149: The Search Engine That Lasts: Why Pinterest Should Be Part of Your Marketing Plan

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp, and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and evergreen sales funnels. In this podcast, we go deep into product and marketing strategies for digital product creators. We cover everything from digital product creation, how to market and sell your digital products, and just as important, how to find your ideal customer. Let's jump right into our show.

And my special guest today is Kate Hortesky. Kate is a Pinterest strategist and owner of KH Socials, a Pinterest marketing agency for. For bloggers and lifestyle brands. And, Kate, I am super excited to be chatting with you today, honestly, about one of my favorite subjects, which is Pinterest marketing. And we're going to be talking about how to grow your business with Pinterest marketing in 2023. But before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit about you and how you help people?

Hi. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here chatting with you today. So, yeah, I do Pinterest marketing and management for bloggers and lifestyle brands. And I initially, for years I did Instagram and content marketing. But like you, I just absolutely love the Pinterest platform. So I switched over completely to Pinterest about three years ago. And yeah, I've been working with brands on their Pinterest management ever since.

So let's jump right in and kind of set the stage and talk about who is Pinterest right for and what type of businesses should be using Pinterest to. To grow their, you know, grow their brand, grow the reach.

Sure. Yeah. So. So, you know, Pinterest has become really popular lately. So I have people coming to me all the time saying, like, everyone's saying I need to be on Pinterest, but I. I don't really know why or I don't know if it's right for me. So there are a few different factors that you need to look at before you decide if Pinterest is right for you. Um, one of the biggest is if you are online or if you're more of a brick and mortar. So Pinterest works best for online businesses because there isn't really any kind of location targeting people on. There are just generally looking for information, ideas, inspiration. So anyone in the online space, it's a really great fit for. The other big thing that I look at is how much content are you creating. So Pinterest requires a consistent supply of new content. You Know, you can't just have like three blog posts up and continually be posting those. So you want to look at if you are creating or if you have the capacity to create content on a consistent basis. This can be a lot of different things. This can be. If you're a photographer, it's different photo shoots could be YouTube videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, products of your E commerce. But yeah, are you or are you able to consistently put content out to kind of feed the Pinterest machine?

And what would you say what type of content works best? Is it all of those or just fine?

What works best is something that it's really easy for the Pinterest user to say yes to. So one thing that makes Pinterest so great is that all of the searches are unbranded. So people aren't on there, say, searching for Nike sneakers, they're searching for white sneakers. So it's great because people don't need to know you to find your content, but because they don't know you, they're likely, you know, they want something free and easy. You haven't built up that, like, know and trust factor. So you need something that's super easy for them to say yes to. So, like a blog post, a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or even a freebie. Excuse me, but yeah, free content that meets the user where they are in their search journey.

So let's talk about. You know, I've been using Pinterest for many years now. I think I started back maybe in, I can't remember from a business standpoint, maybe 2017, 2018. How has Pinterest changed over the years? And are there things that we may have done years ago that we shouldn't be doing today? Or can you kind of walk us through that?

Sure, yeah. So in terms of how the user is using Pinterest, that hasn't changed. And in terms of the benefits of Pinterest, that hasn't changed either. Primarily, the benefits of Pinterest are to build brand awareness and to drive website traffic. But on the marketing side and the actual strategy side, a fair amount has changed. And I would say the biggest piece of that is the volume of content you're putting out. So if any of your listeners were using Pinterest back in 2017, really prior to 2020, um, we were doing something called looping content. So we would be pinning the same things over and over and over. Um, and you'd be pinning a really high volume, a mix of both your content and other people's content. So when, you know, when you were managing account prior to 2020, you might be pinning up to a hundred pins a day because you could just regurgitate content over and over. But since then, Pinterest has gone more of like a quality over quantity approach. So I recommend, you know, around five to ten pins a day. But it's new, new content. So you're. There's more of an emphasis on fresh content rather than pinning the same thing over and over. And there's much more of an emphasis on posting your own content versus repinning a bunch of content from other people.

Okay. I just want to make sure I'm clear because some of this information is new to me. I haven't kept up with this as much as I. As much as I should have. So what we should be focused on now is quality over quantity. And I think that's, you know, I think all of us are in the background kind of clapping our hands about that.

Yeah.

Did you say we should be focused on pinning five to ten pins per day?

That's the average that I recommend. It's going to depend on how much content you have to share and how much time you want to invest, but that's a general rule of thumb.

Okay, and the other thing that you mentioned that has changed is they really want us posting and linking back to our own content rather than repinning everybody else's content.

Exactly.

Okay. All right. So that's the change. That's a huge change, because I know a few years ago, the tailwind communities were a big thing, and do you recommend people using those anymore or is that kind of gone by the wayside?

So, yeah, tailwind communities and similarly, group boards used to be a really, really effective strategy because like I said, repinning content was a great way to. To grow your account. There are still the occasional clients that I find some group boards work well for entailing communities, but for the most part, I don't spend a lot of time on that. You know, they can be time consuming, and they're really. They're nowhere like, as near effective as they used to be for the most part. So I would put your time more on creating your own content rather than pinning to these communities or these group boards and hoping for that to get your numbers up for you.

So that's some great information. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the customer journey. One of the things you mentioned a few minutes ago is that the searches on Pinterest, you know, from a user perspective, are unbranded. Can you walk us through the customer journey. And if our goal, right, eventually is to sell an online course or a membership or some type of digital product that we have, and that's mainly what the people are listening to this, that's what they're focused on. How should we structure the customer journey when it's coming from Pinterest?

