38: Pinterest Tips and Trends With Alisa Meredith, Tailwind
In this podcast episode, I chat with Alisa Meredith who is the Content Marketing Manager at Tailwind about Pinterest tips and trends.
Are you using Pinterest in your business? Want to know some of the latest trends (e.g. video)? Curious about how SEO works on Pinterest? Wondering if you should focus on YouTube or Pinterest? Interested in learning about Tailwind and how it can help expand your reach?
Specifically, we discuss:
The difference between YouTube and Pinterest and why to consider using both in your content marketing strategy
Using video on Pinterest and how it works
How your prospects search on Pinterest and things to consider when creating your content
Hashtags, call to action and tips for creating an engaging, clickable pin
SEO and how it works on Pinterest (hint: you may change the way you create your pins!)
Why to consider Pinterest ads
Mentioned In This Episode:
Research Pinterest Trends: https://trends.pinterest.com/
Transcript:
Today I have a special guest with me. I have Alisa Meredith and Alisa is the Content Marketing Manager at Tailwind where she gets to indulge her incitement about Pinterest marketing every single day. On a mission to help every marketer embrace the power of Pinterest to build traffic, leads and sales. You'll often find her being very persuasive on Facebook lives and if you watch carefully, you'll probably see a cat or a squirrel in the background.
A Maine native, she is loving the coastal North Carolina coast and now thinks winter means any day under 60 degrees. Alisa, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to chat with you. Thanks for having me. Destini.
So what is the temperature there right now? Oh, Oh man, that's a good question. I should be paying attention to that, but I'm not, I can tell you yesterday was 65 yet and I bought this really cozy sweater a couple of weeks ago within had no chance to wear it.
And yesterday I was wearing it and sweating like crazy, but I didn't care cause I don't think we're going to get winter this year. It's 56 right now. Okay. 56 so that's still cold. Honestly, you know I'm in Atlanta so 50 50 still called us. It is, it's a cold snap. Tomorrow will be 68 Sunday or Saturday will be 71 so you know as it should be.
Well let's jump right in here. So we're going to be talking about Pinterest today and alot of the course creators that are listening here, their goal from Pinterest or whatever content platform they're using is to get that person to click on the content and go to their website so they can convert them to an email subscriber.
So can we talk about that process and number one, why would somebody want to use Pinterest to drive traffic to their website? Yeah, so Pinterest is one of the few networks that actually wants to send traffic to you. So we know that if Facebook and and others, they really want to keep you on the platform, but Pinterest is not like that at all. So basically Pinterest is just a wall of images that link away from their site to yours. So the opportunity
There is huge. There aren't any real recent studies that I've seen, but the most recent there was Pinterest was the number two driver of what they call social traffic. So just behind Facebook and that number came out before the whole Facebook apocalypse thing where they, they dropped people's reach even more.
So, you know, with 320 million monthly active users, 2 billion monthly searches, there's just a lot going on there. And people actually want your content, they want brand content. So we would have seven, 8% of the content on there is from brands and people actually like it.
So, so let me ask you this. So some people who are listening here today, they might be considering, should I focus on Pinterest or should I focus on something else to drive traffic to my website? One of the questions that I always get asked is, should I focus on YouTube or should I focus on Pinterest?
How would you answer that question? Yeah. So that those are two very different networks, right? So YouTube is a lot more social. But I would say why, why not do both? So if you're creating content for YouTube, primarily you're creating a lot of video, you can use video on Pinterest as well.
So just chop it up into maybe,30 seconds, a minute, maybe up to four or five minutes for Pinterest. And just give it a try. So if you're already focusing on YouTube, just just dip your toe in and see how those videos work for you on Pinterest. Obviously Pinterest is a lot heavier in the static image department, so if you have a lot of backlog of content with static images that you can link to this content. Yeah, you really need to take advantage of that on Pinterest.
Tell me, since you mentioned video, I have to ask about it. How is video doing on Pinterest?
Well, it, I don't have a numbers right up in front of me, but it is something that Pinterest is really heavily invested in and they really want people to consume that video on the platform. But it also leads to a lot of clicks. So it is doing well and searches for video content on
Pinterest have been growing tremendously year over year. So I would definitely give it a go. It's one of those things where it, it features, it's very obvious in the feed. So as you're scrolling the videos will auto play in the feed so it catches your eye.
And also sometimes it will appear first in search results because Pinterest really wants people to use video and to see video. So it's one of those kind of early adopter advantages at this point to get video on Pinterest.
