How Bon Appétit dishes up winning content on Pinterest

There’s food content out there for every taste and craving. With Bon Appétit, they're a food and entertaining brand known for mixing together timeless content with a relatable aesthetic. Whether applied to go-to recipes, cooking tips or the latest culinary trend, the approach has proven to be an irresistible combination for their foodie audience. And the brand also soon discovered an appetite for their content on Pinterest.

Bon Appétit has a bounty of curated content across popular food categories on social channels. Turning to Dash Social, a social media management tool and a Pinterest-approved partner, Bon Appétit was able to easily access performance data and insights about their audience and content. Diving into historic data, Bon Appétit found that their content performed extremely well on Pinterest.

The goal

Bon Appétit’s opportunity on Pinterest, based on the data and insights they gleaned from Dash Social, was a long-term engagement play for click-throughs and conversions. While many channels can be used to drive brand awareness, the brand saw value in going beyond that on Pinterest thanks to a differentiated audience. Bon Appétit’s audience on Pinterest was leaned into their recipes and photos, preferring to save the content to act on (and cook up) later, rather than to take a quick scroll for entertainment.

Guided by a data-driven strategy, the brand set out to focus on content optimization. Highly relevant content on Pinterest would not only resonate with their engaged audience, but it could also translate into increased traffic to their website, as measured by saves and outbound clicks.

The strategy

Much like the content on Pinterest, Bon Appétit’s recipes and cooking content remain relevant for audiences year after year. And since Pinterest is a visual search engine, content on the platform continues to show up for people searching for it long after it’s initially posted. To optimize their content for maximal discoverability, Bon Appétit implemented Pin best practices and found that adding text overlay cards over visually compelling images proved successful in helping their content reach the right audience, as well as including key search terms in relevant copy fields such as in title and description. 

Bon Appétit also tailored their content curation to follow the lead of consumer behavior on  Pinterest. From holiday inspiration to event planning, the brand made sure to cover all bases of the cooking and entertaining journey. Relevant content was at the ready for their audience on Pinterest throughout the year, with classic and on-trend content prioritized over fads and viral micro-trends. 

With people on Pinterest always on the lookout for new cooking ideas, Bon Appétit saw the importance of publishing regularly. To save time and efficiency, they used Dash Social's data-driven scheduling tools to plan for and schedule their posts in advance and also to find the optimal time to post content for their audience.

The result

The brand’s optimized content and always-on presence hit the spot with engagement and growth. The Pinterest audience, with high search intent, savored their content with an impressive 148% lift to saves and 60% increase in outbound clicks to the Bon Appétit site.

Tips to try

Get more out of your Pinterest content with these best practices.

Think like a search engine
Pinterest is a visual search engine for inspiration and new ideas.  So, remember to provide context for your content—with text overlay, keywords and visually compelling cover images—to help get discovered on the platform.

Follow a posting cadence
Publish regularly, ideally on a weekly basis, to get your content in front of more people looking for ideas like yours. Save time and efficiency using a scheduling tool.

Tap into a Pinterest partner in the know
Dash Social is an essential efficiency and reporting platform that Bon Appétit used to help inform and optimize their content strategy, and effectively monitor performance and insights.