Lessons

Lesson Info

Establishing Your Presence on Pinterest

Welcome, everyone, so we're gonna be talking today about pinterest marketing and before we dive in and really get to work it. And the great thing is, for those of you who are following along online at home, you could actually be doing a lot of this work. You can pop up your computer, you can be on pinterest, you could be doing a lot of these things, but before we really get started and dive into that, I want to take a minute and talk about why you should use pinterest for your business. I know there are a lot of platforms out there, there are a lot of ways to market, so what makes pinterest so great as a marketing tool, especially for makers and designers? So pinterest is a tool for discovery. It more closely mimics the way that we shop. So in the past, if you had a business like I did or like our studio audience does where you made a really visual product, the only way to really get people to find it right was maybe to try to do some seo to get people to search for it, but they had to...

know what they were looking for, right? That's, how it works, you should know what you're searching for, pinterest is the opposite. And it more closely mimics the way that we shot a lot of times you go into a store and you don't know what you're shopping for and you stumble upon that great piece of jewelry or that great piece of art or that great mug or a piece of ceramics pinterest mimics that and people in pinterest are in that kind of mood to look for products so forty seven percent of online shoppers in the u s have made purchases based on pinterest recommendations so almost half of shoppers in the us have bought something because they saw it on pinterest that's a pretty powerful tool pinterest users are also in a shopping frame of mind the good news about that is that if you're promoting your products on pinterest it takes some of the sleaze of marketing out right? We always feel uncomfortable when we're marketing because we're worried that we're an intrusion were bothering people you know you jump into someone's twitter feed hay by this that feels like an intrusion right? We're posting on facebook they're looking at pictures of their friends babies and then it's hey buy this right it feels they get intrusion on pinterest they're already actively looking for products it's part of the culture and so they're they're thinking about things they might want to buy to begin with so your product isn't an intrusion it's actually a welcome addition to what they want to buy and that actually reflects in statistics as faras the average dollars for a purchase coming from pinterest so fast company conducted a study I don't know the magic behind how they did the numbers, but what they found is that the average order value when a user follows through on a purchase from pinterest is one hundred seventy nine dollars and thirty six sets and they actually compared that to twitter where it was sixty eight dollars and seventy eight cents and facebook or is eighty dollars and twenty two cents so we're looking at more than double the value of an order because on pinterest they are already thinking about shopping. The other thing that makes painters such a valued valuable tool is that people use pinterest to plan for the future. Facebook is about what happened in the past here's what happened? Here's my vacation photos right here's pictures of my daughter it's a little it's getting a little more instantaneous but it's usually about something that already happened twitter is really about the now the breaking news this is going on in the moment pinterest is where people go I want this later I want to do this later I want to buy this later it's where they store all of the things that they're planning on taking action at they're actually thinking about making a purchase not this happened in the past but I'm going to do this in the future and what that also means and for pinterest is that your marketing efforts have a longer shelf life you put a tweet out there it may be good for twenty minutes, right? You post on facebook people might see it for a day fifty percent of site visits take place three and a half months after the initial pin fifty percent of orders take place two and a half months after the initial pin. What that means is that your pens can keep working for you months or in some cases even years after you've put them on the site that means that pinterest is marking for you when you're not even using it and that makes it a really valuable platform. So all of these things combined plus the fact that it's a visual medium right? You don't have to figure out the right words necessarily and we're gonna talk about descriptions they matter but you don't have to nail those is perfectly as you might on something like twitter we're trying to optimize your ceo because people get that immediate visual visceral reaction to your products when they see them on pinterest and for us in the fields that were in that makes it the most powerful marketing tool out there today so let's dive in and talk about you let's talk about our audience for a minute because you guys obviously you're here for a specific reason so does this sound like you you design, you make you sell a product, you've got, you've got something that you're doing that you're designing that you're selling that you're making and you probably want to sell more, right? I think everybody wants to sell more, right? Moore moore is different for everyone, but I think the maur itself is universal, right? You also want to know the best ways to market your business online there's a