A New Way for Health Care Marketers To Reach Moms: Pinterest
Suzanna Smentowski, marketing and digital content writer, Henry Ford Health System
If you’re trying to reach mothers — the primary healthcare decision-makers in most households — then Pinterest may be an attractive opportunity for your health system. As of October 2020, U.S. monthly active users on Pinterest numbered 98 million, and more than 78 percent are female. Pinterest reported in March 2019, the month before it went public, that 43 percent of U.S. internet users use Pinterest, and eight out of 10 are moms.
“People on Pinterest are looking for advice,” says Suzanna Smentowski, marketing and digital content writer for Henry Ford Health System (HFHS). “If they’re already online, why not meet them online with health and wellness information?”
When HFHS relaunched its health and wellness blog in 2015, Henry Ford LiveWell, the marketing team was looking for ways to increase pageviews beyond its primary social channels, Facebook and Twitter. “We created a very simple pin template, and we were just working on getting content out there,” says Smentowski. “We created boards that aligned with our service lines — heart and vascular, cancer — and ran some basic ads.” In short, she felt that they were doing all the right things.
But in May 2019, the team learned that the system’s Pinterest channel had been flagged as spam. The results were dismal. “Daily impressions across all of our pins on all of our boards was averaging about 578 impressions, and we were posting four or five times a day,” Smentowski says.
After consulting with Pinterest, the team was able to identify the issues. First, they were posting content that was unbranded. Second, they were posting the same or similar content too frequently. “The combination created a perfect storm for us to get blocked,” says Smentowski.
Since then, Pinterest has become a valuable tool in the HFHS marketing arsenal. Learn more, and see some examples of the types of content HFHS posts there:
How Henry Ford Health System Uses Pinterest to Engage a Key Audience: Moms
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