ConAgra Foods’ Digital Marketing and PR/Social team members Megan West and Jenna Rice share how they strategically grew ConAgra’s ReadySetEat Pinterest page through testing various tactics such as pin it to win it contests, influencer pinning and third party support. You’ll learn which tactics performed and which didn’t as well as how they were able to track actions to actual sales.

1. Choosing The Right Pinterest Tactic
5.15.14
Megan West
Manager, CRM, Digital & Recipe Strategy
ConAgra Foods

2. Our brands are in 99% of homes

3. A CRM program that strives
to help busy moms and
dads solve the weeknight
“dinner dilemma”
Recipes are our currency.
7ingredients or less 30minutes or less

4. Why Pinterest?

5. Wrong Question.
Don’t start with
channel.
Or tactic.

6. Always…
Always…
Start with Business Objectives!!!
(Selling stuff is the reason we all have jobs)

7. ReadySetEat OGSM (simplified)
Drive incremental sales of ConAgra
Foods brandsObjective
What do you want
to achieve?
Drive XX% lift in incremental sales
of ConAgra Foods productsGoal How much?
Strategy
How will we
choose to get
there?
By providing users with quick and easy
Dinner ideas to solve the weeknight
dinner dilemma.
Measures
How will we know
when we get
there?
Drive XX visits to recipe pages
Tactics
What tools will we
will use to employ
the strategy?
SEM, Content Discovery and Pinterest

8. Step 1
Test Design and
Treatment Execution
A stimulus website,
CRM program, etc. is
applied to a group of
consumers
Step 2
Identification of
Exposed and
Unexposed
Households and
One-to-One match
Exposed
Test Households
Unexposed Control
Households
Step 3
Measure & Interpret
Sales Impact by
focusing on
purchasing patterns
How do we know that recipe visits will drive sales?
$3.80
$4.20
Total Brand
+11%
Unexposed
(Control)
Exposed (Test)
*For illustrative purposes
only
NIELSEN
CATALINA
SOLUTIONS
web-enabled
NIELSEN ad
“tag”
embedded
within ad
10x lift in
ROI:
Year 1 to
Year 3

9. How do we know Pinterest will drive Recipe Visits?

10. 3 Pinterest
Case Studies

11. 1. Pinterest Sweepstakes (Pin it to Win it)
Challenge: Can a “Pin It to Win It” sweepstakes to determine if running a promotion on
Pinterest could drive traffic to recipe pages and newsletter sign ups. (Executed in
2012)
Solution: Pin it to Win it contest
encouraged consumers to ‘pin’
ReadySetEat entrees, sides and
desserts for an opportunity to win a
prize pack.
Promoted the sweepstakes on the
ReadySetEat Facebook page and
Twitter handle, as well as the
ReadySetEat newsletter.
Results
• 170% lift in traffic to RSE from
Pinterest
• Pinterest continued to be #1 referral
site (outside of search.)
• High drop-off rate for visits from
sweepstakes boards

12. Pinterest Sweepstakes (Pin it to Win it)
Good For:
• Starting a Pinterest
presence – builds a base of
followers
• Driving awareness of
content (focus is pinning,
not traffic)
Watchouts:
• Pinterest cracking down on
regulation
• Must disclose that pinners
are looking for
compensation
• May not bring in the right
target audience

13. 2. Pinfluencer Campaigns
Challenge:
Can we use influencer pinning to drive recipe
traffic & newsletter sign ups?
Solution
• Conducted CPC campaign enlisting 150+
top pinners in food to pin ReadySetEat
recipes, driving traffic to readyseteat.com
and increasing brand awareness on
Pinterest
• Landing page overlay prompted sign-up
Results
• 10x avg amount of recipe visits from
Pinterest in less than 12 hours
• Repins up that day 30x avg.
Partner

14. Clicks: 2,493
Clicks: 926
Clicks: 951Clicks: 1,241Clicks: 1,472Clicks: 1,607
Clicks: 771Clicks: 782Clicks: 823Clicks: 905
Top Pins by Clicks

15. Pinfluencer Campaigns
Good For:
• Campaign-focused
activity
• Use with other influencer
campaigns
• Limited amount of content
• Content that isn’t overly
branded
Watchouts:
• Vendors can’t “pay to pin”
- May need to disclose in
the future
• Expensive for maintaining
sustained support
• May not have time to
optimize content

16. 3. Organic Pin Management
Challenge: Driving scale traffic from Pinterest – not enough internal
community management resources to devote to pinning the right
content at the right time or optimizing it.
How it Worked
• Ahalogy managed our presence, pinning content at the right time and used analytics
to continually improve.
• Robust A/B testing including cropping, text overlays, description optimization, pin
frequency and timing.
• Landing page overlay organically increased followers
Partner
Results
• Increased traffic by +156%
• 197% increase in repins
• 62% increase in Pinterest
followers
• Playbook for pinning content
based on extensive A/B testing
Recipe Visits from Pinterest
156%
increase

17. Source: Ahalogy test

18. Source: Ahalogy test

19. Organic Pin Management
Good For
• Ongoing presence on
Pinterest
• Driving steady earned traffic
to your content
• Robust sets of owned
content
• Learning what content
works
Watchouts
• Not quick – needs time gain
momentum & learning
• Resource investment to
create and test content
• Promoted pins could reduce
visibility of organic pins.
(Facebook effect)
• Pinterest vendors could turn
to media as their main
model

20. That’s it for boring case studies!
Let’s talk about content!

21. Start with data and insights
Visuals Matter
Treat it like SEO
Make the content work hard
Test and test again

22. Start with insights

23. Start with Insights

24. Use your data!

25. Visuals matter

26. Our photography has evolved

27. Cropping alone can improve the visual
28 repins 319 repins
11x
Repins

28. Example Pin
0.5 Height/Width Ratio
Uncropped
Cropped
Aggressive vertical crops win on Pinterest

29. Treat it like SEO

30. Keywords Matter
Write Pin descriptions in
language real people use when
searching.

31. Make sure the content is viewable across devices.
(and add the Pin-It button to your content)
Pinterest Visits to ReadySetEat

32. Make the content work
hard

34. Test and test again

35. Be a Nerd.
Get curious.

36. A/B tests

37. Create your own playbook

38. Thank you!