lot of options out there, hopefully, you know, in those first couple of minutes, you started to realise why pinterest is such a good option, but you do want to know which are the best options where you should be spending your time. You do have limited time, right? None of us have infinite time to market our businesses. We want to be making product, right? I want to be designing and making, so you want to know what the best ways are to market your business online? Maybe you don't feel like you have time for one more social media platform, really? I have something else on my to do list, right? I can see sarah kind of nodded her head a little like something else on my to do list, so you might feel like that, and hopefully what you're going to realize by the end of this is that pinterest isn't really a true social media platform. It's actually something much bigger than that if you talk teo anyone a pinterest they actually don't even view themselves as a social media site they view themselves as a search engine they're not going after facebook or twitter actually going after google and that's a really important distinction because what that means when we're using pinterest to market your business is you're not using yet another social media platform you're actually using a really powerful marketing strategy and the other reason you might be here is because you know you probably should be on pinterest right? You've heard enough about it you've heard that it's important for visual people you might even be using it on a personal level you might be using it because it's a great place to find recipes or ideas for things to do for your with your kids or to plan your vacation you might already be using it and you might actually be using a lot right? You might be using it on awful lot but you aren't sure how to make it work for your business and that they may be your other concern you're afraid that if you jump into pinterest it's going to become a huge time suck right you're worried that you're gonna lose yourself down that rabbit hole and suddenly it's going to be four hours later and not only do you know work but she did know marketing right that's a concern so that's what we're going to talk about in this workshop, we're going to make it so that you have a really clear strategy of what you should be doing when you step onto pinterest step on is not the right word when you go on to pinterest right? You have a really clear strategy so that you're not feeling like you're wasting time you khun b really efficient, but at the same time you can still have fun with it. So part of the reason that I'm here and teaching this class is that I happen to really love pinterest, I think it's the most fun way to market my business, I have ever found it's fun and so that's, what you want to do is we want to keep it efficient and fun, so I just want to give you guys a little bit more of my background so that you can see kind of how pinterest worked for me. So as jae ko mentioned at the start of this segment, I am a designer. I'm a metal smith. My primary business is branded under my own name. Meghan omine websites meghan almond dot com on guy sell jewelry and a variety of other products, and I tend to be the kind of person who's. Usually fairly up on the new or social media platforms, you know, I'm not the first doctor, but I tend to pick him up pretty quickly. I was on twitter, you know, fairly early instagram caught my eye and the same thing with pinterest, but what I found about pinterest that was different than any other social media platforms I know it's not technically social media, but that's how I started approaching it when I was first on it. What I found that was different than any other platform is that it felt easier to connect with my customers and more of my ideal customers. It seemed like on twitter and on instagram and on facebook I feel like that was mostly connecting with my peers, right? I was finding a lot of other jewelers, a lot of other makers and there's a time and a place for that. That connection is important, but it doesn't help you if you're trying to sell product if everyone was following me on instagram is doing what ideo, they're not going to buy something, and what I found about pinterest was that it was really easy to generate content and to, you know, develop my brand in a way that attracted a lot of my customers, so a little over a year ago, I decided I was gonna focus on pinterest. As a as an actual strategy had been kind of using it I picked up a small following so I decided I was really going to go for it and in a little over a year I've gone from about fifteen hundred pinterest followers too twenty three thousand and actually since I took this screen grab I think I might like twenty three five now so uh it keeps it keeps growing and what I found when I look at those followers is that most of them are people who could potentially be my customers yes some of my peers air following me but that number is small compared to the amount of people who are someone that could potentially buy my product so on this platform I was able to really engage with my customers if you guys want to check out my pinterest page because I'm gonna be using it as an example a lot so those of you online you can go to pinterest dot com slash magan almond that's my page if you want to see as kind of we're talking I'll use myself as an example use our lovely ladies in the audience here is an example but you can check that out as well so then the other thing that I did is I have been working with a friend who was also working on developing her pinterest page danielle crest