Pinterest doesn't have the cool cachet of Instagram or the vast reach of Facebook. Yet the platformstill offers advertisers and marketers a powerful opportunity to engage with potential customers.

And, given the fact that it flies slightly below the radar compared with its more widely used socialcousins, it also offers businesses a chance to carve out a competitive edge with a very covetedadvertising demographic.

The Pinterest Demographic

Knowing your audience is a prerequisite for success in advertising and marketing. And part ofknowing your audience is understanding how to reach them. For businesses with a customer basethat skews female or family-focused, Pinterest is an obvious choice for advertising campaigns.

According to data from Pinterest, roughly seven-in-ten of the platform's users are women. Roughly60-percent of Pinterest users have children under five and 40-percent have household income inexcess of $100,000. Additionally, 50-percent of Millennials use the platform at least once a month.

Given these figures, we know that businesses seeking to target female consumers, Millennials, orfamilies with children and disposable income are likely to find the right audience on Pinterest.

The fact that Pinterest ranks behind only Facebook when it comes to influencing users to make buying decisions also makes the platform attractive.

How Pinterest Ads Work

Promoted "Pins" are designed to look and feel like user-generated pins, fitting squarely into thecontext of native advertising. The goal is to help Pinterest users find new products or services thatare relevant to their lives. When a Pinterest user sees and saves a Promoted Pin, their followers willalso see that Pin within their feed.

Pinterest uses an Ad Manager that works much like Facebook's, allowing businesses to specify acampaign goal (brand building, traffic increases, greater engagement etc.) then design ad contentto drive campaign goals.

Creative execution, of course, is an imperative for advertising success. Pinterest is a visual platform,so businesses that deploy creative, visually stimulating content generate the highest ROI on their marketing efforts.

Pinterest conducted a study of the one year performance of 500,000 Promoted Pins to discoverpatterns shared by the highest-performing ads. Some of the common features shared by the best-performing campaigns included:

• Actionable and inspiring Pins

• High quality, high resolution images optimized for mobile (80-percent of Pinterest usersconnect via mobile)

• Vertical Pins with a 2:3 aspect ratio

• Keywords and hashtags

• Branding

• Helpful copy and/or descriptions

Following these prescriptions is important, as businesses focusing on such elements are receiving agreater ROI on their Pinterest marketing campaigns.

The takeaway

With so much attention on social behemoths such as Facebook and Instagram, it's easy forPinterest to get lost in the digital advertising shuffle. Yet smart businesses understand thatPinterest offers access to a demographic (younger, wealthier and family-focused) that's highlyattractive to many advertisers.

By creating compelling content that's optimized with the features listed above, businesses can usePinterest to create deeply effective ad campaigns.