#37 Back to the Basics of Pinterest with Kate Ahl, Simple Pin Media

All right guys, if you are ready to blow up your Pinterest strategy, get ready to meet the number one Pinterest agency in the United States. Our go to Pinterest expert, Kate all with Simplepin Media. As we break it all down, this is episode number 37. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works. From mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Alright you guys. There is no secret that women's fashion is the number one most pinned category on Pinterest.

So?

So for boutique owners and wholesale brands alike, the opportunity to reach potential customers there is pretty astounding. Now, given the fact that Pinterest is known as a dreaming platform, well meaning that customers are going there, women are going there on a daily basis to dream up what is next in their wardrobe. What is next in their life. Think about it. Their ideal house, their ideal recipe ideas, their ideal fashion, their ideal body. They're dreaming about what they want to come next in their life. So while Pinterest isn't a short term strategy, like Instagram for example, or Facebook where you're posting and you want to make a sale today, it's a long term strategy that builds your brand and helps you continually get in front of the right ideal customer using keywords so that over time as they're planning their ideal wardrobe with you, they're getting led back to your Pinterest feed again and again and then back to your your website. So when you show up consistently on Pinterest as the algorithm favors, it's going to consistently favor you and driving more and more traffic back to your business. I was blown away at this episode you guys meeting with Kate all, the founder of simplepin Media. She is one of the top Pinterest experts in the world with a huge agency and team who supports her actually taking on agency work and supporting brands and businesses individually by setting up their Pinterest strategies. Kate did not hold back one ounce in this interview. I have to tell you, she broke down everything from using tailwind tribes to group boards to how to grow your followers, how to read your analytics, how to create gift guides and how to plan. I thought this was interesting. How to plan content every month that helps your customers Think about the next step. What is the future of what the customers are planning? So Kate will actually release blog posts talking about top categories to pin in, say, October, because she knows people this time of year are starting to look for holiday gift ideas or Thanksgiving recipes. So then how can you, the business owner, be prepared with whatever those topics are and work them into your own pinning strategy so that you're really serving your customers in the most opportune way and helping your content to show up in the most opportune way on Pinterest. Now I will stop talking so that you can get to it, so that you can take notes and learn all there is to know about your own organic Pinterest strategy. I want to thank Kate again for giving so much useful information in this episode. I hope you guys really enjoy it.

All right, guys, welcome back to the podcast. This week I can't wait to talk about this subject because I feel like we get questions about Pinterest every single day inside of the boutique hub. So, guys, please help me welcome Kate all with simplepin Media. She is a Pinterest expert and we could probably take this podcast on a couple hour journey. Just talking about Pinterest, right, Kate?

Oh, absolutely. We could talk forever about it.

It's every woman's greatest addiction, but also probably one of the greatest tools in a boutique owner's toolbox, too. So let's, I want to just start, let's dive right into the Pinterest piece of it, and then I want to come back into your company. And you and I were spending some time kind of talking about life as a business owner before we started recording the podcast. And I want to come back to that a little bit later. But first, as we think about Pinterest as a whole, tell me about why Pinterest for boutique owners? What is the stat on women's fashion and Pinterest and why is it so viral like it is?

Pinterest has probably, I think it's like 200 or it's a 100, like billion pins or 200 billion. I always forget the number. Let's just say it's a. It's a huge amount. And one of the things that Pinterest can bring to the table for any type of boutique owner is that it's where women go to curate these ideas for fashion, to plan out their wardrobes or to get ready for the next season. Pinterest is definitely a search and discovery engine. It's where people go to discover ideas. And so if we think about it on the the fashion Realm and how it can serve the boutique business. It's that you want to be serving these Pinterest users by getting your images or your content. That's usually what we refer to it as in front of them when they're searching for it. So that as they're gathering we say, and they're building up their boards and they're dreaming about what's next, your content is there and ready for them to take action on.

Perfect. So when people think about Pinterest, do you feel like there's some confusion in terms of Pinterest versus Facebook and Instagram? Like, people are often looking for that instant gratification in terms of marketing on Facebook and Instagram, but when they come to Pinterest, they find it confusing because that's really not the same strategy.

Absolutely. So how I describe it is that Instagram is very much like an in the moment. It you see an image, you engage with it, you might like it. It takes a lot to get clicks from Instagram because it's kind of its own little like sub world that we like to operate in. And rarely do people go back and revisit those images again. So really once it's done seeing it seen and then on Facebook we kind of have a different targeting over there. We have audiences and, you know, business pages have a really hard time getting off the ground. And the same thing applies where once somebody sees a status update or even an ad, it's done. And then we go over to Pinterest and it's very much like Google. People use it as a place where they search. And so the advantage for a business owner is that it's not a one time thing. Something that you pin today for your followers to see can be seen in a few weeks by other followers or it can be pulled up in search. It has a longevity about it that doesn't exist on Instagram and Facebook, which are very much in the moment. You do get this quick engagement and engagement is what you're looking for. Whereas when you move over to Pinterest, you're looking for a click and this takes a lot longer to build up the momentum and then it does something on Instagram. So what I honestly find is people come to me and they say, I've been working on Instagram for a long time and I want to jump over to Pinterest. What can I expect in terms of growth? And it, I always tell people it's very, very, very slow. So what you get on Instagram, a like or you know, even just a comment is not something you're going to get on Pinterest. You're going to get a click. People don't comment or like on Pinterest. It's kind of the joke is it's the introverts platform because people want to go there and they want to be in their own world. They don't really want the social interaction. It's kind of a little bit quieter over there. So that's how you can kind of distinguish those three platforms and wrap your mindset around how you're going to market. It's just, it's apples to oranges. It's totally different.

