The Drum Awards Awards Case Studies Marketing

The Soul Publishing on crafting a DIY Pinterest strategy to boost brand awareness

By Awards Analyst, writer

October 14, 2021 | 4 min read

The Soul Publishing won the ‘Best use of Pinterest’ category at The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries 2021. Here, the team behind the winning entry shares the secrets of this successful project...

The Soul Publishing adapted content from its DIY-focused channels (including 5-Minute Crafts) for distribution on Pintrest.

The challenge

With an increasing appetite for DIY content across social channels, The Soul Publishing set out to adapt content from our various DIY-focused channels (including 5-Minute Crafts) for distribution on Pinterest.

KPIs we hoped to achieve included:

25% of overall growth in video views and impressions in 2021.
2 million total followers by Q2 2021.
20m Idea Pin views by Q2 2021.

The strategy

There were two elements that were imperative to the success of our strategy. Firstly, the structure of Pinterest as a platform allows channels like ours to prosper. The focus on visual search means that Pinterest as a platform rewards publishers, like us, who have a breadth of visual content for people to engage with.

Pinterest also operates differently in terms of how it stores this content; it functions more like a search engine. This allowed us to build up a catalogue of content across multiple pages and languages which can be accessed repeatedly by Pinterest users.

Secondly, new features including the rollout of an improved video uploader, a new video tab, and lifetime video analytics on Pinterest empowered our team to find the insights we needed to accelerate our presence across the platform.

Existing features also played a key role. Idea Pins due to their position (at the top of the feed) and duration (they don’t disappear after 24 hours like in other social media platforms) are helping to increase the number of views and engagements across our videos. Similarly, Idea Pins allow us to share our best 5-Minute Crafts life hack content.

The execution

We adapted our popular ‘how-to‘ content for Pinterest users worldwide by creating an extensive library of content that catered to different searches, interests and trends.

This began with creating 5-Minute Crafts in Portuguese (Ideas Incriveis) and Spanish (Ideas en 5 Minutos). Videos have been the main driver of traffic on the Spanish and Portuguese Pinterest accounts, with ‘Ideas en 5 Minutos’ seeing an average of 18 million daily impressions and surpassing 1 million followers in Q2 2020.

At the peak of lockdown, some of the most popular videos on the Spanish and Portuguese channels included chicken roasting tips, easy homemade ravioli, and peeling hacks. Given the popularity of the initial two launches, we’ve expanded to 11 languages including French (Brico Sympa) and Arabic (حِرف إبداعية في 5 دقائق) across four different brand channels.

For The Soul Publishing, Pinterest’s unique position fills an important gap in the social media toolkit. As we have demonstrated with our successful launch, if used correctly it can add significant value to brand awareness.

The results

Within our first two years on Pinterest, we have seen extremely high levels of engagement with our video content.

Highlights include:

In the first half of 2021, we saw a 25% increase in impressions compared with the second half of 2020.
We have had 360m video views across all our pages in the first half of 2021.
In the first half of 2021, 5-Minute Crafts Family had 3x more impressions than the previous six months.
Our Idea Pins in 5-Minute Crafts Family have been viewed 10m+ times.
Our total followers on Pinterest to date (June 2021) stands at more than 3.7 million.

This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for Digital Industries 2021. Find out which of The Drum Awards are currently open for entry.