Pinterest Marketing for Those Who Still Don't Get It

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, welcome to another episode of maximize your social influence. In fact, this is going to be episode number 146. And today, I want to talk about Pinterest, and Pinterest marketing. But before I do that, I want to remind you all that this episode is being sponsored by the age of influence my new book, which will be published on March 17, which I'm currently running a pre order, or I should say pre sales. Well, you know what I mean pre order campaign for. So right now, Amazon actually has it at a really, really good price that is going to be hard to beat. So I hope if you're interested in this, that you will listen to episode number 144. Or read the show notes where I tell you how just by simply pre ordering and sending your receipt of the paperback that you bought from Amazon to Neil Neal schaffer.com, you're going to be my special guest to dedicated webinars to only those that have pre bought my book and have supported me. So once again, listen to 144 or check out the show notes. But today I want to talk about Pinterest. Now, Pinterest is if you have been a loyal listener to this podcast over the years, and I've been podcasting. Wow. Since January of 2013. Believe it or not, first of all, I have podcasted about Pinterest before so for further reference, you can go back to episode number 24, where I talked about are you taking Pinterest seriously, episode number 66. I talked about the uniquely engaging Pinterest community boards which are not as uniquely or engaging as they used to be. So that might not be the best one to listen to. But then episode number 77, debunking the Pinterest myth. So this is the first time in about 70 episodes that I will be talking about Pinterest. And Pinterest really is a very, very special place in social media consistently. And I mean consistently. Pinterest is the place where after Twitter, I generate the second most traffic from social media for my Neal schaffer.com website. Pinterest is also a social network that not only generates a lot of links, but pins have a really, really long lifespan. And with the help of certain tools, a lot of it can be automated. And that automation is actually in accordance with Pinterest terms of conditions, which is pretty amazing. I think Pinterest is an example of a social network that really wants you to pin more they want to have more content that people can discover great content on on that social network. So without further ado, give a listen to the podcast. And I hope you enjoy it. Hey, everybody, it is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to a another episode of the maximize your social influence podcast, the topic of Pinterest is a really, really interesting one. And that was originally actually how I began to know Jillian who was the CEO and founder of milotree, as well as catching my party, what I love about her, and I'm really sorry that she couldn't be here because I know that she has some great content to share is that's immediately when I downloaded her plugin, and I was on like some freemium plan. She reached out to me. And yes, it was probably automated. I don't know what email she uses. But hey, let me know if you have any questions about the tool that I created. Here's why I created it. Here's how people use it. Here's some FAQ guides. It was marketing automation, but done in a very, very authentic way. It's part of this concept of customer success. Do you want your customers to be happy after they start engaging with you? Or are just automate Hey, thanks for subscribing hit us up on support. It just it seemed very authentic, very real. And to me very valuable that I get to know the people behind the business that I'm doing business with. And I think this is a growing trend we see with younger generations. And companies investing a lot in customer experience marketing in order to better achieve this. So Pinterest, why Pinterest? So Pinterest is really funny. You know, every community is very different. You will not see anybody talk about milotree. Like on the internet, if you go to like best plugins or best opt in plugins, it doesn't really come up. But if you were to do this search on Pinterest, it comes up all over the place. So it's reminder, every social network is very different. So let's take a step back to the history of Neal Schaffer and Pinterest. But obviously this is going to be packed full of tips and advice, because I do believe that Pinterest is worth your attention, regardless of industry. The first thing was, I see all these influencers, right influencers are primarily on YouTube and Instagram. Used to be mommy bloggers. They're all over Pinterest, but now we've seen a new generation of influence answers pop up with Instagram, YouTube. And especially when we look at Instagram, it's visual. And most of the things that they're sharing are consumer brand related. In fact, most of the brands that are investing in influencer marketing in Instagram are consumer facing brands that people post a lot about on Pinterest as well. So always thought Why aren't more influencers involved in Pinterest because it generates a tremendous amount of traffic, and E commerce revenue, right. So it's a way of getting