Perfect. So when people come to Pinterest, do you feel like they take a while to find, find where their ideal customer is on Pinterest versus the other social channels or what does that process look like to really nail who that customer is that's going to follow them on Pinterest?

Yeah, that one is a tough one. It does take a long time. But I always tell people to start back with whatever your avatar is or your however you would refer to it, buying Persona or whatever it is. You need to think about that first before you go into Pinterest. Because of the search factor, Pinterest is primarily, it's driven on keyword search. And that's how Pinterest matches up your content with people who are searching or putting it into people's smart feeds. So each person has what's called a smart feed. And that smart feed is curated based on the people you follow, the interests that you have, and even the boards that you have on your profile. So that sends this signal to Pinterest to look for content to fill up your smart feed. So if I'm a marketer, I want to make sure that I'm using keywords in the pin description, which we can get in into that in a minute and then nitty gritty. But the high level is you want to be using keywords in this place that you know, your person might be searching to find your particular piece of clothing or jewelry or whatever it might be. So that could be if it's geared around fall or if it's, you know, you even want to get as simple as like pants, T shirt. However people might describe it because the woman who's coming onto Pinterest right now, it's August, they're thinking maybe of what they might be wearing in the fall. They might put in long casual mirror sweater with a tie. And so they're looking for something that specific so they can start to pin it to their women's Fall fashion board so that when it gets cold, actually they're ready to buy it in October. Whereas when you again, when you jump over to Instagram or Facebook, it's just an in the moment. There's not a whole lot of searching going on. There's more of just what's happening right now. And you on Instagram would heavily use hashtags and that's how you would really target your person. And then on Facebook, you would heavily use Audience Insights, the demographic piece. So each one has its own unique characteristic. But when you're looking at Pinterest, it's into the search and into the keywords.

So how many is there like a rule of thumb with keywords when you're doing that, like how many to have in the title, do you add hashtags in the description? Talk about like the layout of an ideal pin.

Yeah, so an ideal PIN, number one, you're going to have the image and the image size has to be a two to three ratio. And a good dimension. Numbers that you can go with is 600 by 900. So it's vertical, you can use square. So an Instagram sized image. But what we have found is that vertical definitely converts higher than any other image. So you don't want to use horizontal, you don't want to use square, you always want to use vertical. So that's number one. And inside your image, you want to help the person see. So let's say you see it clearly. So let's say you're showcasing an entire outfit, but maybe the one thing for sale might be the jeans and that's really what you want to highlight. You want to get a close up on that or you even want to add a little bit of some text overlay that can be a couple of words going over the top. It's very much like billboard advertising. So as somebody's thumbing by on Pinterest, they know that the focal point that you want to draw them into is the jeans simply by the words that you put on there. It could be best women's jeans for fall or something like that. So that's right what we start with. Then when we go into the PIN description, that can be up to 500 characters. But what we recommend is two sentences that sound very natural. So it could be something like pick up the best women's fall gene has. I mean, I'm not creative with any of this, so I. You can get the idea, but you want to have it have keywords naturally built in instead of keyword Stuffing. So just putting one keyword after the other, and then you can end it with a couple of hashtags. Hashtags are new on Pinterest within the last year, and I wouldn't recommend any more than four to five. We don't use it in the same way that we use it on Instagram, but it's just one other way to target people, searching if they happen to search by a hashtag. So in your pin description, having those keywords naturally built in, in those two sentences is the very best, most easy way to start, because that tells the Pinterest algorithm what your pin is about.

So once you've got the perfect pin, how many boards should you have? And how many of those boards should be your content versus content that you're pinning from elsewhere on Pinterest.

So there's no hard and fast rule about the number of boards that you have. So what we tell people is only the number of boards that showcase your products, your content, and that people can clearly understand what your brand is about. It's really helpful only to have boards where you can pin your content. Used to be a theory that you might have extra boards that would fit the lifestyle of the person that you are targeting, but that was when Pinterest easily showed the boards and the profile to people. That's not the case anymore. So what we recommend is on your profile, you just have the boards that reflect your branding. So if that takes 30 boards or 60 boards, it's fine as long as those board names, again, are very keyword specific. So you don't want to have a board that's just women's fashion. You want to have a board that's targeted to the season, women's fall fashion. Or you could even target a generation, Millennial or Gen X or whatever it might be, if you know that your people might be searching that type of keyword. If you create a certain type of, you know, if you have a certain brand that's very specific to you, or people know you for a specific type of clothing, you would want to name one of your boards that name. So you want to be thinking about, again, the searcher so that you can put this content inside that board. So the number of boards isn't really important. And then as far as pinning other people's content versus your own content, Pinterest has said you can go ahead and pin as much as your of your content as you want. We don't recommend any more than 30 or so pins per day. And it really above and beyond the number of Pins per day. You want to create a good user experience. So you don't want to pin the same pin over and over and over again to where if somebody came into your board and they see 20 of the same pins, it's just not a good user experience. But you are allowed to pin the same pin again. It just would be helpful if you would have multiple different images in between or you add it to a different board. You can certainly pin it again to different boards and then maybe in another month pin it again. Another way to get kind of a stretch, let's say you have a category of jeans again. You can also create a pinnable image and link to that category on your shop or on your website to where it has multiple in your Pinterest image, it has multiple genes in the image and then you could lean to a category page in instead of a specific gene. So there's lots of different ways that you can get creative with the image and where you link that to on your site.

That's super smart. And that was actually one of my questions was what does the life cycle of a pin look like? Ideally, you know, you could pin say it's a cashmere sweater or whatever it is that could go on a number of different boards. So that's super smart. How do you, you know, you and I were talking about managing a team and growing a business and I know so many of the boutique owners who are listening are in that same boat like you and I are. How do you help your clients, whether they're a boutique owner or a blogger or someone growing a business, how do you help them to understand a strategy, put a strategy together so they begin to outsource this to their team. So it's not taking all of their time doing all the pinning.