So I'm going to keep kinda digging in this a little bit cause this is new to me also. So let's just say that I had like a how to video, you know, you know, for my business it was how to set up a Facebook ad or how to set up a Pinterest ad.
Would that type of video do well on Pinterest or what, is there a specific type of video that we should consider there? Yes, you could definitely do a how to of course you want to make sure that there you leave something for them to click on to go to your site from there. So you could, you could just show, show the basic step by step.
And then say, you know, for more details, click through to my site. Other things that work really well, like the, the brands that are on there, there's some, some alcoholic beverage brand, Stella something or other, they do a really great job in it. There is clearly more for brand awareness than for anything else. So the product features very strongly in the ad. And it's just a beautiful kind of lifestyle ad.
But you don't want to be dependent on the sound, right, because people generally aren't going to turn the sound on. So make sure you use your captions. But yeah, does that answer your question? Yes. That's great. It's, I know now that we're sitting here talking about, I'm like, I've got to go try that some months. You do.
So let's, let's talk about and think about Pinterest as we would using it for a sales funnel, right? So the first thing you know that people we need to focus on, right? I think incredibly far wrong would be the pin.
Is there you have any tips or guidance on how to make that image engaging and what other things should we be thinking about as we create that pin to upload to Pinterest? Yeah, so I think that there's something to think about kind of a step before that because you mentioned funnel.
So yes, I'm thinking about where Pinterest fits in. So 97 to 98% of of the searches that happen on Pinterest and that's where most of the activity happens is in search because it is a visual search and discovery engine. 97, 98% of those searches are unbranded, which means that people on Pinterest are way high up in the funnel and usually don't even know what they want.
Exactly. There's a lot of inspiration that happens on Pinterest, so, so maybe you kind of vaguely know you want to redo your kitchen, but you don't know that you want to buy Benjamin Moore paint or that you want to call her faucet, right? You just have this big idea that there's something I want to do, just help me get started.
And that's where Pinterest is really powerful because you don't have that competition with that brand awareness. Anybody can get found in search on Pinterest. So as far as like the images that convert though, did you, you were gonna say something. Yeah, no, I was just, I was just thinking about it. So, you know, I'm trying to think about it from an online course creator
Standpoint. So let's just say somebody has a course, right? That walks somebody through how to do it. I, you know, for me, I'm about to do my basement. So let's just say they have a course that walks you through how to design or redesign or renovate your basement. What would they need to consider for that sales funnel?
That's a perfect topic. I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing people are going to search on Pinterest. They might search with style also. So there's a new tool out if you go to trends.pinterest.com that will show you search trends and how they are, how they're moving. S
o, unlike yesterday I did a comparison and, and promise you, I'll get back to your question, but this plays into it. I did a comparison of keto and Atkins diet search terms. And it was, it was wild, like, you know, is growing, growing hugely. Spiking Atkins is very flat and very low, which kind of I expected that, but that'd be the kind of thing you would want to search. Like, alright, if I'm talking about my basement redesign, am I gonna talk about a family room or am I going to talk about a recreation room?
Like which term do I want to focus on? So you use your, your trends for that is, it's very, very cool. If you don't see it when you're logged in, log out and try to trends.pinterest.com. It's really, really helpful. But that will help you kind of figure out how to frame it specifically for Pinterest, which will play into how you put your text on your image, what kind of title and description you write and all that good stuff.
Okay. And I will make sure that that link is in the show notes for everybody so they can go and check that out. Yeah.
So in terms of the image itself and what we can continue down this path of thinking about somebody who may have a course that talks about renovation or redesign or designing something like that,
What, what would you suggest they consider in terms of the image and the, maybe the title in there and everything in that pen. Okay, so, so basic stuff as far as taking the image definitely want it to be a professional quality, right? So there are some ugly pictures at work, well on Pinterest, but most of the time no they do. So get your lighting right, your composition right.
Make sure you know everything looks really good and that's just a good jumping off point. You make it somewhere you feel like, yes, I want to live here, I want to be here, I want that to be my house, my life. Because it's such an aspirational platform, you really need to kind of give people the dream but also make it attainable.
Okay. So can I think about that too? They include include hashtags in their pin or does that matter at all? Yes. In your descriptions for sure. Yeah. Is there anything else they need to make sure they include in their description?
