A recent campaign by Nails Magazine illustrates the power of Pinterest as a visual marketing tool. Focused on creative designs for nails, the magazine also runs a Nail Art Gallery site – a forum for nail technicians and salon owners to share nail designs and receive feedback in the form of viewer likes, comments, shares and pins. The brand made a first foray onto Pinterest to help generate traffic, and saw huge results in terms of pageviews, Pinterest followers and advertiser dollars.
Setting Goals
Before the brand turned to Pinterest, the Nail Art Gallery site wasn’t generating much traffic, was seeing little engagement on Facebook, and subscriptions to the site weren’t drawing in much revenue or attracting advertisers. Nails hoped that a Pinterest site would accomplish the following goals:
- drive traffic to the Nail Art Gallery
- demonstrate the Gallery’s value to advertisers (and attract more of them)
- gain additional social followers
Creating the Campaign
In 2012 David Broyles, Web producer for the media brand that publishes Nails, created a Pinterest strategy with his social media team. He told BtoB that he “had never done Pinterest before, but I found that others were doing community boards for nail art.”
The brand did some research and sought out influencers in the Pinterest community to help launch their site. Nails contacted active users on the image-sharing platform – with a focus on popular Pinterest influencers within the nail/salon community – and “personally invited” them to start a Nail Art Gallery account to show their images and pin designs from the Nails board. They also created “brand-specific” Pinterest boards, and invited companies with active communities to post on these boards.
To promote their Pinterest presence across social platforms, the Nails home page features a feed that displays popular Pinterest posts, and the brand sends a tweet everytime an image receives five ‘likes,’ according to BtoB.
Measuring ROI
The results of the campaign were clear and measurable:
- page views jumped from 1.5 million in January 2012 to 4.6 million by October
- followers on Pinterest grew from zero to 13,182; pins reached 7,466
- referrals from Pinterest totaled about 17,000
- total referral traffic from all social sites more than doubled (reaching 30,133)
According to Broyles, “Pinterest has become the No. 2 social referring site for us, and the number of new backlinks coming to us is now in the tens of thousands,” he said. So from zero presence on the site, Pinterest became a huge source of referrals and backlinks for the Nail Art Gallery.
Exposure and increased traffic from Pinterest also trickled over to the company’s Facebook page: the number of followers grew from 76,623 to 109,908 (and is now over 114,000).
Finally, monthly advertising revenue on Nail Art Gallery increased 7X, growing from $1,000 to $7,000.
Pinterest is clearly a perfect fit for the brand, which appeals largely to females (80% of Pinterest’s user base) and is focused on visual art. And the brand went about creating a presence on the site in the most effective way – by personally reaching out to influencers and companies already active on Pinterest.
What results (if any) has your brand seen from establishing a presence on Pinterest?