I would say, number one, it's to start if you have the time to go to your Pinterest profile and create the brand that you want, that's kind of like your foundation, which means that the profile name clearly people understand when they come to your Pinterest page, they know what you're about in that five second snapshot. And then if you create the boards that you know you want, you number one, that's your foundation. So then when you do hand it off, you're not having to explain to anybody, this is what I want you to create, this is the branding that I want. But take the about the hour, you know, it's about an hour to go through depending on how much of a mess your pages. So let's start with that so take about an hour and go through and create the branding. Then what you would want to do is you would want to create, let's say you're going to pass it off to somebody on your team. You would want to have at least 10 pins going out per day. And I recommend using a scheduling tool like Tailwind. There's really no difference between scheduling or live pinning to Pinterest. And Pinterest prefers Tailwind. It's one of their marketing partners. So you can use it knowing Pinterest supports it. And then they have a little scheduling tool where it limits you at 10 per day. And you can schedule out whether it's a certain piece of content, if you have a blog side to your site or it's products you want to showcase, you can do a little mix of both or a hundred percent of your products. The goal being you want to pin within the time frame that you know people are going to be searching for whatever type of content it is. So you don't want to be pinning right now summer fashion, because we're kind of. We're at the end. Right. You would want to be pinning fall and even a little bit of winter. So it's also preparing them to think on this time, the seasonal schedule, if there's a seasonal component to your business, and then giving the parameters to say the goal is, I would like to ensure that my pins are going out daily. So again, you can do all 10 or you can do maybe six of your own and four of other people's, maybe other people that you want to support or products that you know your audience might like but maybe you don't sell. And then see how that works for the next couple of months. See what resonates with Pinterest users. And that can be seen. If people have Shopify stores or even Etsy or whatever, tracking Google Analytics, whatever they use, then they can actually see what's bringing the traffic to their site and potentially conversions.

Perfect. So an iteration as you go.

Yep, exactly.

I love that you talked about using Tailwind, because that's something that we use too. For anyone who's listening and they aren't familiar, could you go a little more in depth in terms of Tailwind, not only for scheduling, but also we've got a lot of boutiques who are in Tailwind Tribes. You talk about how those work and then also like the idea of group boards and collaborating Pinterest account.

Yeah. So I'll kind of start with group boards and how. And then I'll work my way back into tribes and then basic tailwind. But group boards on Pinterest were started initially for one to two people to collaborate together to share ideas. And over time, it's grew ground to be pretty massive. So you can get group boards that have a thousand people on them or even up to 3,000 people. Pinterest has said they are not really happy with the way that group boards have gone, and so they are downplaying how people use them. So if you do use a group board to collaborate, I highly suggest that you look for a couple main factors. Number one, you want the group board name to be very specific. Nothing broad. Women's fashion wouldn't be very helpful, but something that is very targeted and also would be good for your audience and you can put your content on it. So if you join a group board that you're never going to put your products on or your content on, it's just not worth it. You want to have a place where you can get seen, then the other thing you want to look for is a very, very low number of contributors. I would say less than five. So there's just a few of you collaborating together that you want to support each other's business. And that's the whole point of any type of sharing group, whether it's tribes, whether it's group boards. You know, it's the reciprocity piece that really makes it work. So if you're joining a tribe where everybody in there is not your style, it's nothing you would pin. But you're putting your stuff in there, you're not actually making it work the way it's designed to work, which is you put in a pin into the tribe, somebody pins out of the tribe, and they pin your pin. So whether it's a group board or whether it's a tribe, the thing you want to be thinking about is who can I join with who's very similar style to me? I can support their shop or their work a hundred percent, and I feel the same back to me. So again, that reciprocity. So then even backing up into their tailwind as a scheduling tool has that component of tribes where tribes easily integrates with their scheduling. And what I mean by scheduling is that when you pop in to tailwind, it'll say, how many pins do you want per day? And you can design what you want your schedule to be. And the great part is it's called their smart schedule. And so you're not picking times based on just the guess, but you're picking the times they suggest for you based on the activity of your account and when people most engage with your pins. And so when you pop in to pin front, let's say you're on your website and you have a product that you'd like to pin, you simply hit the Tailwind extension button, it pops up and you select the board that you want to pin it to and hit, hit schedule and you're done. So it takes little to no time for you to ensure that you're being consistent on Pinterest. And Pinterest has said multiple times that's the key and that's what they want for content creators, is for you to be consistent on Pinterest to daily send out your content. Because Pinterest relies on our products and our content to serve their user base. They if they didn't have that, they really wouldn't have it even thing to show people. And so they're saying to content creators or store creators, please put your content daily onto here. And Tailwind allows you to do that without thinking about it, which is you can fill up an entire week in probably an hour and then all your pins are going out throughout the week and you don't have to think about it again.

Simple. So simple. What about connecting Pinterest to Shopify? Most of the boutique owners who are listening are using Shopify, so we've got viable pins. How does all of that work?