I'm sure is a bloke called style for a happy home danielle and I actually developed a class together we realized that there were a lot of people who had this knowledge, so we created a class called practical pinning that we've taught a couple of times now and it's really about helping people hone in on their pinter strategy find their ideal customer, and so what I've seen is this strategy that I've used and that I'm going to share with you, I've seen it work for other people I've watched other people, you know, students in this class apply it, and it's worked for them, too, so I know that this strategy is really powerful, so here's, what you're gonna learn in this workshop, you're gonna learn basically a simple strategy for making pinterest work for your business. I don't want to give you a time of steps. I want you to focus on a few basic things, but you're gonna learn how to make the most of your time on pinterest, right? So we can be efficient that we don't fall into that four hour rabbit hole, you're gonna learn how to paint and see the you attract your customers and not your peers, you're gonna learn how to create pinterest specific content that drives traffic back to your sight because this is actually the secret sauce of pinterest is if you take your audience and you leverage it by becoming a content creator that's when it becomes that powerful marketing tool for your business when you start to drive that traffic back to your site and we're going to learn how to convert your pinterest traffic to create fans and customers so now I want everybody to share as we're kind of moving through what's the one thing that you're most hoping to learn in this workshop we're gonna start with our studio audience I know there's a lot about pinterest is there something specific you're really hoping to learn today I think they want to be a little more concise to make customer and a little less all over the place so you maybe want to figure out how to hone in on kind of a more concrete vision did it in a little bit better like like still put the things that I'm doing out there but yeah gotcha yeah awesome what she said also I started with a personal interest site so it's kind of like my idea is my goals and everything like that are what I would like to party but I want to streamline it to kind of incorporate my business also at the same time awesome I don't even know how to articulate because I know I don't know what I don't have e but I know that there's a comer kind of ah you can link it up commercially somehow you you really use it as a powerful tool to sell your products so what are we getting online? Jen vasquez photography's with us. Good morning, jen, she says, I'm hope I'm most hoping to learn about specific text with pictures to be how to be found or creatively, carol that more into carol she's saying how to sell using pinterest and connect with potential customers on k c sharp is saying the same thing. I definitely need to attract customers instead of peers on a girl named michael who's joining us she's, saying how to use it for interest in a more targeted and targeted and specific way. I have thirteen thousand followers, but I'm not using that to my advantage very well going that's a lot of followers, so, yeah, we're definitely gonna talk about how to get those followers from pinterest onto your sight because that's, that piece of the puzzle, I think a lot of people are missing it's not enough to grow the following, we want to bring them back to our site because that's, where we can really engage with, um so the good news is that you're gonna be able to start taking action on your pincher strategy before this workshop even ends. So not our ladies on the couches, they don't have computers, they get comfy couches instead, but those of you who are watching at home jump in there and try these things as we're talking about them there's no reason to wait until this ends sit down and work on that and of course we've got the workbook too so you can follow along with our pinterest marketing strategy you can answer some of the key questions that we're going to talk about so certainly use this but don't be afraid to go in there and try it the good news is you're not going to break pinterest you're not going to break the internet you know when I started this strategy it was all a really big experiment and I've been kind of feeling it out as I've gone along you guys now have the benefit of you don't have to feel it out like I did I'm going to tell you the strategy so you have that advantage but I can tell you from lots of time experimenting but you're not going to break it the other nice thing about pinterest that you're going to find is that you know if you use something like instagram you notice you post something and you really like it and it seems like sometimes you I feel I could lose followers and I post things and you get really disappointed right? You're like oh really I liked that one and pinterest is the opposite it seems like the more you use it as long as you're curating great content the more you're going to grow so you know there's there's some ways that you can alienate people but it's much harder it's really about being on there and being engaged in finding great content and you're going to grow your audience now one little note that I want to make before we really dive into the strategy is in this workshop we're really here to talk tactics not tech support and that's from a purely logistical standpoint I'm happy to answer questions I want you guys to go submit questions there's that asked button you can ask you can vote if you want if you want that