Yes. So keywords are super important on Pinterest. You want to think about what keywords, like what could we talked about with trends, so which ones are working on Pinterest and also they need to be related to your content. So Pinterest SEO is pretty, pretty interesting because it's it's really advanced surprise, like surprisingly clever. So they look at the image itself.
So if you have your picture of your basement renovation, they'll pull out things like, Oh, this is a cabinet, this is a Barstool. I don't know what else is in your basement. Yeah, pool table maybe or theater room or anything like that.
Okay. So, so they're actually pulling, they know that, that they're pulling the image I had no idea. Yeah, it's really cool. So they there are, they are assigning those keywords to your pin based on what they see in the image. It's really very interesting.
So knowing that you can, you're going to want to use those same keywords in your title and your description to kind of reinforce to Pinterest, yes, this is what my pin is about so that they can properly categorize it for search. And also because like your home feed a lot of that is just inspiration.
So like if, if they know that in the past I looked at something like how to play pool, they might show me your pin because they picked up that it had a pool table in it because they think, Oh, if she's interested in how to play pool, maybe she wants to buy a pool table or see how it would look in her house.
Yeah. You just have to kinda think of all the implications of, of Pinterest search to, to really set yourself up for the most exposure to the right people. So basically from an SEO standpoint is pulling from the images. It's pulling from all of the words that you have on the pen. Does it pull from your their landing page, let's just say you have the link in there to your blog post, does it go there and pull that information to about once a day or so? It will go to the linked page and it will check out like your title.
It checks out to the the description on your page and the main text itself. So it doesn't, it's not like it has to be word for word exactly the same, but they do want to see consistency across the keywords from your pen to the page itself. And they also look at the boards. You save your pin too.
So if you're, if you're saving your, your basement renovation ideas pin to home remodeling, well that makes sense. But if you save it to gardening ideas, that does not make sense. That can kind of confuse the system, right? So make sure you're just saving two relevant boards that add context to tell Pinterest or this is, this is what this pin is about.
Is there any tips? And that you mentioned the boards made me think of this. Is there any tips or things we need to consider when we are building our boards in our, you know, in our business account?
Yeah. So build your boards in service of the content that you create. So look at all of the content that you have already and think, okay, what would be a good home for, for these kinds of pins. So again, if we're going to go with the basement remodeling ideas we're going to have home remodeling, we're going to have maybe even basement remodeling ideas.
If you have enough content to support that,uyou might go for the style, like let's say, what style are you going for with your basement remodeling? Uwe're looking at more of a farm house type stoke. Perfect. Okay. So farmhouse style decor.
Yeah, so you could have several different boards that would all make sense for that pin. And, and so those are the boards you should create. So if you create a new piece of content and you feel like, Oh, I don't have, I don't have the boards that really set this up to explain what this pin is about, then is trying to create a new board. Okay.
Any other tips related to our boards? I mean I've heard things like you need to have a lot of pins in your boards or what if we're just getting started out? You know, we're just getting started in Pinterest. We need to be concerned with,
Well, years ago what I used to do when setting up a new account is I would create a secret boards, load them up with pins and then set them public so that there was never a a board without at least 20 pins on it. But the fact is people are generally not browsing your profile like they're not looking at your board. So spending time to set up a board cover image is just not a good use of time, spending time arranging the order of your boards.
It really, unless you are very deliberately sending people to your Pinterest profile as a sales tool, that the profile itself, the way it is laid out, doesn't matter that much like the things that matter or are the keywords, the SEO factor. But as far as like a board titles, all that stuff, how many pins are on each board, it doesn't really matter because people are generally finding you in search or in their home feed where they're seeing one pin at a time.
So that makes complete sense to me. So we need to just to make sure that we're, we're focusing on what really matters and it, you know, as we were talking through this you know, so we're, we've talked about the pin how to make it engaging with talking about we spoke, I don't think we've covered that entirely.
Well, we covered is the image itself. So sometimes you're just going to have an image and you're just going to pin that. So that may work for you. In this case, like the, the basement redesign tips someone may say, see that in a search for basement redesigned tips and think, Oh yes, I want that, I'm going to save that.
But a lot of people find that they have to put text on image. So, so a blogger would write or a lot of course creators would have to give that extra context with your text on your image. Another thing to keep in mind is that yes, Pinterest does read that text on your image as well. So while there are some people who can do just fine when no text on image, most of the time you need it, you want it, it's helpful.