Well, so one of the things we're actually deep diving on here at Simple Pin is really understanding that connection between Pinterest and Shopify. So I can't go too deep into it, but I will say that buyable pins are, they're still relatively, they're not new, new to Pinterest, they've been around for probably two years. But the thing that we need to know is that when somebody hops onto Amazon, they're like primed and ready to buy. When they hop onto Pinterest, they need to be warmed up. So if we talk about like the marketing funnel, they're definitely at the top. They're a cold audience that needs to come in, get to know you, get to know who you are a little bit more about you. Which is why we suggest those who have stores that once people click over to your store site or to your website, there is definitely a pop up that gets them on your email list or offers them a discount code so that they, they, if they need time to buy, they can. Now that being said, the shoppable, the Shopify connection that gives you the Bible pins, those allow you to buy right on the platform. So If I see a handbag that I absolutely love and it's a buyable pin, I can simply add it to my cart and walk through the process and that's all facilitated there. The hard thing is, is that it's very rare for people on Pinterest to make the decision right away simply because of the ecosystem inside there. Somebody who is working on a remodel on their house, they're planning three to six months in advance before they actually buy the bathroom tile that they love. So they're gatherers. Be that pin that they gather. The buyable pin can be one thing that they put into their board for later. So it is good. But I wouldn't depend on it as a way to generate a lot of conversions just because over time that's not what we've seen. We've seen people take time and really, I guess they get. Need to get to know you. Right. Like, they really need to develop this trust, the know like and trust factor before they really take the plunge.

That makes total sense. The idea of them being a gatherer and, you know, collecting that content that's coming far in the future. Talk about, you know, even within that, there are still times when pins go viral. And I think about, as I see it happen with some of the, the boutiques in our community, there's a pin that goes viral. They've sold out of 100 pieces of an item, the vendor no longer makes the item, and all this traffic is hitting their website because of this one crazy pin. So two questions. One, you know, how do viral pins happen the way that they do? And two, if you are a shop owner and you're sold out of that item, do you have any tips for them in terms of. Terms of they can't restock that same item, just redirecting that link to another item or to a category page so they still can collect that traffic.

Yeah, the redirect is the best because you can't update a pin that's out there all across the platform. So if something does go viral, you sell out. We always recommend a redirect. Definitely telling the customer, giving them the information like this is sold out. It'll be back in stock at this time if it is going to be back in stock or, or this is out of stock. But we suggest that here's some other suggestions that are very similar because one of the things on Pinterest when something does go crazy viral is that it continues, it can continue year over year over year. And I'm sure some, some shop owners have seen that something that somebody pinned and was picked up and went viral two years ago is still bringing traffic. So what you want to do is still try to get, get them to make a buying decision or go somewhere or sign up for your email list so that you've captured it. And as far as going viral, that is a tough one to really a tough code to crack. But the biggest thing being back to what we talked about with creating the perfect pin, it's your PIN description. And what usually happens is that there's a large number of people searching a particular search term and yours happens to be toward the top for some reason, it's because somebody saw it. It gets more clicks, it gets more impressions and engagement. And this sends a signal to Pinterest that, oh, this must be important. We're going to show it to more people. And so that can stick around for a very long time. Which is the advantage of Pinterest in that it doesn't fall off. It can. My highest, like trafficked pin has been over two and a half years, and it brings probably a thousand sessions to my site every single month. And I don't do anything to it anymore. It still has, it's still optimized, right? So when these people enter into my site, and I guess that's a way to look at it, is that Pinterest allows people to enter your site through various doors. And so if you are looking at your tracking, whether it's Google Analytics or whatever your website gives you, then you're able to see where you can greet them. And you might be surprised by that. If you never look at Google Analytics or any type of analytics, if you never look at that, you're never able to see what door they're entering into to capture that traffic, even if that item is out of stock.

So what about Pinterest Analytics? So, you know, a lot of times we're looking through Google Analytics, but what analytics does Pinterest give you? To also look at how your site's performing as you make changes over time.

So Pinterest and Google Analytics don't really talk very well with each other. And so what you see inside of Pinterest analytics is going to be what's happening on your profile about the people you reach. And then it will give you a little bit of website activity based on if you have like the pin it button that you've added to your site from Pinterest, they can track how many people are, are clicking on it. But back to the middle section, which is people, you reach one of the Best things to do inside of that is to look at the interests for the people who are your followers. And you can even see the interest of people who don't follow you, but they've pinned your pin. And when you look at those, then you can gather those keywords to see what. What's most important to them. It kind of breaks them down into categories, and then you can even see the names of the boards that people are pinning your pins to. So again, we take mostly Pinterest analytics to look at our keyword research, and then even looking at a pin that has maybe a really, really high number of impressions, but a low number of clicks, that tells us that it's not getting the engagement. People are just passing it by. And then maybe we can change up the image or add a little bit of text. If there's no text to get people to click on it, to get people to take action.

Perfect. So when. Let's talk about the image piece, because I know we talked about kind of the layout of the image and what works well. But I'm curious the answer to this question, especially in boutique land, because there's basically three options. Do you upload a product photo, a lifestyle photo, or a flat lay? What seems to work best, in your opinion?

All three, and here's why I say that. Number one, if you have the product photo, you're really allowing people to see it up close and for people to use the visual search tool. So the visual search tool is something where you can hover over the image, and Pinterest will match that image with other images on the platform. This allows someone like, let's say your boot that you're looking for is out of stock. Well, I can hover over and see if Pinterest suggests any other ones where I can buy them. So this is important for any other shop owner that maybe this one shop is out of this specific boot, but you have it in stock. Now, as a Pinterest user, I've hovered over, I click your pin and I go to buy because I'm interested. So that's why we always want to have the product shot, so people can see it up close. The lifestyle image allows them to picture themselves in this particular product in this boot. And so having the lifestyle again, it brings it to life. And then the third of the flat lay, that is definitely something important to see too, because it's kind of a little bit of a combination of product and lifestyle combined. So what I always suggest to people is if you are new to Pinterest marketing and this is a new project that you're going to take on to see how it performs. You don't really have any data to go on, so you have to do all three to see what's going to resonate with the users over time. So I would say give it a good six to eight months of putting all three types of images, which I know is a tremendous amount of work. But doing that allows you, after those eight months to see what type of image did people click on, save the most. So then maybe we can just really focus on those types of images going forward.