for your, you know, once again, this is called maximize your social influence podcast for a reason, right? It's also you as a brand, as a marketer, generating you know, value from these social networks, when you want to work with brands or for your own brand, right, it generates value, and that it actually can generate a click back to a website, whether that is of the brand partner that you're working with, or your own website. This is something obviously Instagram can do with an Instagram story, if you have 10,000 likes or more, or followers or more, or with a bio link, but it's not natural. And it's really funny, I know that I'm talking about something different here, there's already theories going around that it's actually more effective in an Instagram story to say DM me for the link than to trust that people are actually going to swipe up for that link. And the experiments I've done so far actually proves that that is sort of true, I find more people will do Lincoln bio than swipe up and an Instagram story or do the Hey, DM me for information. So it's all relative, you need to experiment, it's for your own audience. But Pinterest is a built in audience of people that are used to clicking on images and going places and looking for inspiration for things to buy. So it is a natural that more and more influencers should be there. So let's take a step back. I was I'm not gonna say early on in Pinterest, but I've been on Pinterest since maybe 2011 2012. I saw success early on. And then I sort of put it on pause for several years. And only over the last few months have I got refreshed or reinvigorated with Pinterest. So here's the thing, the stat that caught my interest, and this is several years ago, and I haven't seen a stat since and I'm going to put the link in the show notes. And Christopher, just get into the comments here. And how much SEO juice can you actually derive from being interesting? You know, there's theories about does Google index Pinterest boards, pins, I do see them come up on search results sometimes. But here's the thing and you hit it on the head, Christopher isn't Pinterest, really a search engine rather than a social media platform. Pinterest is similar to YouTube. It is a discovery engine. It is not a social network. And if you read a lot of or listen to a lot of podcasts about Pinterest, you'll know that people 97% of the time according to Pinterest, they're searching using keywords they're not looking for brands are following influencers. They're looking for inspiration based on ideas based on products based on topics. So actually, if you're a no name, or your brand is not known, you can be as successful on Pinterest as some of the brands that are well known. And that alone should be exciting. But really the stop that I want to go back to. And maybe this gets to a Christopher sang here, which I agree 100% Is that Yes, it is a search engine platform. And for people do click so there was a stat once again several years ago came out on Shareaholic. And the stat was that there were more people that were actually going from Pinterest to another website than any other social media site. Now, after that was published, I think Facebook did surpass Pinterest. But Pinterest for a long time has been the number two site. Look, not everybody clicks on Twitter, not everybody clicks on LinkedIn or YouTube obviously not on Instagram. So Pinterest still generates a tremendous amount of clicks. So that's why it's great for b2c e commerce knowing that it's a primarily female demographic, maybe 70 to 80% female, but that was what initially interested me. And I thought, you know, is this really going to work because I'm not a consumer facing brand. You know, I'm b2b. But as you know, I began posting and I began to get some traction and I got to get some real traffic back to my site, which at that time was maximized social business calm, I started to get traffic and I started to get a lot of traffic. And as I was doing it, I realized that the entrepreneurs, the small business owners, that the sales and marketing professionals that I'm trying to reach as a brand as a as a podcaster as a content creator as an influencer. They're also on Pinterest right now, maybe a lot of the male demographic isn't on Pinterest, but the female demographic, a lot of them really are on there. And maybe that explains why I got so much traction for my content. Now, I have always placed an emphasis in the visual have always had blog post images. With text overlay. I have not done the text overlay recently for various reasons. But early on, I invested in a resource to create the text overlay images for all of my sites, and that helped me have something pinnable now fast forward to 2019 So with with Pinterest, what I realized you know in 2019 is like okay, what am I going to do differently this year? How am I going to really get my traffic to the next level as I'm removed from maximize social business.com Back to Neal schaffer.com. And I have another episode on that. But I do believe that your name is your best brand. It stays with you forever. And as an influencer, it may be more memorable than something generic debatable as to what influences what to do if they want to have a brand. If you have a really catchy brand name, that's