So I would suggest testing it and see, see which are more engaging, which get more clicks for you. But that text on image is super important. And just a little beyond that, like a call to action on there. So, so for yours it could be something like, yeah, inspired now. Right.
And that could, that could be just texts. That could look like a button. It could have an arrow. It could, you know, just anything that kind of helps them move along that, that process. And Pinterest did a really cool study about, what leads to certain actions. So adding a call to action on the image and in the description led to 6% higher sales. So it's something you definitely want to experiment with.
So could you give us some more examples of a call to action assuming that, you know, a lot of people listening here, right, are going to be driving somebody to their website and the opt in will be on their website.
Yeah. So you could put something like teach your dog to stay in five minutes. Maybe that's your lead magnet that gets people into your funnel, that gets them to sign up for your dog training course, know whatever it is that you're, that you're trying to teach people.
So your, your pin would probably have a picture of a person and a dog, which is another thing that can build engagement. And then have a, like it would say, teach your dog to stay or yeah, I think go stay in five minutes or less. And then your call to action would be like learn how or get started.
Right. And then in your description you would probably want to say something like, watch the freebie, like sign up to watch the free video or sign up to grab the free download. That's especially important to specify that you have to sign up if you're going to promote that pin.
Perfect. Yeah. So there are several things. So another thing that can really help with things, more sales is keeping your image consistent with your landing page. So a lot of people ask, well wait a minute, if I have like five different pin images for one article, do I have to have all those images visible in my post or on my page?
No, they're just looking more for like a consistency in theme or design. And there's nothing that says you can't try a little experiment every now and then. So, so in general you do want people to feel like, Oh, I clicked on this image of like pesto glasses and I went to a page that sells pastel glasses. That's a good experience.
That leads to more sales. So for the example of a course creator, like if you showed a lady just kind of the classic computer with flower on desks, right?
And in your pin image and then the image on the landing page was like neon flowers. It's off kind of off putting, destroy some of that trust there. Not a great experience. So you do want to keep some consistency there and that can lead to a 13% higher sales, which you know, also translates to things like higher signups. Right.
And you know, we, we talk about this in the terms of sales funnels. I always, you know, mentioned you don't want to lose the scent, so that's a good way to put it. Yeah. another thing that can lead to higher sales to the tune of 20% more, which you know, who doesn't want that is in your images and in your text on images to lean into seasonal events and everyday moments. So that's a fancy way to say, make it applicable for now, for what people are thinking about now.
So the holidays are really an easy example to understand. I think the harder one is when you talk about everyday moment. So what does that mean? So if, if you have a course about like how to dress for success as a millennial today your, your image is going to be seasonal for what people are shopping for now.
Like, and your text on image might be like 10 springtime looks like for the office, something like that, right? So no matter what you do there, you can lean into that seasonality. It's obviously easier if it's like fashion or DIY things that are just super obviously seasonal, but you can instead think about what are people thinking about in general right now? So like right now people might be thinking about health and fitness, they might be thinking about their budget because tax time is coming up.
They'd be thinking about taking like a spring break because people on Pinterest plan early for everything. So what can you do in your opinion itself to appeal to people with that on their minds? And sometimes the best you can do is to go by color. So what I mean by that is I happened to notice over the summer that really bright, like Caribbean colors were doing very well on Pinterest.
And then as soon as fall was starting to come in, I saw more like orangy colors start to do really well on Pinterest. So that's something that works. Parenting with now is even if we don't change the text on the image and it's the same exact content, can you play into what people are thinking about now by just changing even the color of the pin that you're saving at this time? And that's where you can be always be seasonably, even if you're not like obviously seasonal business.
That's very interesting. So Valentine's day is coming up, so probably red, maybe pink hearts, flowers, roses. Yeah, very good. And then one more ad this, I mean probably could apply to courses. So including a price on your pin itself can lead a 28% higher sales.
So what I like about this is that now, especially if you're going to promote your pen as soon as somebody clicks on the pin, you pay. So it used to be that someone would click on your pin and see more details and then click to go to your website and then you'd pay there. Now it is the case that as soon as they click on your pin, they're loading your website underneath it and you've already paid.
So what could happen is if you had a course that was let's say $15,000 you could end up advertising to a lot of people who would never pay that, right? So adding that price on your pan is kind of a way to prequalify people.
So that's, that's very interesting. So what price points have if we're adding the price there, have you seen anything like a $500 course? Might not. I explained to me, I'm trying to understand this a little bit more. Yeah.