I like it. I like it. And actually this gets my nerdy brain just totally spinning out of control because I think about, you know, all the boutiques we work with on their Shopify accounts and, you know, the multiple views that we upload of our product images. So a lot of times boutiques will have like a stock photo or more of a product type, product based image and then a lifestyle image behind that and a flat lay behind that to give the customer on the website all three options. So how simple would it be to go in with your tailwind button, you know, and just to be able to schedule it right there, all three options so that you could run Simple.

Exactly. It's so simple. If you already have it there, you really just have to think it's just a couple more steps and you're really opening up as many traffic streams as you possibly can. And that's what you want to do with Pinterest, especially right out of the gate.

All right, so let's go back to something I probably should have started out with in terms of questions, because everyone's probably wondering this in their mind. So we've talked about how to use Pinterest, right, And examples of great pins. But how do you grow your following on Pinterest?

So that's an interesting question. The importance of a following has really evolved and changed over the years. In the beginning, it was very important, and then we switched to Smart Feed and it was not important important. And now we're kind of swinging back the other direction where we still have a heavy emphasis on search being number one. But followers do giving Pinterest that first signal of intent and so they're able to show it to more people. So with following, I would also say one of the important things to think about is your number isn't as important as your conversions. We've seen people who have 200 followers who get a great number of conversions and people who have 200,000 followers and really struggle with Conversions. So that being said, don't put too much stock in the number, but do ask your audience to follow you. So a few ways that we tell people to do this is. And this is probably the best way, you know, a lot of people will ask me, like, what can I do on Pinterest? What you're doing on Pinterest, as far as daily pinning, that's the main key to growing your following. Then you have to take it off Pinterest and really utilize other social channels or your email list or even on your website. So number one is you always want to have the Pinterest icon on your website so people can know that you have a profile. They can click on it, make sure it's connected. I've seen tons of websites as they come across that when their web developer was doing everything, they forgot to link all the social accounts. So make sure that's linked and it's linked to the right one. If you've changed to a new account, make sure you update it. The other thing is on your site somewhere you can embed. It's like a little Pinterest follow me widget. And you can just Google that and Pinterest has a place for you to build it. And it would just say, follow me on Pinterest. That's another opportunity. When people come across to your website, they can easily do that. The other thing you can do is you can highlight specific boards. So one of the great tricks I heard somebody talk about in the past, and it had to do with eyeshadow. So we'll kind of, we'll say, maybe you're your. You create earrings in your shop and you have all these different varieties and you've pinned all the product shots and lifestyle shots to your women's earring board. Well, you can take that link to that board and you can put it on Facebook or an Instagram for the users to come over and say, hey, I've pinned all of my earrings that I have up in my shop right now. I'd love for you to hop over, pin share, save whatever you love, and even comment, because you can comment now on pins on Pinterest and let me know which earrings you love. It's a way to get this, the cross promotion happening across social channels and that will help increase your following as well. Because this Instagram user maybe didn't know you were on Pinterest, so they hopped over to your earring board and now they're following you. The same thing maybe with a Facebook user. So just be strategic about where you're placing it. Newsletter signups, that's another thing too. If you are an active. A lot of people write personal emails each week. It's something that I do every Wednesday. So what I do is I will link back to my podcasts and then right next to it, I'll put a pin it for later. And that's simply the URL of the pin on Pinterest. So if I have something that's how to clean up Pinterest boards that links to my link on my website, and then the pin it for later links to the pin on my Pinterest boards. So I'm giving them every single opportunity to pin my stuff, which definitely helps on Pinterest, and then to follow me and to see where it is I what I'm doing on Pinterest. That's probably the best way.

That's super smart. I'm just thinking now about all of the product emails that get sent out from boutiques every single week. How simple is it to not only have that URL, but a pin it button right in the emails that go out or. We actually used to kind of market this way years ago when we first started the boutique hub. Even with blog posts that we shared on social media, on Facebook, you know, here's the direct link and then, hey, here's the pin it button. I'm sorry, here's the URL, which we would shorten with bitly to pin it for later, read it, or pin it for later. We'd always give them that option. And we've kind of fallen away from doing that. So thanks for the reminder.

Yeah, there was another great one too. I think it was Lindsay Olives. We. We follow lots of different, like, emails to see what people are doing, but they did a great email campaign over a couple weeks that were our best, our top five pins of the week. And that's really what was all in their email, was the this image and then a pin it link. And it was a really cool strategy that they employed to try to get more people onto Pinterest following them.

Oh, I like that. I like it. All right, so talk about, you know, kind of along that strategy, how a lot of boutique owners, you know, they'll have their product pages, category pages where we're actually selling products. But a lot of us will also use blogs to tell a story around an occasion or product category or a trend. How could we even embed some of those pinnable images right in the middle of that blog post and then kind of post our blog or pin our Blog two different ways to Pinterest. You know, one through the product images themselves, but then one is having like a nice cover image of that blog post that also goes to Pinterest directly.

Yeah, I love the idea of content marketing and, and warming up your audience. I think it's really, really important on Pinterest. So, number one, I would say if you're going to write a post that has to do with your latest product, and maybe you're rounding up the top five people on Pinterest love these five best. And so you would definitely want to put that Pinnable image at the top. And on that blog post, you want to make sure there's share buttons so that they can actually share it to Pinterest if they find it helpful. And then you want to talk a little bit about it in that blog post. So, for example, the top is kind of your Pinterest image. It has all five of whatever you're talking about, five of the best in a collage image. So people can see that right away. But then as you go along in the blog post, you have singular images calling out each one of them. So then you're not only able to pin the top image, but you're able to pin the other five in the this post that all go to the same place. And that's a really good way to extend reach. And again, it's a good way to get them to warm up in this blog post. You can have them sign up for your newsletter or you can have them direct them to your products, have them follow you on Pinterest. There's a lot you can do in a blog post that you can't do in a singular product. Just sending them to a product.