awesome. But if a year or two from now you decided you want to change brands, it's a lot harder, as I realized. So, Neal Schaffer, what am I going to do differently this year, I noticed that when I look at my Google Analytics, first of all, search engine traffic number one, and that's why and I'm going to be doing some blogging, training men for my own contributors, but I'm gonna offer up to everybody coming soon. So stay tuned for that, because I noticed after search engines, which still drive a overwhelming majority of traffic to my, my site, Twitter number two, now, I am a verified profile on Twitter, I have like 220,000 followers, I am very active on Twitter, I have a great system in place, this is going to be another part of the training that I plan to unleash to the world very soon. And I found that to be a very, very successful place for my content to drive traffic. Guess what's after Twitter, it's Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn is probably more I can be doing Facebook, you know what they want you to stay on the platform. And every social network wants you to stay on the platform. Twitter's a little bit different. It's where the news breaks, right? People are gonna click on links, and there is a a clicking culture on Twitter. Pinterest is the same, obviously, yeah, Pinterest wants you to stay on their site. I mean, they have Pinterest ads, what have you, but they realize the value is in offering up a discovery search tool, meaning that I believe based on the information I see, and I read that Pinterest has a special value they place on content creators, they want you to pin there more often, they want to offer up a service to their users, where they can find more pins for more inspiration. So this is stuff that I've learned over the years, I've been focusing more and more on Pinterest. And I think that if you haven't been on Pinterest as a discovery engine, this is where you need to start, create an account, create a business account. And there's there are reasons to have a business account. But the first thing is, it gets your account verified. And you get access to something called Rich pins, which is sort of structured markup on your site. But but you know, there's fake news, there's fake pins, there's people that hijack other people's pins, send it to other sites. So having a verification is only going to help you. So you want to make sure that you do that. But going forward, I don't mean to pin anything, I want you to just simply go out there and look at what's out there do a keyword for product name. I mean, it's the same thing that we talked about yesterday, with small businesses looking for influencers, do a keyword search, what's out there. And the Pinterest search tool is awesome. You go into Pinterest is that Google? You know, Google has something Google suggests. So if we were to go in and we were to enter, you know, Pinterest, in Google, I would say you know, Pinterest marketing, Pinterest tools, it would show you the top searched keywords that come after the keyword you just entered. Pinterest works the same way. So very soon, you're going to be seeing different keywords, and you would see in Google, and what's really fascinating as if you do a search, if you're in social media marketing, like I am, and you do a search for social media marketing keywords, you're going to notice visuals, and you're going to notice that things are talked about in a visual way. And even the text overlay is very different than what you see on any other social network, you're also going to get to see lifetime performance for those pins. So if the pin has been Repin, 100 times 1000 times 10,000 times, you're going to see that number go in and look at the popular pins, it's going to be really, really good education. If you want to be successful on Pinterest, you need to be looking at what's working. And you're going to find a few things. Number one, not all of your content is going to fit on Pinterest. Now if you are in any of those female demographic dominated, consumer facing brand type of content, yes, it may all work. For me not everything works, because I believe what I see happening, for instance, with social media marketing is a really really niche of, you know, bloggers, content creators and small business owners. So enterprise social media tools, information is not going to do well. But how to start a blog on WordPress, those sorts of posts do really, really well. And freebies do really, really well download the free checklist on you know, before you publish your next blog post, make sure you check these things. So it really becomes an interesting experiment, I should say, or interesting sort of discovery of what content is working on Pinterest, and I believe that what works on Pinterest is going to work elsewhere. So I've been learning a lot about the way that really really savvy pinners display visually and with text overlay their content or their lead magnet or what lead magnets they are creating and how they're getting business value out of that because if you look for Pinterest case studies or if you're listening to all the different Pinterest podcasts out there, I'm going to talk about two that I listened to very frequently I'll put them in the show notes. You're gonna