Family Handyman is focused on creating do-it-yourself content to help simplify and inspire the everyday lives of our readers. We're the DIYer's best friend, offering a variety of resources for do-it-yourself homeowners, including how-to instructions for improving homes, yards and vehicles. What better way to present that material than on Pinterest?
Over the last couple of years, we wanted to find a way to strengthen our community on positive and visual platforms. Being our authentic self is top of mind as a brand and we felt Pinterest could help us evolve and take our content to the next level. It helps us understand what our followers are looking to create/fix in their homes. It's a place where people come to aspire—and we aim to provide that inspiration.
The goal of our efforts is to:
Our brand was built on providing endless DIY ideas to make our followers' lives easier. We know improving a home can be quite expensive—but it doesn't have to be that expensive. For starters, did you know you could have a new backsplash in just six hours for under $200? Or that you could do one of these 16 cheap updates to give your bathroom a little more pizzazz?
This is the type of content we know resonates with our audience—we can bring our projects to life with beautiful imagery and videos on a platform like Pinterest. Our aesthetically pleasing long pins are clean, bold and attractive to the reader—they inspire them to create.
To improve our overall look, we worked closely with our design team to incorporate best practices from a Pinterest designer. The result? We've seen our overall traffic skyrocket.
Unlike algorithm-based platforms like Facebook, people are searching for content vs. clicking on what's serviced to them. Since incorporating SEO into our overall strategy, we've seen consistent overall growth week over week. Our teams have conducted research that show us which keywords to focus on in our content and the design of our long pins. This helped us realize we needed to promote other topics we hadn't before like kitchen design, new homeowner tips, landscaping, etc.
Focusing on Pinterest has helped us reach and attract many new audiences—specifically young women. While gardening and home décor may not be hits for us on other platforms, we see the demographic responding to these types of content on Pinterest.
We also began uploading video content to the platform, which provided another way for Pinterest followers to engage with us. Instead of seeing a static image, they can see our talent building a specific project or explaining the latest trend in home organization. There's no better way to connect to a brand than by meeting and engaging with the faces of said brand.
While all of this has helped us achieve our goals (we are the #1 home improvement magazine on Pinterest after all!), none of it is more important than knowing we can reach our audience (old and new) in an authentic, trustworthy way. This platform allows us to deliver safe content that not only inspires, but makes life easier for our followers.
As of December 2018, we've seen incredible growth YoY:
TL;DR: We hit every single goal we set out to hit at the start of 2018. A quick reminder/rundown:
