Sarah: Hey, good morning, everyone! I've got a great crew with me today and we want to talk to you about Pinterest. This is really going to be eye-opening because we know there's a lot of social platforms out there to use, but one that you may not have considered is Pinterest. If you're thinking that Pinterest is just where you go for decorating ideas and recipes, then you're really missing out and need to pay attention because we're about to show you how Pinterest can be a marketing goldmine for your business. So let's get started.

Kelsi: Welcome to Marketing Mix, everybody. We are here every week, mixing it up with different digital marketing topics, all in the name of helping your business. We will have tips, reviews, trends, Q&A. You just never know what we're going to bring you. But first, let's remind everybody where they can find our broadcasts.

Sarah: Sure thing. Okay. Don't forget. We go live every week on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. You got to check out and subscribe to our awesome podcast Marketing and A Mic and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn. And as always, subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are putting out cool, fresh videos every week, all in the name of digital marketing. So, it's all good stuff. Because we are here to help after all. We're here to help every business out there. Okay, let's talk about Pinterest. Pinterest is not your typical form of social media. There's not much of a social aspect to it at all. Really, it was designed to function as an online corkboard, if you will. And so people use that to pin recipes, outfit inspirations, similar to things of if you were to pin or put a collage together of all your favorite ideas and inspirations and photos, but we're going to talk a lot more to detail about that and how Pinterest works, but let's first start off with what is Pinterest about and how can you use it?

Katie: Yeah. So, Pinterest is kind of similar to Google in the fact that it is actually a search engine. So, people go on there with the purpose of finding, as you said, a recipe or an answer to a question or some inspiration. That means it has to be really visually beautiful. So, you'll see it's built, like you said, to be like a corkboard. You'll have different boards that you can pin different things too. So, you can set it up to organize, like "I do just want a recipe board or I want a wedding planning board or a first home board" where you can have all kinds of different pins on there. What's nice with Pinterest is since it is a platform like Google, as a search engine, it's actually going to rank and allow you to use keywords to be able to reach a higher audience. It makes it perfect for business because you can target your audience directly and funnel traffic directly to your website, which is fabulous. It has more than 291 million active users and is a place where people go to find answers and solutions. Why it's so important that it's a visual platform versus Google, is on Google you can go and type in "closest Chinese restaurant" and it's going to pull up a map, it's going to pull up different websites. Whereas, Pinterest is going to pull up pictures. It's primarily just a picture platform in that way and so it's really important that you make it visually appealing and beautiful. That's a big, big push for Pinterest. They also, whether you sell products or services, Pinterest is the perfect platform to market either of those. Get your brand more noticed, more recognized and to make it more searchable online.

Sarah: I think that's such an interesting point that it's a visual search engine because we all turned to Google. A lot of people do because they look at it as that's where I get my answers. But when you think about it, Pinterest works in the same fashion, where you're searching for stuff, but it's visual. But within that, you can link to your business. There are so many inner workings to it, but yeah that's one key thing is to just get in your head that it works like a search engine.

Kelsi: Yeah. And another huge benefit to using Pinterest is that your pins actually far outlive any other type of post that you would do on Instagram or Facebook, for instance. So, you have a lot longer shelf life on the content that you put on Pinterest. And the reason for this is that Pinterest doesn't actually care about posting your content in chronological order. They just want content that's valuable and that has a lot of engagement. So, if you create something that is valuable and that has a little bit of engagement, you can almost guarantee that that's going to continue to bring you results down the line for years to come.