get a feeling that there's a lot of people that are really, really successful at Pinterest and it really comes down to those pins. So once you've done that, I think that you're going to be convinced now like I said, you don't have to put all your content there. But you need to have content. More importantly, you need content because every pin is a bookmark, right. So it's something I want you to experiment with, stop spending so much on Facebook ads, stop spending so much time spinning your wheels on Instagram without seeing the traffic, do a little bit experiment, do a one month, three months, what we're finding is you don't get immediate results. Because the search engine does not necessarily work chronologically. It's not like Instagram where you post something, and then 12 hours later, it's dead. Although the hashtags may, you may be able to find it later. And you can still get some traffic from your followers. Pinterest works very, very differently. They're trying to find the best content for the audience that is searching, right? You don't even have to have followers on Pinterest, to get traffic from Pinterest in a weird way. So Pinterest is truly unique. And if you're a content creator, it is really awesome for those reasons. So once you've sort of saw Pinterest in a new light, hopefully, once we get that going, we're inspired, we understand that Pinterest has a unique value. Now we're going to dip our toes in the water, the way you dip your toes in the water is if you've if you read maximize your soul. So it's hopefully you did you understand I talked about this concept of content buckets, which a lot of people talk about these days. But it was in the book. And the whole idea is that if you're going to blog, you want to have content categories, and content categories, or content buckets. And they're really content categories, right? What are the types of content that draw people to your blog, on Instagram, I have three content buckets. One is food. One is travel, which also includes a lot of Japan, and one is social media slash marketing. And in fact, you'll see that three different verticals based on each content bucket, and I analyze my performance. And at some point, I may say, You know what, I want to add another content bucket, or I'm just gonna stick with these three, or maybe I'm gonna narrow it down to two, based on engagement with my audience with a blog, I think Neal schaffer.com. Right now I have 30 to 40 content buckets. Now, that's because I have a lot of contributors. And I'll create new content buckets. If there's a contributor who wants to collaborate with me, on Twitter, I have nine main content buckets for my email newsletter, I have six main content buckets. And what these might be your you know, content marketing, influencer marketing, Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, you get the picture. So if you have this concept of content buckets, and you should have if you have a blog five to 10. Ideally, you're now basically going to create a board for each content bucket. The way that Pinterest works is, it's really, really simple. You have a profile, you have a description in your profile, you have a board that has a description, then you're going to pin images or pins to the board that have a title and a description. When everything matches up, you're in Pinterest Nirvana, Pinterest knows that your content is focused on a certain subject. So the SEO principles you would apply to a blog post or to a YouTube video work the exact same way in Pinterest. That's why you want to make sure that the keywords that you want to be found for for each one of those categories, is included in your description, and is also included every time you pin. Now they have your board set up, you want to move on to the actual pins, Pinterest will actually allow you to upload an image and create a link, a title description. And even if you do not have an embedded image in your website, you can send traffic there, I recommend that you have images on your website, because I mentioned that there's this issue of people that are hijacking their pins, changing the URL sending them to their website, Pinterest will look at that image. And they will try to see if there's a similar image, whether it's a logo, what have you, or text overlay on your website. So the easiest thing to do here is go to fiverr Fiverr. I used to use a long time ago, and I will I didn't really use it. I didn't think it was appropriate. But there are a bunch of social media marketing virtual assistants that can help you create pins. If you do not have the graphical background, this is what I do. Okay, now you need to find the right person that always takes time. So you're going to need to experiment, it does not cost a lot of money to create pins. But the idea is, if you have content on your website, the content should be in the form of a blog post. But even if their product pages, you want to create a pin, and you want to put the pin on that page. And ideally you want to pin from that page to Pinterest. Pinterest has a button Chrome extension if you're a Chrome user that allows you to do that. But that's that's really in a simplistic way that is what you need to do. You need to have images and ideally, you're gonna embed them