Interview with Hillarys: How Pinterest is shaping interior design
Recently, social media has become all the rage when it comes to promoting a brand. It seems you can’t go five seconds without stumbling across a celebrity promoting a teeth whitening kit or an Insta-famous model talking about her favourite makeup. But does this work for interior design? Can social media really increase customer engagement with cushions, wall paper and chairs? We caught up with interior retailers, Hillarys, to find out more about its collaboration with Pinterest.
Hillarys turned to Pinterest in a bid to create a social media campaign that resulted in the brand becoming an expert research source when it came to interior design.
By creating Pinterest boards around popular interior design trends, connecting with influencers and using offline integration featuring “Popular on Pinterest” badges in their showroom, Hillarys upped its overall traffic on its website and increased engagement with its customers.
In total, traffic increased by 53 per cent and Hillarys saw 11 times the number of people booking appointments with the brand.
Here we ask Christopher McKay, Social Media Manager at Hillarys how and why he did it.
Why did Hillarys decide to launch the Pinterest Campaign?
Pinterest is a really important channel for our customers so as soon as we had a clear plan as to how a promoted campaign would look and be executed, we jumped right in and tested it out.
How did Pinterest find the correct influencers for the campaign?
We still firmly believe that finding the right influencer for a campaign is down to a lot of manual research. It’s easy to get caught up on how many followers someone has but for us, it’s not all based on that. We like to work with people collaboratively on projects that feel authentic to both parties.
How did Pinterest and Hillarys construct the campaign plan?
We worked closely with our paid social agency on a testing plan that would give us the answers we needed to make Pinterest a regular feature in our social media strategy. Like with anything, it was about agreeing on the objectives, how we were going to measure it and what the next steps were after we finished the campaign. Pinterest helped to guide us through the process and were on hand to support when we needed them.
What was the overall goal of the campaign and did you achieve it?
The overall goal for the campaign was to understand how Pinterest could be used, going forward, within our social media strategy. We know that it’s important to our customers and plays a vital role but didn't just want to upload our product catalogue and hope for the best. We wanted Pinterest to be an integral part and play a role in our overall customer journey.
Would you recommend using Pinterest to other companies looking to promote business?
It completely depends on the business objectives, what the platforms going to be measured on and what content can be used on Pinterest. We have fantastic imagery that works really well on Pinterest, a wide range of products that can be showcased across different boards and lots of content that resonates with our audience so for Hillarys, it’s perfect. For other companies, it’s about weighing up how much investment and resource is needed to make the channel work.