Sarah: A third point that we want to make about how Pinterest works, which is so great is that you don't have to create separate content for Pinterest. Now, what do I mean by that? What that means is that if you create a blog or if you create just certain images or articles or little starter kits, all that good stuff, you create that and you don't have to create something completely separate. Really all you have to do is have ... Because you have the ability to link your pin because everything that you put on there is kind of considered a pin and you can put them within boards. And we'll give you a little visual about that here in a minute. But if you have the ability to link every pin back to your website, this is huge because you're getting a flood of traffic to your website that can convert to sales, boost your SEO. So, it's a win-win for your business. It's just another avenue to get that traffic built and back to your website, which is your headquarters online. Those effects kind of grow over time. So, as your pins get re-pinned and shared more and more by viewers, it's boosting that engagement, and then that, in turn, is going to boost your visibility with Pinterest because they look it as you've got a lot of interesting content that users are liking. So we're going to kind of bump you up in what people see first when they go on there. So, building up your engagement on Pinterest, you want to keep in mind that it does take some time. You want to start putting your content out there regularly and we'll kind of talk about that too, about how often you should. And as Kelsi said, it doesn't have a shelf life. So, as you're building that, you're building kind of equity into your account and it pays off because once it's there, you're going to get those good returns because it's just got that longer shelf life. And I want to say this to - last point. Even if you're not selling a physical product, because a lot of people keep in their mind, well, it's visual. I don't sell a tangible item. How is this going to work for me? Again, it's all you have to do is create a catchy pin. Meaning like some sort of catchy image or article or whatever it is and link it to your pre-existing content. And that's it. So, you don't have to think that, "Oh, I just have to sell a tangible item." So, that's important. We're going to talk about how to use Pinterest for your business now.

Katie: Yes. Really, you never know what people are going to find appealing on Pinterest. It is okay for you to pin things you might not have thought of. Like, if you are a pest control service, pin those facts because people are on there looking for things you might not even think too. When you do, you just make sure that your pins are visually appealing. Not only does your content need to be engaging, but it all also needs to be visually beautiful because one of the simplest ways to grow your authority on Pinterest is for it to look good. A lot of people that are going there because it's visual are expecting really high-quality images and high-quality graphics. So that does matter.

Sarah: I have brag on you, Katie. I do have to brag on you because you have you and your husband have a wedding photography business. Let me tell you, you are the jam when it comes to Pinterest. Jam. I'm probably aging myself with that, but I want to share your page because you have done a tremendous job in that whole thing of building your brand and making it visually appealing and I want you to kind of expand on it as we go. But yeah, this is Katie and her husband, Alec's photography. They do wedding photography. This is what you see when you first land on their page. So, obviously, you've got the visually appealing aspect of it, but please continue. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I want to show something that you did as you chat.

Katie: So, where Google and other search engines are primarily word-based as we talked about, Pinterest is completely visual. Now you can put, you'll see in a minute that you can put descriptions on everything, but that's not what people are really looking for. It's really, really important that you take the time to create well-designed posts. Even if that's just a simple image. It doesn't have to have words on it. It doesn't have to have all that kind of stuff. Just make sure the image looks really nice. The same strategy applies to curating your boards. So, what you're seeing on the screen right now is all of our boards. As we said, boards are just going to be where you go to put the pins. So you'll see we have one just for engagement rings because there are going to be a ton of people searching for engagement rings, which sounds so silly, but they're going on there to find inspiration to show their future fiance, make sure that they dropped some hints. That type of stuff. So, we've organized it by popular search terms. You'll see we're just so intentional in how we set them up. We want you to be intentional on how you set yours up too. They need to tell a story to your audience. So they actively want to engage with them because a person might come to search our board for just engagement rings and they may follow just that board, but it's going to auto-populate some of our other content there. Or they might come on engagement photos like you're seeing here. Each of those boards tells a unique story. This one tells a specific story of engagement pictures. Overall, it's more important that you have better quality pins than the quantity of pins. We'll talk in a minute about how you can actually pin content from other users too to help boost your engagement. When you build your authority by being visually appealing here, you're building consistent trust with your target audience by showing them that you're consistent. You're also going to experience a higher level of customer loyalty, which can translate to repeat sales in the long run because they're going to keep coming to you as the authority for what they're searching for. And you're going to get more referrals from happy customers and prospects who can turn into advocates for you because they can actually be pinning your pins to their board too and in turn marketing you for free.

Sarah: So that was really cool. You showed us those boards and those boards were all titled differently. And then like you said, if you wanted to, if I was a user and I wanted to look up engagement photos because I was just recently engaged, you have it perfectly categorized that you've got your boards and then you click on the engagement and then the user can see all of the engagement pictures that you and your husband have done. And that's just a huge selling point.