in your website. Although when we talked about lead magnets on a lead page or landing page, you cannot embed those images. So you're gonna have to do those manually, right. But ideally, you have lots of content when you add images. It allows others and allows Pinterest users to easily obviously share those images to Pinterest as well. So there's a lot to cover here with very little time. But once you understand the concept and you want to invest in pins, you need to create pins. Now, Pinterest is very, very clear about the size of pin they want. They want two to three dimensions. So it's two wide three long, and sort of the recommended size they say 600 to 900. So 600 wide nine You're tall. If you go to a lot of the blog posts on Neal schaffer.com. Or if you go to one of my boards, pinterest.com/neal Schaffer, you'll see what I'm talking about almost everything I do is of that dimension. Now the resource that I use from fiber uses Canva. And you can actually purchase Canva templates for pins, or you can use whatever cam to house and work from there. Obviously, you want to create something that doesn't look like anyone's else. And you want the brand new to be of your own brand name. But she will create them for me in 735 times 1102, which is the canvas standard for Pinterest. And that's fine. It isn't same two, three ratio, that's the key thing, you want to embed it, and you want to pin it. That is the simplest thing you can do when you pin it, you want to make sure the title the description, actually match the board, which matches your description. And you ideally want to do this a few times a day. This is where we get into a little bit more advanced tactics there. Those that are successful Pinterest are consistent. Pinterest likes consistency, you're going to want to do this for beginners, I would say try to aim for five times a day. How do people do this? And this, we're going to get back to your question, Christopher? And do you recommend curating or perhaps hiding some of your Pinterest boards, if you need to pin five times a day, and you don't have that much content? You need to curate content in order to be active and curating content is good? Because you're going to attract a broader number of people and you build trust, when you share other people's content? How do you become a thought leader on Twitter and social media is a blog post I wrote recently, brands do well, people that do well on Pinterest are good curators as well. Do you curate 10% of the time 20% of the time 30% of the time, I started like a 5050 ratio these days, I'm more 70 My own content, 30 curated, maybe 8020. And there's some brands where they have so much content, and they get they do so well. They're 100% their own content, that's fine. But at the beginning, you're going to you curate. And that's great, because you're gonna be able to find a lot of great content creators out there, and you're probably going to learn from them. And from the pins you share to your board through Pinterest analytics, which by the way is awesome. Because you have a business account, you're gonna learn some great things which you're gonna be able to use in your own Pinterest marketing. Here's another trick, you can pin to multiple boards. So here's what I do. I have my content buckets on Pinterest on Pinterest, I think I have like 15 different buckets. But I also have something called social media marketing. So whenever I pin to Facebook marketing, I also pin that to social media marketing. So from one pin, it's going to two boards. That's two pins. And the other secret about Pinterest is it's okay to repin the definitive tool that you want to use for this. And this is the this is really you know, it should go over this in another episode is a tool called talent. Talent is is the end all of any Pinterest app? Yes, there's a lot of apps that will also do Pinterest. But if you want to focus on Pinterest, you should use this app and why tailwind is great is it has something called Smart Queue. I believe that's the name of it. Domino's anyway, smart cue smarter cue smart note I forget the exact name. But what that does is it allows you to create a recycle loop of content that you can determine how often you republish to Pinterest. Now, Twitter recently said, Hey, we don't want you to post the same tweet. Pinterest is okay with it. Right? They want the smart feed that Pinterest users see to be active all the time. Now, they don't want you to do too often. So you don't want to pin the same pin to the same board too often. But once a month, that's totally fine. And the Pinterest, Smart Queue functionality is officially approved by Pinterest. So if it finds that you're posting too frequently, it will not let you it will actually put a warning on the screen. So that's a great way to begin to stay active as you create more pins for your content. If you have 10 pieces of content, that's 10 pins. And if you have two boards, that's 20 pins. And if you publish five times a day, that's four days worth of the 30 days in a month. So right there, you're already creating more pins. I'm going to image this as one note, before I look at the final comments here that Pinterest actually appreciates you creating fresh content. What this means is, if you find that a pin isn't