At Firebrand, I’ve had the privilege of building tremendous growth on clients’ social channels, especially Pinterest. It was extremely rewarding to get analytics reports over the past few weeks revealing that one client, Mally Beauty, saw an increase in total Pinterest impressions by over 118%, while our client Kosher by Gloria’s (KBG) Pinterest impressions increased by 576%.

This happened entirely organically, with no paid promotion whatsoever. How insane is that?!

Ideally, these kind of impressions would come to all clients- but that’s not the case. Here are our tips and tricks for building clients’ Pinterest accounts based on tactics we implement for managing two accounts that are experiencing exponential growth:

Pinterest impressions
An example of a high-quality shot of a KBG recipe we used for her Pinterest page!

 

1) Define your Pinterest goals

Why is your client using Pinterest? Who are they trying to reach? Think about Pinterest’s key demographics and psychographics, and decide how your competitors are responding to behavioral characteristics of their target consumer within that specific audience.

In the case of Mally, we want to shape the brand’s Pinterest account into not only a source of beauty inspiration, but also a place to educate consumers on how to fix makeup mistakes to get the best look possible. This will ultimately increase Pinterest impressions, brand awareness, and drive traffic to the website through pinning looks featuring Mally products. With KBG, the goal is to create awareness of Gloria’s unique kosher recipes. This means shifting the focus from re-pinning other Pinterest user content to adding pins from kosherbygloria.com in order to highlight Gloria’s cooking skills and compelling imagery.

Pinterest impressions
One of the top-performing boards from Mally Beauty based on our Pinterest-driven goals

2) Add original pins that leverage your clients’ Pinterest goals from other social channels

Both Mally Beauty and KBG are incredibly active on other social media channels. They also have websites where leads can learn more, view pictures of their products and recipes respectively, and convert to loyal customers or fans. Whenever you have a breadth of content across multiple platforms, consider how you can repurpose this content to increase Pinterest impressions while reaching specific goals.

Pinterest impressions
An example of a Mally Beauty asset for Instagram that we pinned to the “Words to Live By!” Pinterest page.

To drive more traffic to these social platforms and websites, we pin content from Mally and KBG’s Instagram pages to their Pinterest boards. YouTube has plenty of videos and pinned videos we can find of Mally giving a tutorial or Gloria cooking a recipe to also increase the diversity of their content on Pinterest. Finally, we pin photos of Mally’s products directly from their website and recipes directly from Gloria’s blog to increase the potential for traffic to landing pages for conversion.

 

3) Engage Meaningfully!

While it is important to add your own unique content to Pinterest, no one will see this content if your client doesn’t establish a loyal follower base. Engage with your client’s target audience on Pinterest, but remember to engage in a manner that drives results for the goals you set out to achieve.

Mally needs to be an advocate for beauty tips. So we find articles that provide beauty tips on products ranging from liner to lipstick. It is an added bonus if those articles feature Mally Roncal herself giving tips to fans. Since the primary goal for KBG is driving awareness to Gloria’s brand, we insert her brand voice into the conversation surrounding kosher cooking. we like other kosher recipes, follow boards featuring kosher cooking, and monitor any Pinterest users already following Gloria that are focused on representing a kosher lifestyle.

Pinterest impressions
An example of some boards followed by KBG based on the keyword search “kosher cooking.”

Now, we do advocate using Pinterest for the sake of a client joining every social network out there. Different platforms are more ideal for certain brands than others. But if Pinterest is ideal for your client’s target consumer and business goals, use these tips to fuel results that exceed expectations.

Oh, and follow Mally Beauty and Kosher by Gloria on Pinterest!