Katie: I will say two different things. One if Pinterest seems really overwhelming as we're talking about it, I promise it's a lot easier. Just get on there and get started because there are so many components, but it's so easy to learn as you go. I think it is just a little bit overwhelming just because it is so visual, but it's not difficult. And also bonus tip Pinterest really loves vertical images. So, one's facing up and down. It's going to take up more space on the platform and they tend to get pinned more. So, if you're taking time to create pins for Pinterest, we recommend that that's the size and style you use.

Sarah: Yeah. That's a good tip. Yeah.

Kelsi: Absolutely. And you're so right, Katie. Don't feel like when you're jumping into the Pinterest game that you're on an island, because you're not. Pinterest has a highly accessible community that you can leverage to help grow your reach and get more eyes on your content. One way you can do that is by leveraging what's called "group boards". We saw from Katie's examples of her boards on her page and how they're themed. You can actually find group boards that are themed in a similar way that you can search for that have some sort of connection to your business or that have some sort of relevance to your customer base. Go towards those group boards. The way that those are set up is you have a user like Katie on Pinterest that has a really great following. They set up these group boards and allow other pinners to contribute to those boards. So, what happens is if you create your own content and you post on that group board, all of your followers are potentially going to see that pin as well as everybody that's following the group board, as well as every person that's following the person that's following the group board. So, you really are increasing your reach exponentially by utilizing that tool through Pinterest as well. It can also give you a resource for you to use because one really important part of utilizing Pinterest for your business is that you need to engage on the platform as well. So, you're seeking your audience to engage with you, but Pinterest wants you to engage with Pinterest. But don't let that overwhelm you because you don't have to create all original content. Pinterest really loves it when you post about 10 to 12 pins a day. And that seems like a lot, but when you can go to group boards and find similarly themed content and you can repin that it's like a collaborative experience. So, those users see when you're pinning their things and they're more likely to pin things when they see things that you pin that they like if that made any sense coming out. I'm getting all-

Sarah: There's just a lot of pinning happening.

Kelsi: Yeah. Pin, pin, pin. So, as Katie mentioned earlier, a great example would be those pest control companies. You don't necessarily have to post all pest control, all pest control. We know that leaky faucets attract pests. So, you can pin pins that are "how do you fix a leaky sink". Things like that that are really going to help your customers, but aren't 100% attached to what exactly it is that your business does if that makes sense.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. We've got to recognize our fan base this morning. Good morning, LaVon. Good morning, Cindy. And Allen. Good morning. He says, "Pinterest baffles me. I need to call you guys."

Kelsi: 

Come on, Allen.

Sarah: Yes. And there's Glyna. Hey Glyna! Okay. So I want to say this too that Pinterest is maybe a younger demographic, but it's not that young. What I mean is we had talked about on the last show about millennials, and the oldest millennial is about to turn 40. So, really it's a prime age group. Meaning if that falls under the bracket of your customer, that's more important why you need to be on Pinterest because while you may not be using Pinterest, that's where a lot of your customer base is searching. Because again, it's like a search engine, so you just really need to think about that. So really whatever industry you're in real estate or insurance, for those that are watching Cindy LaVon, you can really, really, really use it for that. Now let's talk about something with how you can help you is when you're creating these boards and you're creating kind of all your pins, it's really, really, really important to think about your keywords. So, what do we mean about keywords? This is kind of your title and your description of your boards and your pins. We keep mentioning this, but Pinterest is a search engine. Users type in keywords and content pulls up based on those keywords that they put in. If you're building your boards, you want to make sure that you've got the right keywords within your stuff so that it shows up and it matches what those customers are looking for. So again, you want to do that in your descriptions, but you also want to do that in your boards because it's your job as a business owner to be relevant and niche. When you're titling and writing all of your descriptions, you want to make sure that those pins can be found. Here's a little pro-tip. If you don't know how to title appropriately, the best thing would be is to hop over to Pinterest and just start typing in stuff because it'll auto-populate. So, for us like digital marketing, I could just start typing in digital marketing and it's going to auto-populate a whole bunch of different keywords to help match what I'm looking for. So, pop on over there and just start searching that and see what comes up and that'll be a great place to start. To optimize your boards again, use keywords in your board title and description, and boards are searchable. So just like content is searchable, so are boards. The Pinterest algorithms look at keywords to help determine the content and how it will rank. So start there. That's a good little tip.