Oh, I love it. I love it. We could nerd out on that piece all day.

I know we could. Yes, we could.

Oh, man. Okay, so one more thing that I know we're gonna nerd out about together is the holidays are right around the corner. So fourth quarter, craziest time in retail. Let's talk about the use of, say, holiday gift guides or specific content marketing for retailers around the holidays. Using kids.

I love this. And you're right. I could totally nerd out on this forever. Okay. Okay, so one of the things, there's a few things to note here. Number one, Pinterest says you want to start pinning for the specific holiday 45 days in advance. I would say with the exception of Christmas or anything that happens in December. So what we see is these high traffic times. Like you said, they correlate with fourth quarter September to mid January. It's like we're hitting it hard. And so what you want to do is get creative. What you said with gift guides is genius. It's the top five best best gifts for mom, the top five best gifts for tweens. Get very specific. Instead of just doing a very broad gift guide, think of what your, your avatar, your ideal customer is going to be buying. And I would create as many gift guides as you can, in all honesty, because those, once they're pinned, will resurface probably again next year and they will continue to bring you traffic year over year. And getting super creative with them allows you to target not just a really, really broad keyword like best gifts for women, but if you go deeper, then when people search that keyword on Pinterest, they find your gift guide and they might want it for something that's in graduation time or Mother's Day or whatever it is. So be thinking of something that's not just holiday gift guide, but a gift guide that someone could surface all year is and still buy from. And then you can update the links if you need to in that specific gift guide if things are out of stock. The other thing you want to be thinking about too is naming some of your boards. Excuse me, in a particular way that you know people are going to be searching. So if it is gift ideas for mom, that's a great board name. And then you can also put your gift guide pin in there, or if you create another gift guide pin in there for moms, you can keep it expanding on it. So again, go back to the keyword thing. What are people searching and how can you create more content around that specific topic?

I like that. How about, I know in your business you also work a lot with bloggers, right? So a lot of our boutiques will collaborate with bloggers. And I know we've kind of reached this new day and age in terms of marketing where there's such a copyright and infringement day that we're living in. And Pinterest is kind of at the middle of that sometimes. I'm wondering, what do boutiques need to know in terms of working, collaborating with bloggers and then having those images on Pinterest and any other Pinterest, you know, kind of ethical pieces that they should keep in mind as they use the platform?

Well, I would say if you're going to be working with bloggers to do any type of campaign, you want to always have a contract in place, you know, and I know you have lawyers in your community but making sure that there's express written content consent that you've given the blogger to use your images to pin as much as they can. And that's really a good thing for you because they're pinning more of your product images as a part of their campaign. You can even write that into the campaign. Actually, we've seen people do that quite a bit where they will put, please, also, as you're writing about this product, pin these images and you can give them to them or however it works best. But I would say that would be number one because Pinterest is at the center of the controversy simply because of, of the pinnable images. And they have had some trouble in this past year with what are called stolen images, where these bots, and they're all bots, they're not, you know, people are creating them so they happen super duper fast where they swipe an image and redirect it to a new location. That's something they are working on, taking legal action, they're pursuing those people who are doing that. So knowing that if you come across an image that's yours, or somebody has taken a product image and they're redirecting it to their site or different page and you didn't give them permission, there is a way to strike against that pin. And there's actually two options. When you report a pin, you want to strike against it instead of, I can't remember what the first option says, but that first option they give you actually removes every single one of those images from the platform, which you don't want to do because you know, there are some good, you know, product images of yours because you've pinned them. You just want to strike against the specific one that does not go to the right location. So I hope that makes sense. I feel like I didn't explain that super well.

Yes, that totally makes sense. Is there anything else? I mean, you said have it in the contract and then I guess striking against those pins, we also run into where, you know, say a brand new boutique owner who maybe doesn't understand they can't take images from Pinterest that are product images and share them as their own content.

Yes, that is a big one. So you can't take. Some people will do roundups and so what they'll want to do is they'll highlight other shop owners and it most of the time it's on accident. I will say that it's just people don't know. So what they'll do is their main image will be someone else's image and then they'll pin that and it will link link to their site in order to prevent the controversy that can happen around that. Ask five shop owners if you can highlight their shops in a roundup or you can highlight their products and ask can I use your image within my pinnable image? Do you give me permission for this? That is one of the biggest ways that you can avoid any trouble. Just ask to use the image and if they say okay, get it in writing, document it, put it in like a Google Drive file, just knowing they said yes in their email, I can use the image and then go from there.

Simple. All right, one last kind of Pinterest specific question I want to ask you and it has to do with growth is just about giveaways. We talked about growing and collaborating but also finding the right types of followers. Do you have some suggestions on giveaways to get in front of the right people?

Yeah, I, you know it. There used to be contests like called pin it to win it and Pinterest said you couldn't do that anymore. So we have haven't seen any good examples actually of giveaways lately because you can't have the entry be that they follow you on Pinterest. And so I know their terms of service on giveaways have been updated quite often and I don't know where they currently stand. But all that to say we haven't noticed it as an effective way to drive engagement or following. That's authentic. Really the best way to do that is just to to do it through going through your audience. You know, doing the giveaway on your site, you can certainly pin the giveaway, but because a giveaway is usually time sensitive, that's a little harder on Pinterest just because that pin could live for a year. So you have to be very clear in the post when it begins, when it ends. So it just honestly makes more work and we haven't noticed the payoff being worth it.

Gotcha. That makes sense. I knew they were stricter than other social platforms on the giveaway, so I was curious if there was anything that was working.

Yeah, no, there's not.