same question answered please ask those questions just know that really minute details about you know how do I do this exact thing for my specific site? We can't answer in the scope of this class we just don't have the time and I can't you know personally looking and everyone's page while we're talking but all of those strategy questions we're definitely gonna answer here so if you need a little bit more of that tech support of course the first place you can always go it's just goto helps out pinterest dot com there's a lot of support there if you get stuck if you can't find the answers, you can always contact pinterest directly the other thing is if you're watching this workshop and you realize you do need a little bit more of that tech support hand holding that is something we do on our practical pinning class. For those of you who feel really stuck, we do answer those questions there as well. So here, you know, we're happy to answer questions, but we're going to talk strategy as opposed to the tech support peace. All right, so let's, talk about your pinterest plan of attack because we're really going to break this down into four key steps, and if you're following along in your workbook, it's actually all spelled out for you on the first page, nice and easy. So the first thing is that you're going to establish your pinterest profile, we're going to make sure that set up, and we're gonna make sure that set up in a way that it tracks your customers as opposed to your peers, and we're going to make sure when we're sending of your pinterest profile that you have the right boards because actually you're bored choice plays a big role in your success on pinterest then in step two, we're going to grow your pinterest presence, we're gonna work on growing your followers. Now the beauty of pinterest is that they've actually shifted their strategy so that you can have a big impact on pinterest even if you don't have a crazy amount of followers, followers are not the only way that people engage with their content on pinterest but if you can build a solid follower base, it makes things a little bit easier if you know when you post content it's going to get shared and seen by more people that does make things easier. So we're going to talk about how to grow your pinterest falling and then in three you're going to create content for pinterest and as I said before, this is the secret sauce pinterest can exist without people creating content and by content I just mean images now those images could take a lot of forms they could be photos that could be quotes, they could be infographics, there's a million forms that that those images could take but at the end of the day it's all content for pinterest and the people who are creating that content are the people who win because pinter's can't exist without it. So that's going to be our really key step and taking that pinterest following and bringing it back to your site and then that last step is to convert the traffic from pinterest so we're going to bring the traffic back and we're gonna figure out what we want to do with it. You know we want them to become loyal fans we want them to sign up for a mailing lists, we want them to buy our products, so we're going to talk about that as well now before we dive into actually, that's step one of setting up your profile, I want to make sure that everyone is in the right mindset for using pinterest because using has it been a business requires shifting your approach a little bit from when you use it as a personal consumer, right? So how does your approach to pinterest change when you use it as a business? If you're using it for your personal purposes or that's how you've been using it, maybe your board looks a little like this. Hey that's, a cool recipe idea. Hey, I'm going to make that crafty project, right? This is where I want to go on vacation. This is something I should do with my kids. None of those things were wrong. Those are all things that people use pinterest for. But if you're not food blogger that's not useful if you're not a travel blogger, forty places you want to go on vacation in twenty minutes probably not useful to your audience, so when you're shifting to thinking about using pinterest as a business, you have to think about curating a world for your ideal customer. And so the difference is you're going up in your own product for sure, but you're gonna put it in ah, context, you're going to curate a vision of what life looks like for your ideal customer. And so when you are using pinterest is a business, you're going to become much more customer focused, but at the same time you're also going tio set a vision for your brand, so when someone comes to your pinterest page it's going to feel like there's a focus, there is a point of view and there's something useful there for them and that's really that difference? So have you guys been using pinterest in the past? You can go ahead and share a little bit, so you kind of mentioned that one e this's coolest guy like, yeah, I want to make that yeah, yeah, I use it a lot for home to cork, right? So just khun just getting ideas and kind of like putting him in and then I'll start aboard that something that I'm interested in, and then it has, like, one or two in there, and then I forget about that board, and then he certainly boards with kind of, you know, I didn't I didn't know that you were guilty of that. You sure you know what I think nothing was someone like you, kathy, is you make home to core products, so pinning home decor and house ideas makes sense for you, it's, just the idea of structuring them in the right