Katie: Yeah. So something else to think about with Pinterest is just like any other social platform. Timing is so important. Pinterest is definitely unique though amongst social platforms because it has different popular times than Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat, whatever you might be on. Whereas a lot of peak times for posting are going to be, lunchtime, dinnertime for most places. Pinterest is like 8:00 to 10:00 PM, 2:00 to 4:00 AM. Very different because it's global. Because it's like Google because it's a search engine, it is worldwide. And a lot of those times lie outside of most people's normal hours. I don't know how many of y'all are up between 2:00 to 4:00 AM. I'm not.

Sarah: If I'm up, I'm not happy about it.

Katie: What's nice is you don't actually have to post in real-time. Pinterest will actually allow you when you're creating your pin to schedule your pin to go live at a different time. You can batch that out and do a ton of different pins to all go live between 2:00 and 4:00 AM, 8:00 to 10:00 PM. I know Sundays are really big on Pinterest. You can do that, it's so easy to use. There's also a myriad of scheduling tools like Tailwind is a very popular one where you can go in and schedule and track analytics all at the same time. Pinterest does have their own way to search your analytics and see the backend of your business, which is so nice. You can plan these out months in advance. If you want to just take one day a month to do this is going to be my Pinterest day. I'm going to take a few hours and I'm just going to schedule pins. Awesome. It totally is so easy to do and it helps with automating your consistency.

Sarah: That's a great tip. If you just knock it out all one day, just several, then you're kind of done. Then you can get your bulk out there and schedule it at different times and then sort of walk away and let it do its magic.

Katie: Yeah.

Kelsi: I will say if you do plan to use Pinterest for your business, you do need to make sure that you change your account over to a business account. That is going to actually give you access to all the analytic tools that we discussed and will give you more control over your brand and how you set up those boards. Like Katie mentioned being very intentional. And it will also allow you to promote pins through Pinterest ads. It's totally free to set up your business account through Pinterest as well. So do it, today.

Sarah: Yeah. Free is nice!

Kelsi: We love free.

Sarah: Okay. So we're going to conclude this by just saying, if you want any information or you need help with just getting your business started on Pinterest, we would love to have a conversation with you and we would love to be able to help you any way we can, whether it be Pinterest or any other social media platform, whatever it is. So, that's it and I want to thank Kelsi and Katie today. They are our awesome social media team and they are terrific and they do magic work. So-

Katie: Can I add one more point actually?

Sarah: Yes, please do!

Katie: So, as you all are going in and starting your Pinterest strategy, please remember one thing. It is going to take time. It is not an overnight success thing. You may see some people who have pins go viral. A lot of times that can happen three to six months after the fact. As Kelsi said, your posts live so much longer on Pinterest than they do on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever you might be on. So, building up and taking your time to actually allow it to start to snowball and have that effect of building up is so important. It's going to help you reap so many just good benefits over time. We have some of our most popular posts are ones from five years ago of things that I'm like, "Really? People are still posting that?" But we're still seeing active traffic to our website. So, please just be patient with yourselves and know that as you start it, it's going to take off. It's just going to take time.

Sarah: Yes. That's a really important tip. Yeah. You're building equity in your Pinterest business account. Thanks for sharing that. That's really important. Okay. So that's a wrap for us today and don't forget to tune in on Friday because we have got another great Biz Talk and our guest is going to be, Pari Barzegari with the Shelby County Chamber. She's got a lot of good info. We talked to her yesterday and she's got so many ways to help business owners and actually even people looking to get into the career world, even just straight out of high school. So, it's going to be a very good one. Thanks, everyone for tuning in and we will catch you next time. Bye.