Sure. Yeah. So I think one thing that's really helpful to clarify is the difference between Pinterest and Instagram in terms of how the user is using the platform. And that informs the whole customer journey and customer experience on Pinterest. So if you think about Instagram from a marketing perspective, you're going there to build a relationship with the users you're sharing behind the scenes, you're having conversations and people that are on there, they're following to be engaged, to learn about you. And yeah, it's more, it is a social platform on Pinterest. It's much more about the user. So unlike Instagram, a relationship hasn't already been built. So people are meeting you on Pinterest, usually for the first time. This, the benefit of this is that, you know, you can get your business in front of a whole new audience. So that's really helpful. But what you need to keep in mind in terms of the customer journey is that these people don't know you yet. Like, you haven't built that, like, no trust factor. You haven't built that relationship. So you're meeting the user at the very beginning of their customer journey. So for something like course creation or like a membership program, that that's likely a bigger ticket item. So a user likely won't come to Pinterest, come across your content and instantly sign up for your membership program. So the Pinterest sales funnel is a super important aspect of being successful on your Pinterest marketing strategy. So typically what's going to happen is someone is going to come to Pinterest and say you have a nutrition membership program. Maybe they're searching for healthy recipes, meal prep ideas. They, they have a question that they're looking for a solution for. And this is where your blog content comes in. So you're creating all of this free content that's meeting the user where they are, you know, with a question. They're looking for nutrition tips, whatever it is. And then once you get them to your site, you can start to bring them into your sales funnel. And for something like courses or membership programs, this will typically be getting them onto your email list and then you can nurture them from there towards your membership program. So thinking of the user journey, as they don't know you yet, they need some free content that meets them where they are in their search journey and then kind of like guiding them towards a paid product down the road.

So would you suggest, so if they're searching, like you mentioned, like healthy recipes, would you suggest pinning maybe one of the pins going directly to one of your free gifts and some of the pins going to maybe some blog posts or podcast episodes. And then from there, hopefully like on that blog post you have some either a pop up or some way for them to get on your email list.

Exactly. So if you just think about how you use Pinterest yourself, like, you're probably not going to Pinterest to look for a health coach or like sticking with the nutrition theme or nutrition program you're looking for, like, okay, I want some easy, healthy recipes I can start incorporating. You click over you like what you see and then something pops up that says, you know, looking for more? Here's an ebook with 10 free easy dinner recipes. And then, you know, you sign up for that and then you're kind of like nurtured through their email sequence as you get to know them, you get to, to like, like know and trust them more. And then they can, you can be kind of guided to sign up for something later on. Yeah. So you can link to your freebies, your lead magnets, but that still requires an extra step from them to give their email address, which they might not want to do right off the bat. So prioritizing your content strategy around, super easy to say yes to content that doesn't require anything from the Pinterest user other than just a click to your website.

So let's say that somebody's listening here and they're like, yes, I definitely want to invest in, you know, spending time on Pinterest growing my, you know, Pinterest account so I can, you know, eventually build my brand, you know, expand my brand awareness and drive traffic to my website. How long does it take somebody to really see results from their Pinterest investment?

So Pinterest is a slower moving platform than something like Instagram. So, you know, there's no hard and fast rules for how long it's going to take, but it's a good, you know, three to six months before you can expect to see real, tangible results. That doesn't mean you're not going to see anything right off the bat. But it is a much slower moving platform because Pinterest is a search engine. So just like you wouldn't expect to be on the top ranking spots in Google. In your first month or two of doing your SEO on your website, you likely won't be ranking high on Pinterest for the first few months either. Everything. Sorry, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say. So it's like I thought, you know, a more of a long term game like, kind of like SEO when you're trying to build up your ranking to get to that first page of Google.

Exactly. So Pinterest is a search engine, just like Google. It just happens to be a visual search engine. But what Pinterest is doing, anytime you post something, it's indexing your content and it's trying to understand who you are. So it takes a little while for it to, to understand you. The, the upside of that is once it does understand you, the life cycle of your pins can last years. Like one of my clients, consistently, her top blog Post is from 2016, but it's become so popular on Pinterest that Pinterest sees it as really high value content. So it's continuing to send it out like years later. So whereas an Instagram post might have a life cycle of a couple days, Pinterest can be months and years from one pin driving content. So it's a slower game, but it snowballs once it gets going.

So Kate, before we wrap it up here, do you have any last minute tips for the audience?

I think that a step that is missed a lot, which I have touched on here, is understanding where the Pinterest user is. So you're not just throwing up content. You know, with Otis strategy in place, you really need to think like, why is someone coming to Pinterest, what are they looking for? And what high value free content can I provide for them to meet them where they are in their initial stages and then how can I have a strong funnel in place to keep them coming back for more?

Kate, thank you so much for all of your wonderful tips here today and educating me kind of the changes on Pinterest, that was a great conversation. Can you let the audience know where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.

Absolutely. So you can find me online@kh socials.com and I'm on Instagram@kh.socials. and if you go to my site, I have a free beginner's guide to Pinterest marketing. And I walk you through the eight essential steps to getting your account set up and getting the basis of your strategy in place that you can start pinning and growing your business on Pinterest.

And thank you so much, Kate. I will make sure all of those links are in the show notes so people can click on them and find you.

Thank you so much. It was so great chatting with you.

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