Using Pinterest as Market Research (Before You Make the Thing)
Pinterest is a search engine full of people describing what they want in their own words. That makes it unusually good at three research questions — and completely useless at the fourth, which is the one about money.
By Mia Bennett · Pinterest strategist
Most of what gets called market research is people asking their friends whether an idea is good.
Their friends say yes, because that is what friends are for, and then a quarter disappears.
Pinterest is unusually good at the alternative, and I do not think many people outside marketing realise it.
It is a search engine where a few hundred million people describe, in their own words, things they want and are planning to do.
Nobody is performing on Pinterest.
They are searching for how to make a small bedroom work, and that search is a much better piece of evidence than any conversation.
It is very good at three questions and hopeless at a fourth, and knowing which is which is the whole of this post.
Do people want this?
Search volume answers it well
Which version do they want?
Compared phrases answer it well
When do they want it?
Seasonal shape answers it well
Will they pay for it?
Pinterest cannot tell you. Nothing here does.
What it is good at
Does anybody want this?
Search volume answers this directly and unsentimentally.
If a subject has meaningful, sustained demand, people are typing it, and you can go and look at how many.
The value here is mostly negative, and that is fine — it is much cheaper to find out that nobody searches for your idea now than in five months.
I have watched an idea die in ten minutes on this check and it was the best ten minutes of that project.
Which version do they want?
The more useful one, and the one that surprises people.
You are rarely choosing whether to do a thing; you are choosing which of five framings of the thing to build.
A meal-planning product could be "meal prep", "weekly meal plan", "batch cooking", "freezer meals", "family dinner planning" — five phrasings of one idea, with genuinely different amounts of demand behind them, and it is not obvious in advance which is which.
Comparing them is a ten-minute job and it can reframe an entire product.
That is not tuning; it is finding out what people think they are looking for.
When do they want it?
Pinterest demand is highly seasonal and, importantly, it runs ahead of the season — people plan on Pinterest, which is what makes it commercially useful in the first place.
For anything with a season, that shape is a launch calendar you did not have to guess at.
The seasonal calendar has the specifics, and spotting trends early is the same read on a shorter timescale.
What it cannot tell you
Whether anybody will pay.
I want to be unambiguous about this, because it is where enthusiasm for the method does real damage.
Search volume measures interest, and interest is free.
Somebody searching "small bedroom ideas" has told you they have a problem and are looking at solutions.
They have told you nothing whatsoever about whether they would pay £29 for one, and there is no amount of further Pinterest research that will get you there.
The gap between "lots of people search this" and "people buy this" is where a great many well-researched products have gone to die.
High-demand subjects are often high-demand precisely because free answers are abundant, which is the opposite of a commercial signal.
Traffic is not the same as money is the longer version of this argument and worth reading before you build anything.
The order that saves the most work
Make it, then look for demand
chance it lands
work at risk
Look for demand, then make it
chance it lands
work at risk
The research costs an afternoon. The other order costs a quarter.
Nobody argues with this written down and almost everybody does it the other way round, for a reason worth naming: making the thing is enjoyable and checking whether anybody wants it is frightening.
The research is not hard, it is just the step where the idea might not survive.
The version I have settled on is to spend one afternoon, early, deliberately trying to kill the idea.
If it survives an afternoon of genuine effort to find out that nobody wants it, that is real evidence.
If it does not, the afternoon was the cheapest thing you will ever do.
A practical afternoon
- Write your idea as five different phrases somebody might search. Not descriptions — search phrases. This alone often reveals you cannot say what the thing is.
- Check the demand behind each. You are looking for one with real demand behind it, not five with a trickle.
- Look at what already ranks for the winner. If the first fifteen results answer the question completely and for free, that is your competition and it is free.
- Look for the constrained variants — for renters, on a budget, in a small space, with no equipment. This is where an open lane usually is, per content gap analysis.
- Check the seasonal shape, so you know whether you are looking at a flat line or a wave you have three months to catch.
- Then, and only then, go and ask whether anybody would pay — which happens somewhere other than Pinterest.
One fortnight · two evenings of actual work
Day 0 · write rulesDays 1–4 · publish 12Days 5–13 · waitDay 14 · read it
The long grey stretch is not dead time. It is the measurement.
The thing that makes this workable
Every step above depends on getting an honest number for demand, and Pinterest does not hand you one.
You can see suggestions, you can see what ranks, you can infer from how much content exists — all of which is inference, and inference is exactly what you were trying to replace.
That is what PinPinterest is for: the real demand behind each phrase, how contested it is, and whether it is rising or fading — so "which of my five framings" is a sorted list rather than an opinion, and "is this seasonal" is a shape rather than a guess.
Ten minutes there is the difference between market research and a nicer sort of guessing.
The niches we track shows how deeply your area is covered before you commit.
Kill the bad version of your idea in ten minutes rather than five months
One caution about who is on Pinterest
It is not a general population sample and pretending otherwise will mislead you.
Pinterest skews toward planning-shaped subjects — home, food, weddings, style, crafts, parenting, travel — and toward people in a planning frame of mind rather than a buying one.
If your idea sits squarely in one of those, the demand signal is excellent.
If it is B2B software, the absence of search volume tells you almost nothing except that this was the wrong place to look.
Reading the words people use, not just the counts
The half of this that gets overlooked, and the half that is hardest to get anywhere else.
Search phrases are not only a demand measurement.
They are a record of how people describe their own problem, in their own vocabulary, before anybody has sold them a framing.
That is genuinely rare data, and it is free.
If everybody searches "small bedroom storage" and nobody searches "bedroom organisation systems", you have learned something about how to write, name and sell — not just about volume.
Businesses routinely describe their product in the language of the industry rather than the language of the customer, and this is one of the few places you can see the difference laid out plainly.
Read the long tail for this rather than the head terms.
Head terms are generic by definition; it is the six-word searches that contain the constraint, the frustration and the specific situation — and those are the sentences worth borrowing for a title, a product name or a piece of copy.
The same instinct is what makes low-competition keywords valuable for reasons beyond their competitiveness.
If you are weighing up a niche rather than a product, the competitor study is the other half of the picture — demand tells you whether people want it, and reading the accounts already there tells you whether there is room.
Use it for what it is good at, which is a genuinely large and honest window onto what people are planning to do.
Then go somewhere else for the money question.
Which niches actually earn is the bridge between the two, and it is a different question from which niches are busy.
#competitor research#keywords#niches#monetization
More in Research7 other guides in this categorySee all I’ve spent years growing Pinterest accounts from zero. This is the stuff I wish someone had told me sooner — no fluff, just what actually moves traffic.
