We signed up this client in October 2021. In November, we did not pin much, and in December, we started pinning both idea pins and regular pins. Here’s a Pinterest case study of that account. 

We are currently at 17K followers and 5 Million monthly viewers. Below is the breakdown of the outbound links and saves we have received so far.

January – 810 Outbound clicks, Pin ads – €15.43, Saves – 4954

February – 1481 Outbound clicks, Pin ads – €7.58, Saves – 8083

March – 3678 Outbound clicks, Pin ads – €28.42, Saves – 12470

April – 5867 Outbound clicks, Pin ads – €40.67, Saves – 15768

May – 7709 Outbound clicks, Pin ads – €10.60, Saves – 21838

Process

1) The first step we did was to clean up the profile. We merged a lot of similar boards, archived the irrelevant boards, and left the spammy group boards. As of now, we only have 7 boards and 3 group boards. Having fewer boards makes it easy to manage and keep the boards active. After all, Pinterest has some aspects of a search engine, and we all know how important it’s to be regular so that algorithm can give us some preference. Inactive boards can hinder growth. It’s best to have those boards that you can keep active; otherwise, merge them or archive them.

2) After that, we did complete keyword research, optimized the boards, and wrote all the board descriptions. We used the Pin ads interface, Pin inspector, and Buzzsumo to get the keyword data and competitors’ data.

3) In one week or so, the profile was properly set up, we had all the keywords we needed to target, the Pinterest tag was installed, Pin template was set, and the color pallet was selected.

4) Client’s profile was inactive for some months, and there was no engagement. We had to bring the engagement first. Fresh Pins wouldn’t have brought it because we all know that Pinterest pins can take a minimum of 4-6 months to bring some good engagement.

So we used Idea Pins and Video Pins to bring initial engagement. We used to post 5-7 idea Pins daily. Some of the idea pins were provided by the clients, and we used to Pick up from Insta reels and give original creators proper credits before Pinnig. This resulted in good growth; within 1 month or so, we were at 200K monthly viewers.

5) 1’st month, which was October, was all idea pins and bringing some engagement. In November account remained mostly inactive, so regular pinning started in December. We started to Pin 5-10 pins daily. The client already had 200+ articles with an average of 10-15 images that were never pinned. So we had plenty of content to be pinned.

6) We also used Pin ads to our advantage. We run $20-30 ads per month. Now, a lot of you might have different experiences. But I feel that once I run Pin ads, I’m relatively safer than other accounts.

There were instances where our personal accounts got suspended cause we Pinned 15 pins in one go, sent messages to some people, changed Pin outbound links, or tagged a product. This was so frustrating losing our accounts like that. It can be understood if it was a bug thing, but it isn’t. Every other day people complain about account suspension on Facebook groups and subreddits. But in my experience, Pin ads can help in keeping the account safe. After all, no platform would like to suspend its users who spend money on their platform every month.

7) For us, manual pinning has done wonders. We employ 2 methods for manual Pinning. One is to design the pin, upload it on Pinterest, add the description, title, and outbound link, and then Pin it.

Another is just to head over to the client’s website, choose the image and directly pin it from there. Both are used in different circumstances. Custom pins are pinned using the first method, and images on articles are pinned using 2nd method. We use Pinterest native scheduler on weekends when we take a day off.

Reasons For Good Growth

a) Quality and quantity of the content:- Our client posts around 15-20 articles per month. He has got a dedicated content writer team who writes all the required content. Each article contains around 10-15 images. If we take this number, we get 150-300 pins monthly. These are the images that are on blogs and will be Pinned. 2 custom pins are designed for each blog post using different templates and we also Pin 2 idea pins each day. So, 30-40 custom Pins. sThis makes it 180 – 340 regular pins and 60 idea pins a month. We wouldn’t have achieved these results without this many pins.

b) Pinterest trends:- We check Pinterest trends every week and pin idea pins according to that. This helps us get engagement in a fast manner.

c) Timing the content:- We see traffic jump every Saturday. It shows that our audience is most active on Saturdays when they are looking for ideas for the weekend. We increase the number of idea pins on Thursday and Friday.

d) Targeting the right interest:- Nothing is better than showing people what they really want to see. We create more of the content that our audience needs. Head over to audience insight, filter the categories based on the higher affinity, then filter the interests on higher affinity and start making Pins, idea pins, and blog articles around those keywords. This helped us in increasing the engagement rate and CTR.

These are the steps that we follow, which have worked for our clients and us. Pins have started to rank now; we have a good number of followers which can give an initial boost, and idea pins are getting viral. From this month on, we will focus on affiliate sales via ideas and regular pins. 

Marketing is a field that keeps on evolving, and that’s why I like it. What’s working now will be obsolete in a few months. If you have any questions, then do ask. What are the other things that have worked for you? Please share your experience.

UPDATE

Over 1 year and 6 months, we generated 80 Million impressions on our Pins, 3 Million engagements, and 76K outbound clicks.

Since September 2022, this account has been on autopilot.

Between September 2022 – April 2023, we generated 42 Million impressions, 1.5 Million engagements, and 36K outbound clicks without any effort. This proves that Pinterest is perfect for brand awareness and extra SEO results.