If you're wondering how to use Pinterest as a tool to grow your business, this post is for you.
In a previous client showcase, I talked about how Instagram was one of my all time favorite social media platforms to play on. And while that's true, Pinterest is a very close second.
It's such a powerful tool not only for building a community, but also to increase web traffic, as you'll see with this client showcase featuring my client Color Monarch.
Let's get into it!
What is a Client Showcase?
Each client showcase blog post will reveal the statistics recorded from a client project in order to illustrate a few of my social media techniques.
With this series, you have the unique opportunity to learn the inner workings of what it takes to be successful online through social media and content marketing.
It is also my hopes to redefine what success means. It’s not just in the number of followers… Ultimately, social media success comes down to engagement, website traffic, and conversions.
Click here to view other client showcases.
In today’s client showcase, I’m diving into the amazing growth we saw on Pinterest in the past few months with Color Monarch.
About Color Monarch
Color Monarch is the world's first AI-based color recommendation system that's perfect for any exterior or interior design needs. Their web based program gives users the ability to identify the best colors for their space then choose from a variety of complementary paint colors based on a chosen focal point. Users are also given the option of ordering free paint chips to their homes in order to get the perfect color for the space.
The Challenge
When the Color Monarch team reached out to me, they were hyper focused on not only growing awareness for their budding company but also on generating qualified traffic using Pinterest. The most challenging part was the timeline. Initially, we were looking to see how much we could get done in a 2-3 week period.
I was honest with them in saying that I can't predict traffic growth without any previous data to analyze. Pinterest is definitely a long term play. As a business, you may not see any traffic in the first 2-3 weeks. In my experience, it takes 2-3 months to build up enough trust for users to click over to your website. For example, with the client Neil D. Brown, my team and I have been working on his account for a year and I can comfortably say we drive an average of 500 views a month from Pinterest alone. But, it took a year of building that account.
Social media isn't an overnight solution. Just like building overnight successes takes years of behind-the-scenes work. I'm happy to help Color Monarch get there but it's going to take more time than a few weeks.
The Plan
From Jan 2018 – April 2018, we used a few different strategies that contributed to our success:
Create Consistent Blog Content: The key to a successful Pinterest strategy is to consistently create content (in this case, blog content) that your target market will identify with. For this client, we focused on creating content that would help our target audience in the decision making process as they re-design or re-model their homes. We wanted to get in their heads and think about what they would need right before using the Color Monarch tool. Our blog posts are basically the bait leading the target audience to the product.
Use Pinterest Advertising: Due to the short timeline of this project, we wanted to add fuel to the fire with some advertising that was specifically geared at building website traffic. So we created an infographic (see below) and some blog content that would do just that. While Pinterest advertising is a bit less targeted and more expensive than Facebook, I think it worked quite well in this niche.
Participate in the Community: This is huge. As a new brand, it's important to participate and use social media as your target audience would. In today's world, there are so many businesses practically shouting how great they are without taking the time to connect with those who would potentially buy or use their products. Using Tailwind's Tribes feature helped us find pockets of people who enjoyed sharing our posts.
Social Media Portfolio
The pins that we created for Color Monarch are some of my proudest content pieces. I think they fit very well with the branding and are attractive to those scrolling through the Pinterest feed.
The content for Color Monarch is a mixture of blog posts, color inspiration, tips of the day, and informative promotional images.
The Results
In the past four months, we've already grown the Color Monarch community on Pinterest from 0 to 1,293 followers.
But even more important than followers, we've been able to create a community of people who actually care and engage with our content.
- In April, we've had 232K monthly viewers of our pins with 9.2K of them engaging with our content.
- Our group board has 115 contributors with over 700 pins added to date.
- The average cost per engagement was $0.17 for our paid ads with an engagement rate of 1.94%.
- We had an overall total of 475 unique website visits.
- Our most shared pin has been viewed over 100,000 times!
… and it's only been 4 months!
In the Client’s Own Words…
“It has been a very pleasure experience working with Andrea, who helps us setup and manage our Pinterest account. As a small team just starting out building a product, we don't have the capacity and expertise within the team to manage all the social media accounts. Andrea has been very patient listening to our request and responsive to make any changes along the way. She also does very good job communicating progress in weekly summary and follow-ups.”
~ Jodie Shen, VP Product for Color Monarch
Final Thoughts
With all of the recent changes on Facebook with their organic algorithm and their advertising platforms, businesses like Color Monarch will benefit from using platforms like Pinterest to launch their campaigns.
If you want to chat more about how your business can use Pinterest as a marketing tool, learn more about our offers!