You're such a wealth of knowledge on all things Pinterest. This is. I've also taken like a page of notes just listening to you. This is so helpful. I appreciate it. I know you've built this company really from a unique story and a unique standpoint kind of built, you know, something from nothing and also something beautiful that came from a hard point in your life. So I'd love to shift gears and just hear more about you as an entrepreneur and a business owner and kind of share with our audience how this business got started and how it scaled to what it is today.

Yeah, it really started. It started at a kitchen table with a friend of mine, and I had been doing some online work for her, a lot of Facebook work, and even doing blog administrative work. And my husband had lost his job. We were really down in the dumps, like, making nothing. So he was about to lose unemployment, which left us, really with a thousand dollars a month for a family of five. And my kids were little at the time. My son, I think, had just turned 2 or 3. I can't remember, but he was little. And so a friend of mine said to me, you know, why don't you try managing Pinterest pages? Because Facebook had changed their algorithm for the very first time to business pages. And it was a huge, huge shock to the blogger community because they were getting so much traffic from Facebook. And I thought, she is totally nuts. Um, this is never gonna work. And so she just told me to try it. So I tried it and got a couple beta clients. I bought the domain Simple Pin Media and had somebody create just a basic site and thought, well, let's do it. And then realized I really loved learning about Pinterest more than I had in working with Facebook. And Instagram wasn't a player at the time. And so I really just immersed myself in it. And one client led to two, led to four, led to six, and now we have 120 clients. And so it's taken. It's about five years later, actually, to sitting at that table. And just each step has been, okay, the clients are coming. You know, I. I had plans to just keep it a side hustle to stop at 25 clients. And then I hired a business coach, and he was like, let's take it bigger. And I said, okay, well, we're done at 50. And I just kind of kept spiraling from there. And then I started the podcast in 2016, so that's the Simple Pin podcast, and then started a Pinterest community on Facebook. And now that has, like, 13,000 people in it and everything. I hit it at just the right time where I knew people were really curious about how to market on Pinterest for all areas. It seems so confusing to people, and they do want to apply Instagram strategies or Facebook strategies, and it doesn't work, and so they end up feeling frustrated. And one of my gifts is being able to break down something into bite Sized tips that people can implement without feeling overwhelmed. Because I know I feel overwhelmed with business tips that people give me that I just need one action item to say, just do this today. And so that's really how I teach, which is why the podcast has really grown. And then people end up making money on Pinterest and growing their business, and then they come to us and say, all right, I'm ready to hand it off to you. Do so. It's kind of our life cycle inside. Simple Pin.

That's pretty cool. I mean, amazing how one piece at a time makes such a big difference. I love that strategy of making those bite sized pieces. What does it look like, the clients that do work to you, do you guys manage? I mean, do you fully manage their Pinterest accounts? Are you consulting with them on how they can better manage their accounts or what does that look like?

Yeah, we're full management. So basically people come to us because. And this was really, you know, at the beginning, I identified this was people were so overwhelmed with everything they had on their plates. As a business owner, you know, we have millions of things on our plates and we know we need to be doing Instagram and we need to be doing Facebook and we need to do be doing Pinterest, but it keeps falling off the list. And so I wanted to come in and say, I want to take this off your plate and do it so well and communicate with you just enough to where you don't have to worry about it it so that you're not concerned that Pinterest is falling by the wayside, but that we are taking it on. We get to know our clients branding, we get to know all the information we need to know about them, and we basically take it over. And our team strategizes daily. I teach my team more about Pinterest. We don't do anything but Pinterest. So that's really where we keep our focus. And clients are then able to not have to worry about it. They can literally, if they love Instagram and they want to keep focusing on that. We've taken Pinterest off their plate so that they don't have to think about it anymore. We just touch base with them every month. But we do consults as well. There are some people who have teams of people that are already built and existing and all they need is a game plan. So they'll book a consult with us once or twice a year just to touch base to make sure they're still on track. And some people will come to us and Want us to clean up their account or completely overhaul their branding so we do stuff like that. That there are those one time services that people want just because they do have a team. But the people who don't have a team, they hire us.

Man. So many people right now are like amen, take it off my plate. I like it. So I want to know from you though, Kate, because you have this great business that's growing. You are a wife, you're a mom of, you're a mom of three of your own kiddos. Plus you're a foster parent.

Yeah.

So real question is this family life and a business because I'm right in the middle of it, in the thick of it with you. How is it that you've implemented strategies to work smarter and not harder and manage it all?

Oh man. So I think number one is I am also really good at recognizing when I'm not good at something and somebody else is. So when I started Simple Pen, it was just me. I had an experience early on where my daughter was diagnosed with type one and. And that is a very like fast progression illness. Like we were in the hospital and I had these clients and I thought I just need somebody to help be me. And I had a good friend who was so, she had such a great eye for fashion and I had a fashion client and I thought she would be so good and I'm not as good as her. So what if I teach her to do what I do and then she gets to use her gift and all this kind of stuff. And so at each turn as we've grown, as I've added new team members and now having more people in place, I look for those places where I can't do it and I'm not the best at it. So whether it's administration or whether it's systems, it. That is how I kind of build it in there. And then I'm. I also want to protect the time that I do have with my family. So as an entrepreneur it's hard to set hours. And I read an article of someone in the early days and she talked about this idea of hard stops. And she said we all need these hard stops in our day or we will be so stretched thin that we won't. It's like a recalibration when you hard stop. And so I set for myself that I would hard stop when my kids got home from school and that was 2:30 and then I wouldn't do anything business related until they went to bed which over time that actually resulted in I was so tired I didn't even want to work at night. And so it just became a schedule for me. I set was 9 to 2:30, like Monday through Friday and then on Sunday I would plan my week and those became my systems and my hard stops that really allowed me to find this balance between being a mom and My husband is home full time too. He's a part time pastor, but he's home full time. So there's that ability to utilize him to do a lot of things. Now if they were littler and, and you know I would, I would probably end up having to hire a full time nanny, which would be fine. But fortunately they're in school so that 9 to 2:30 works well for me.

