Context & challenge: Build a sustainable, organic growth engine beyond Instagram

In late June 2024, I joined Rayon, a French product-led SaaS company that sells next-generation design software to interior designers and architects, as a Senior Growth Marketer.

Rayon's marketing team already managed to create strong growth thanks to Instagram (+135k followers at the moment I'm writing this article).

The challenge with Instagram is that it was heavily reliant on short-lived content, including reels, and influencer collaborations. It's then a strategy that requires constant investment in new content and partnerships, making it hard to scale at a certain point.

The critical challenge was to build sustainable growth channels that didn’t rely on the unpredictable and resource-intensive nature of Instagram. The goal was to create an organic content engine with a much longer lifespan—one that could continue driving traffic and leads over time, even without constantly pushing new content.

The approach: Build a scalable, productized content engine around SEO and Pinterest

To build a sustainable and scalable organic content engine, I focused on two primary channels: Pinterest and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The strategy I built was centered around creating high-quality plan templates for interior designers and architects and repurposing them into multiple formats to maximize their impact.

1. Templates as the foundation of the content engine

Templates—pre-designed plan models—were identified as key assets with dual potential: improving user activation in the app and generating organic traffic. When I joined, there were around 10 templates available, all produced in-house. To scale, I:

• Hired a freelance interior architect to produce templates regularly, delivering new batches every two weeks.

• Added templates into the app: New users could start projects with a bunch of pre-designed templates instead of a blank page, helping activation.

• Indexed templates on the website: Each template was automatically published as a dedicated asset page on Rayon's website, using a ChatGPT-powered script. This generated descriptions and content blocks at scale, allowing rapid page creation.
  Check Rayon assets library to see an example.

• Recycled templates for Pinterest: Each template was transformed into 10-15 Pinterest pins. This enabled to continuously publish new content on Pinterest by using pre-existing assets.
  Check Rayon Pinterest account to see pins examples.

• Repurposed templates into blog articles: Templates were grouped by theme (e.g., “5 house floor plan templates”) to create engaging, SEO-optimized content.

2. Targeted SEO landing pages

To further boost SEO, I designed and implemented a system of 30+ landing pages targeting specific keywords.

These pages were divided into three categories:

• Use Cases: Pages tailored to specific needs, such as “floorplan creation,” with subcategories like “bathroom floorplans” or “kitchen floorplans.”

• Roles: Persona-based pages targeting audiences like interior designers, architects, and students.

• “Alternative to” pages: Comparison pages like “Rayon vs Competitor,” optimized to piggyback on our competitors' traffic and target users with high intent.

The goal of this structured approach was to optimize for search engines while sharing high-quality content fitting Rayon's ICP needs.

Results: Pinterest reached > 1M views per month and a compounding SEO engine was born

1. Pinterest Growth

I grew Rayon’s Pinterest account from 40,000 monthly views to over 1.2 million (+2,900%) increase in just six months.

But more importantly, the rise in impressions was also reflected in website visits, generating a consistent flow of sign-ups to Rayon.

This growth happened thanks to a scalable approach, where publishing a regular volume of Pins every week was key (around 200 pins published per week). Volume-wise, Rayon's Pinterest account grew from ~100 pins to >3,000 pins.

As Pinterest pins have a long lifespan (around 1 year), we can expect these results to continue growing.

2. SEO Organic pages traffic

Organic traffic to our website SEO pages increased by 130% in six months, validating the scalability and potential of the SEO strategy.

But this 130% growth only reflects a very short-term impact.  The majority of pages I produced were published gradually, with a major push starting in October and November. This system is designed to generate sustained, long-term traffic growth beyond the initial period. The objective of this strategy was to lay the groundwork for a reliable and compounding organic traffic engine.