way instead of that, like well I have a couple of ideas and I'm gonna pin three things to board right now I have a couple of ideas and I'm gonna make a new board and pen for things right how about you there it's been purely just personal interest things I think are pretty and I do have my aboard for my my products but you know it's just my products but your own and it's just your products and you're only painting your products to that one board right right right so that's something else we're going to shift is we don't want it to be one bored with your products and twenty boards of everything else happening on instead your product's going to be a natural fit for most of your boards on we're going to let go of the idea that you have to have one specific board for your products because actually that doesn't work anymore on pinterest we get anything from our online yes we on it's really interesting the way people are already engaging and discovering from what you're saying making how to to use this for business rather than just for personal use because they love them saying you know they used to think this tour really could have been combined yes now michael is saying I began using it as a visual bulletin board from my own research on inspiration but then as I got more followers I started to pin to inspire those who falling now I'm trying to transition to pinning in a way that leads followers to my work into the work of others who inspired me and related to my brand I think that's what this course is exactly what this course is about so you're in the right place for sure awesome and I hope we're going to learn its focus adel been asking other people are asking you to explain as we go along uh how to use it for service based prisons as well it's just yeah we can absolutely talk about that as well so and really if you have a service based business as opposed to a product this strategy doesn't change you're still curating this vision you're still thinking about the things that are related to your product and then you're still going to be creating content that drives people back to your site so you keep those service based questions coming but the entire strategy really remains the same for sure oh so we're pinning content that interests our customers and we're curating a strong brand vision so to start with you have to think about what your customers want to see and what do your customers looking for and you can tack on the words for pinterest to this what your customers want to see on pinterest and what are they looking for on pinterest so my customers even though I'm predominantly a jewelry brand my customers want to see interiors my customers are interior obsessed, they want to see living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, they want to see great interiors, it's something they love, and so I actually pin a lot of interior content on pinterest, but what you're really doing is you're getting inside the mind of your customer, so you know who your customer is? You know that she is someone who is probably going through a life transition or is heading towards the life transition, and so that means that she's probably coming to pinterest looking to be inspired, right? She's looking for inspiration on pinterest so you can really focus on that kind of inspirational motivational content and that's gonna attract a lot of your right customer, and then I would also guess your customer is drawing to a very specific aesthetic, right? We know that you have that japanese influence, and so your customers also going to like that. So thinking about maybe spaces that have that japanese influence, you know, things about japan, those can also feed in because, you know, that that's something that ties you and your customer together. I also know that my customer might be maybe searching for ideas of things to wear to work. This is one of those that you don't have to over think it, I know my customers have most of them have jobs. They're not like me they don't like sit around on their pajamas okay don't surround my pajamas I sit around in sweats all day it's very different you'd changed but I almost to my customers have jobs right? So they're probably looking for ideas of things to wear to work so I'm thinking about that when I'm creating on pinterest the other thing is what do you want your brand to be known for? What is your brands point of view and for those of you happen to catch my very recent work shop on brandon you're creative business you should know this you should know that kind of visual and aesthetic for your brand and that should come out very clearly in your pinter sports so I mentioned my friend danielle crest and in some ways danielle and I can pin from similar categories she spends a lot of home decor I paid a lot of home decor I paid a little more fashion than she does okay and a lot more fashion than she does but when we still have a lot of overlapping categories we have very different pinterest presence you can see danielle is all about color and fun and happiness and when you look at her pinterest boards that absolutely comes through if you look at my boards that are kind of hitting the same categories is danielle you could see there's a very different vibe there I wanna have this sort of a little bit darker, a little bit moody. Or yesterday. I describe it to someone as, like, masculine, industrial or masculine, like masculine reclaimed nous, but still a smidge of feminine in there, too. But I have a very different style, right? But you know that when you come to my pincher sport, you know, very clearly the aesthetic that you're going to get.