At Mykidstime we have been working on a new strategy for our Pinterest channel. Find out how we more than doubled our website traffic from Pinterest in the last 6 months:

Background of Mykidstime on Pinterest

We joined Pinterest in 2012 out of curiosity about what this new social media channel would bring us. As with all our social media we always measure activity from the channel and look at what the channel is bringing us.

Between 2012 and 2014 it brought a very steady 1% of our website traffic as we could see from our referrers in Google Analytics. And we grew to about 1,000 followers by Autumn 2014.

So internally it was considered as a “by the by” channel, not our core social media activity.

However, in October 2014, I decided to take one of Donna Moritz’ online courses on Visual Content (start with her free course at www.createtrafficdrivingimages.com) as I felt that our visual branding needed to be stronger. This turned out to be a very wise move as you will see.

New Visual Strategy for Mykidstime

As a result of doing Donna’s course, the content team at Mykidstime were able to define a house style and brand a key image for every piece of content that we shared on social media including the ones we pinned to the Mykidstime Pinterest boards.

We decided to use a title and our logo on each image so that if it was repinned someone would be able to see at a glance what the content piece was about.

We also did a lot of work on improving our titles to make them more catchy and hopefully more clickable. We use tools such as Tweak Your Biz Title Generator to work and refine on titles.

Here are some examples of pinned images from our new strategy:

Tweaking our Boards

In January 2015 we decided also to do a tidy up as almost 3 years of pinning meant we had a lot of boards and a lot of pins.

Again we looked at what our own Pinterest fans were pinning pins onto to get ideas about the boards we had or potential new boards. We did a bit of a tidy up at this time and consolidated some boards that we felt were repetitive.

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Using our Pinterest Analytics

About this time we got access to Pinterest Analytics and started measuring and monitoring on our actual Pinterest Analytics. Here are some of the things we look at:

1) Most Popular Pins

We look at the most popular pins as a way of informing our content creation and deliver more value to our Pinterest fans as well as more traffic to our website.

2) Who our Audience are

We look at our Audience regularly and how they are engaging with our page, where they visit from. This helps find new opportunities for marketing.

3) What they are interested in

Finding out what your audience is interested in and the boards they create with your pins can help inform your content and marketing strategy.

And the results?

By December 2014 our Pinterest traffic had gone from 1% to 4%. We thought this was fantastic.

By February 2014 our Pinterest traffic had reached 9%.

We have increased from 1,000 to 1,504 followers (at time of writing) since December 2014.

We feel (actually we know) that this is predominantly due to the new visual branding strategy (although obviously board tidy up has contributed a bit to that too).

“Take-aways” for you

So for any business looking to increase their Pinterest web traffic we recommend the following:

• Make sure your visual strategy  is in place for your content. Definitely take Donna’s course, we found it and her advice invaluable.
• Look at what your Pinterest channel is actually delivering.
• Look regularly at your Pinterest Analytics and Google Analytics to measure and check your activity and results.
• Make sure your boards fit what people look for.
• Make sure your content fits what people look for.

What’s your experience with Pinterest for your business?