Perfect. And you've talked about having a business coach and the importance of having a business coach and a mentor. Where else do you go for your inspiration? Favorite books, favorite podcasts? Where do you fill up?

You know, I love the How I Built this podcast by npr.

I love that one.

Oh, it's my favorite. I was actually listening to the Steve Madden one yesterday and I was so inspired. Well, you know, he asked the question at the end like what amount of your business do you contribute to luck or skill? And I love the answers that the business owners give every time. And I, I love that his was just luck. You know, he's very honest about luck and his mistakes and not choosing to be just a slave to fear. But that one is probably the one I listen to the most when I'm driving around. I don't listen to podcast while I work, work because I find that I can't digest the information. So that's my inspiration podcast. I love, love, love it. And as far as, I guess, tools or anything else in my business, I would say, well, I hired another business coach again actually last month. I've gone seasons with and without, but I have found that at certain areas of my business where I'm ready to scale to the next level because it's new for me and because I've never done it before and because actually there's nobody else in my space. So there's people who do Pinterest management, but there's nobody who has scaled to create a Pinterest agency. And so there's not this person that can kind of watch from afar to get ideas. So I'm kind of blazing my own trail. And that requires, I think, a different, not different, but like an outside perspective to come in and see things I don't see. And so that's why there's there's snippets of time where I'll hire a business coach and then other times where I'll pull back. And the other thing is I love I met Natalie Ekdahl who runs the Biz Chicks community and that has been super helpful. Just a women entrepreneur community. And I attended her conference and I felt that was very encouraging just as being together with women who are starting running, laboring over their own businesses and just needing the championship and encouragement of other women. So I would say those are probably like my three main support systems that I put in to help me not go crazy as I'm growing this business.

So you and I are a lot alike in many ways and I appreciate you saying that. How about books? Do you have favorite books as well?

Oh yes. You know, I have read E Myth was the first book book that I read when I first started growing simple pen and that was amazing. Like that revolutionized my perspective of business and realizing I can't do everything. And then built to sell. That was another really great book that I gleaned a lot of information about really streamlining what I do. And then since then someone gave me Tim Ferriss book, the big giant one. I can't even remember what it is, but it's huge. And it's just little snippets of stories that go along with like health, wealth, wealth and something else. Some other categories. They're little snippets that I do read every once in a while. But I think I've kind of exhausted myself in the business books after I kind of read those few. So now I just kind of read a few other ones. I just the last one I read was Girl wash your face by Rachel Hollis. That one was really good.

Have you listened to her podcast, by the way?

I haven't. I haven't.

So her podcast is wonderful. But let me tell you this secret. So her and her husband Dave do like a couples podcast. Don't listen to it with your kids in the room, but you must listen to it. It's very good. Also very good.

Good. I'm glad to note that because we do listen to podcasts in the car and I don't think their headphones in the back really drown out everything.

No, literally this morning my 8 year old was in the bathroom with me while I was getting ready and I had this podcast on and she was talking about adult things and I was like, oh, earmuffs, earmuffs. Like how do I get out of this situation? This is going to be embarrassing. But still Worth it. Still a good podcast.

Okay, I'll listen to it.

Perfect. Well, final question. I know you said that you like to break things down into bite sized pieces one thing at a time. So for any boutiques who are listening today, if you could give them just one takeaway, one thing that they could go and do today on Pinterest, interest to be better in business tomorrow, what would that be?

I would say number one would be ensure that your Pinterest profile matches your branding and that includes the profile picture, matches your site, your logo, whatever it is, people make that connection right away with the picture. Number two, that it's a business account. That would be first and foremost you need a business account if you're going to be selling anything on Pinterest. And then number three, make sure that your profile name also matches is your business name and then adds a little bit of keywords kind of right behind it about what you do. And then there's a profile description. So you want to make sure that top part of your profile at least that is branded. Well, so that if I pop on today, I know exactly what it is you do.

Perfect. Well Kate, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. We'll have all of your contact information in our show notes so our community can touch base with you if they'd like, follow up with any questions. And they certainly have to follow your blog because there is a ton of good information on there. So thanks for being so open, honest, helpful and really having a heart for small business owners like we do here at the Hub too. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and visit with you today.

You too. Thank you so much.

Hey guys, thanks so much for listening to this episode with Kate all of simplepin Media. I have to tell you, when I first found Kate and went to her website, I took like four pages of notes because her strategies are so simple to use and easy to follow. And I hope that you have a ton of aha moments like I did after hearing this interview. Hey, one more juicy detail I want to drop for you. You won't forget that a couple, a couple weeks ago Pinterest themselves also joined us on this podcast. And one secret that I wanted to share is Pinterest is so kindly creating a whole set of videos just for boutique owners on how to maximize your strategy on Pinterest. And it's going to be available to you exclusively through the Boutique Hubs training library. So if you're a member, head to the training library and look for the announcement about when those videos are going to drop and if you're not a member yet yet, make sure you get inside so that you can check out those videos in the library. Pinterest is not going anywhere guys. This is a strategy that's here to stay and I can't wait to hear what did you learn in this episode, what did you implement and what results did you see? Please feel free to send me a message anytime over on Instagram Jalderson and message me about Pinterest. I honestly want to hear what did you do, what worked and what do you going to continue to do going forward to grow your Pinterest strategy? I can't wait to hear from you guys as always and to hear what you do while you listen to this podcast each and every week until next week. I hope you guys have an awesome one. We'll talk to you soon. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a red rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.

Sa.