Pinterest outreach to salon pros boosts Nail Art Gallery

Pinterest as a social marketing site is perhaps best suited to brands with outstanding visual stories to tell. Nails magazine is one such brand, as it reaches out to nail technicians and salon owners with a focus on creative designs for nails.

Nails' Nail Art Gallery site is a forum where this group of professionals can upload photos of their nail designs, prompting viewers to like, comment, share and pin photos.

The problem for Nails, however, was that professional subscriptions to its Nail Art Gallery site weren't pulling much revenue or attracting many advertisers; they also weren't generating much traffic and were garnering just a few Facebook posts each week.

Enter Pinterest.

“I had never done Pinterest before, but I found that others were doing community boards for nail art,” said David Broyles, Web producer for Bobit Business Media, which publishes Nails and the Nail Art Gallery site. So Broyles and his social media team created the Nail Art Gallery Pinterest site.

Nails launched its Pinterest strategy in 2012, hoping to drive traffic to the Nail Art Gallery and demonstrate its value to advertisers, primarily manufacturers of nail polishes and other products. Gaining additional social followers was a secondary goal.

Here are some of the steps Nails took with its Pinterest campaign:

• The company contacted active Pinterest users and personally invited them to start a Nails Art Gallery account to display their images and to pin designs from the company's boards. Brand-specific Pinterest boards were created as well, and companies that had active communities and large followings were invited to post on the Nails Art Gallery Pinterest boards.
• Nails integrated its Pinterest effort with other social sites. A home page feed showcases popular posts, and the company uses the Twitter API to automatically send out tweets after an image receives five “likes.”
• The company focused on popular Pinterest influencers within the professional nail and salon community and invited them to start Nail Art Gallery accounts to display their images.

Results of the campaign were strong. Page views jumped from 1.5 million in January 2012 to 4.6 million by October. The number of Pinterest followers went from zero to 13,182, and pins reached 7,466. Referrals from Pinterest totaled about 17,000 in that time.

Monthly advertising revenue on Nail Art Gallery went from $1,000 to $7,000.

The company's Facebook presence also benefited from the Pinterest campaign, with the number of followers growing to 109,908, from 76,623. Total referral traffic from all social sites more than doubled, to 30,133.

“When you understand Pinterest demographics, which is 80% women, it's perfect for Nails and the Nail Art Gallery,” Broyles said. “It gives nail professionals an outlet to post what they can do, connect with other professionals and share ideas. There's a lot of congratulations going on.”

Broyles said the campaign helped create a broader awareness of the Nails brand.

“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.