doing so well, by the way, between Pinterest analytics and talent Analytics, you got tons of data to look at, it will actually tell you what pins are not performing create a new pin. And when you create a new pin, it is a new visual, even if you keep the same title description, although you should change it slightly when you repin it pinches sees it as new content, even though it's linking to the same URL. So there are a lot of people a lot of Pinterest marketers that will actually create five different pins for each blog post and then see how they perform over a period of time and then only use one but by creating five different visuals. It gives you more pins to pin. So if you had five pins per blog post, right, and you had five pieces of content that's 25 pins and two boards. You have 50 pins and if do five times a day that's 1/3 of your contents already been created. If you republish that once a month, you see the other benefit when you use tailwind is that you can automate this. You don't have to spend a lot of time. It's not spam. You just like your analytics, and you put it into, and I'm going to be coming out a lot of content about this. This goes into a monthly process task, create new pins, check out the analytics, delete out some pins to the smart loop that aren't working, curate more stuff, what have you. I hope they got you intrigued, right? And there aren't that many guys talking about Pinterest. In all honesty, I'm a huge fan. And as I do this, I am maintaining and I am seeing new traffic coming from New pins, tailwinds. And Pinterest has a lot more going for that. But in my limited time of 30 minutes. If you want to know more about Pinterest, you want me to do more podcasts or live streams? Please let me know in the comments. And by the way, I do appreciate the comments I have received iTunes, I have exponentially way more listeners than the number of views I have on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening. So I really hope that you can add a comment because it really does help the discoverability of this content so that you can help your fellow sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners. I'm going to end by just looking at the comments. Hey, Christopher. Yes, tailwind is a great tool, but it still baffles a lot of people. I'm going to be talking more about that in the very near future. Just some final notes here. For those of you that are new, make sure that you do subscribe to the maximize your social influence podcast. You know, I realized that I sort of ran out of time to talk about my literary which was one of the intentions of this podcast, but make sure you go to Neal schaffer.com/milotree. Yes, in full disclosure, it is an affiliate link just helps pay the overhead you know, the lighting in my home office or what have you. But definitely check it out. And it is an opt in plugin. If you go to my site, you'll see a sprinkly dashi looking plugin in the bottom right hand corner showing you my Instagram profile. And hey, you should you know, follow me on Instagram that is using milotree. So definitely check it out there is I do believe there's a free version that you can download. And then after that you can test it out and tell me what you think. Alright, everybody, thank you so much for joining. Alright, so I hope that opened your eyes about Pinterest. I think from a maximize your social influence perspective. Pinterest can be extremely powerful whether you want to reach out to influencers that are already generating a lot of traffic that might be able to generate traffic for your brand. Or if you're an influencer brands always want to see not just the likes and the comments, but they want to see the actual clicks. And Pinterest I think is a great supplement for any lifestyle influencer really any influencer out there. So that's my take on Pinterest. I also want to thank you all those that have gone out of their way to review my podcast. I'm really thankful as you know, my podcast has been going on for a while and I've never really asked in this way for review. So I hope if you've been listening to enjoyed it, I would really be honored and obviously your review helps other people discover this podcast. So really appreciate it. Dr. Vogel, man, totally blown away. I've been following Neal Schaffer for many years now. He has always been a shining example of how to sincerely engage with people across all manners of social media. I had no idea that Neil had a podcast until I found it today, just one episode and I realized I'm going to be doing a lot of binge listening for weeks to come. I'm totally blown away by the high quality of this content if you depend upon using social media for your business. This podcast is not a nice to have it as a must have Dr. Volkow man, thank you very much. I hope I see you at Social Media Marketing World again this year, we've become friends over time. And if you listen to some of the podcasts that I've done, live streams on and you hear a Christopher Vogler man right Christopher comment. It is this gentleman. So thank you so much for being a fan. And I hope that on the next episode, I get to read your customer view. So once again, thank you all and wherever we are in the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.