Brynn Hull | Digital and Social Media | Fall 2024
This past winter and summer, I had the opportunity to do an internship in Utah for a catering company, which turned into a full-time job for me. I ran all the marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and any other platforms. I created ads and optimized them. One day while I was tracking the sales, I noticed that we had one sell from Pinterest and was quite shocked. We had a Pinterest account that had maybe 20 pins in total. It was all organic content and it got me thinking. If we had more pins on there, how many more potential clients could we reach? Especially if it is organic content. When brides are planning their dream wedding, where is the first person they usually go to? Pinterest.
And that is where my senior project originated from. In the early spring, the same owner of the catering company bought a wedding venue. I did them both and was able to compare each Pinterest account to each other. The venue had a Pinterest account from the 2010’s and it looked pretty old.
In addition to the Pinterest, I wrote four blog posts for each company to link on the pins on Pinterest. This way I was able to combine multiple parts of the things I learned over the past few years into this project.
To create pins, I needed to gather content for each brand. For Crisp Catering, it was pretty simple because they have so much content. For The Northampton House, it was a bit trickier. Because they have only had this building since the spring, there isn’t a ton of content. I even added another element of my learning and went and took photos of the building to give me some more content to work with.
After all content was gather I needed to come up with a title. I tried to make this SEO based using keywords that people in Utah would search. I learned this in school and tried to apply this as best as I could. In the description, I would try to do it almost like a caption that you would see on Instagram. Make it fun and engaging. Then I would choose a board for each pin to go to, trying to make all the content feel cohesive and match each other. Lastly, I would add tags to each pin. This isn’t seen on the pins but it helps Pinterest see what your pin is about. Overtime I was able to do these quickly but at first it took some time and research to make these pins perfect. In the end I would schedule the pins and try to have a schedule about 2 weeks out.
You can access The Northampton House Pinterests’ account here. And the Crisp Catering Pinterests’ account here.
The blog posts were chosen by my manager Lori. I tried to write them to best benefit the business by using SEO, keywords, and tactics to make the blog posts stand out. While not all of them are currently up on the websites due to approval and website issues, there are a few on there along with the rest of them in a folder that you can read here. Or you can read the blogs that are available here at https://catercrisp.com/blog/ and https://northamptonhouse.com/blog/
Overall, I made over 70 pieces of content on Pinterest for Crisp Catering and four blog posts. I did over 80 pieces of content for The Northampton House on Pinterest, along with four blog posts. I did a case study at the end to show my findings which can also be found here.
The main thing I learned form this is that some companies and businesses are going to naturally do better on Pinterest over others. The wedding venue does way better on impressions, clicks, and re-pins. The catering company didn’t do as well on those. And I think it is because people tend to search for wedding floral ideas, photography, and ceremonies. Our venue is able to showcase all of that while the catering is strictly food services.
Doing this project was really fun for me to put the skills I have learned over the years to work. I was able to use SEO, photography, content creation, written content, and social media marketing. While this project didn’t deal directly with paid marketing, it was all about organic marketing. Even though we didn’t get a sale from the content over these ten weeks, whose to say that someone won’t stumble upon it in a few months and book us through that. That is how our sale originally happened.
If there is one overarching takeaway, it is that it takes time and consistency for results to come in. While I didn’t have a ton of results, I have a page ready for when someone does stumble upon it. Keeping up on it can be beneficial in the long run. Pinterest wasn’t a platform we dived into as much in classes. For me, learning something new on my own has been such a good experience. Teaching myself how to use it and finding resources to help. It is a platform that isn’t talked about a lot. But with the right business or service, I think it can be an amazing platform to use.
For access to all my blog posts, photos, and case study, click here.