews largely female and spans all age groups, including a sizable presence among those 55 and older. Plus, as PHM detailed in its report, “Pinners are planners,” and they typically come to Pinterest with specific goals in mind.

As Palmer described it, while other social media platforms are used in an external fashion—that is, to tell stories or “portray oneself to others,” she said—Pinterest is more for internal use: the “collection and curation” of information for oneself, with behavior heavily focused around “decision-making moments.”

“People are creating boards and curating content based on things that they are either researching or intend to research and are likely in a position to either make decisions or have already made decisions and are trying to become more educated,” Palmer said, noting that, as with other social media sites, each of a Pinner’s searches informs and strengthens the content that the Pinterest algorithm will show them in the future.

That sense of very deliberate, personalized content remains strong on Pinterest even among the marketing allowed on the platform.

“Pinterest still feels like Pinterest,” Palmer said. “When you’re on Pinterest, it feels like you’re getting very clearly curated content—most of which isn’t advertising, but the advertising you do get is incredibly relevant.”

She continued, “The status of the platform is still respectful of the expectations of a consumer on the platform, and being true to what they offer to the user experience. … It doesn’t feel overwhelmingly saturated with advertising or advertiser content. When you’re a consumer in that space and the advertiser content comes up, it is relevant, it doesn’t feel intrusive, it feels additive to the experience at hand.”

In terms of the specific types of advertising content that have so far performed best on Pinterest for pharma companies, Palmer pointed to a handful of “low-hanging fruit categories” with broad appeal and a “very strong lifestyle angle,” such as women’s health and obesity.

That aligns with Pinterest’s own view of how its users operate: “Pinterest serves as the positive corner of the internet where individuals can explore healthy recipes, fitness routines and a variety of health topics tailored to their needs. But people are more than their health conditions, and they use Pinterest to find inspiration for their whole self. In fact, nine in 10 weekly Pinterest users have said Pinterest is a source for positive health and well-being content,” Kim Dolan, head of health partnerships, ads at Pinterest, said in a statement sent to Fierce Pharma Marketing.

That said, Palmer noted that there’s plenty of room for pharma marketing efforts on the platform to expand.

“I think as the platform matures for healthcare, we’ll start to see similar trends that we’ve seen in the past,” she said. “It starts with the broader demographic, the more lifestyle-oriented audience. Then, as people get more comfortable using the platform for healthcare, some of the more niche or smaller patient populations or more high-science conditions may start to gain momentum as well.”

Meanwhile, brands with large caregiver audiences are also beginning to pick up steam—a development that “intuitively makes sense,” per Palmer, because of Pinterest’s widespread use as a tool for planning and research.

“Caregivers are always out on a quest to find new and better solutions and things that they can do to help their loved one, so Pinterest is a really natural behavioral alignment there,” she said.

Similarly, PHM has seen event-driven campaigns—like those tied to back-to-school or allergy season—find success on the platform, “because, again, if you think about the behavior of heavy Pinterest users, they’re planners. They’re planning ahead and making their boards on things that they’re going to do to deal with this upcoming seasonal event or lifestyle event,” Palmer said.

Overall, she reiterated, the brands best poised to perform well on Pinterest will be those that appeal to patients and caregivers seeking out more holistic ways to manage health conditions: “anything that has a tight tie to things outside of just the medication.”

“I don’t know that I see Pinterest becoming a resource for medical information, necessarily, but lifestyle information, including medical support, clinical support, is a super-natural fit,” Palmer said. “So, where there are lifestyle changes or lifestyle components inclusive of clinical and medical care, I think those are the right kinds of brands to focus on.”