So I think it would take some thought to really think about how you'd want to use it for a course at some of the examples I've seen are like every play or other meal planning services where it's like 18 meals for $3 and 33 cents or like fab fit fun, we'll have over $200 worth of goodies for only 39 99. So I, you know, and that's the thing is too, it's kind of risky to put a price on your pin cause what if you change the price and then they get to your site from the old pin. So it's something to think about knowing it can have a huge impact on sales, but think about the tradeoff there too.
Well kind of like about what you're saying is a lot of the course creators who are listening, they also have digital products that they might sell. Maybe it's a trip wire or you know, something that's a little bit lower in that they may up sell to their client. I definitely think that it would be worth kind of testing this from a marketing standpoint for, for some people.
And I have some of these lower price digital products that yeah, I could probably put the price point out there and definitely would be great. Yeah, I think that'll be really smart. And another thing to consider too is if you, if you are trying to directly sell your course from Pinterest and especially from Pinterest ads, that's really tough. Because a lot of times people are just discovering you on Pinterest, which is a great thing. But then again, you know, to try to say to sell a $1,500 course on Pinterest is a, is a tough sell.
So what you might want to do instead is get them on your email list, like figure out what a lead is worth, worth to you, and then nurture them through your email. Yes. And I definitely think that's something that everybody listening here would be, that would be one of their main goals. Okay. let, let me ask you something because I do want to talk about this. I, as you know, we talked about this earlier before we started recording this.
I'm a huge fan of Tailwind. I've used it. I've used it for a while now and it has really helped drive organic traffic to my website that I, I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And I've, you know, this has been through the tailwind tribes and everything. So can you talk a little bit about tell when I'm explaining it a little bit, some of the folks that are listening may not be familiar with it.
Some of them may know what it is, but they've never used it. Can you talk about that a little bit more in some of the benefits of tailwind? Yeah, so tailwind works for Pinterest and for Instagram. So it's basically publishing and some analytics for both platforms. So Pinterest specifically it, it allows you to schedule that is like the number one time saving tool.
So let's say you're creating five different images for this blog post. Or let's say you're creating 12 different blog post images, like one for every month and playing into seasonality. You do not want to keep a spreadsheet where you're trying to figure out which have I pinned and when did I pin it and all that stuff. So as you're batching your content, you're going to batch your images, you're going to batch your, your, your descriptions and titles.
So you're going to want to batch your scheduling as well. And we talked about saving your pin to every relevant board. So one thing you can do with that is let's say you have, you have those 12 images, but a lot of those you want to go to more than one board.
Well you don't want them to go out every single day cause that can look spammy to Pinterest. You want to space them out. So let's say we have this one pin. We know we want it to go to five boards. So I could say, all right, I first wanted to go to the most relevant board because I want to give Pinterest that really strong signal about what my pan is about.
But then maybe a week later I want it to go to this other relevant board. And then a week later to this other one. Again, those are things that you do not want to be managing in spreadsheets and with calendar reminders, just get them all done at once.
And then of course we have tribes, which is where you can find like-minded bloggers to help kind of supplement your content sharing on Pinterest to to keep things active and also you can find some people to partner with. So one of the things that surprised me about tribes and I was already working at tailwind when they came out, but I just wasn't expecting to find so many cool bloggers that I'd never heard of before and they be a ride I have to, I've met. Cool. So that's cool.
And then, then there's smart loop, which can also reshare your content at appropriate interval. So we talked about that seasonality. So if you have a pin that every year at a certain time tends to do really well, you can share it out again so that your new followers may see that in the following tab and other places.
And it's just one of those things that like set it and not, don't worry about it. Like you should go in and look and make sure that your, your pins are still performing. But it just takes a lot of that kind of mindless but annoying and easy to forget work off your plate and we automate it for you.
So you, you talked about looking at the performance of the pins and all of that is until when so you can look at it's pin inspector and you can look at certain dates of when things are pinned and you can clearly see like which instance of that pin brought in a certain number of engagements. So that's pretty cool. The other thing I really like smart loop analytics because it's gonna tell me like overall in all my smart loops, what's my re-pin rate?
So am I getting at least one repin every time I share my pin? And then I can look at each loop itself and say, all right, the average repin rate here is, is two repins every time the pin goes out. But then I'm looking at each individual pin in the loop and I'm seeing that some are like four or five re-pins and some are at maybe like 0.2.
And because I know that, Oh, those 0.2, they're not very engaging. I'm going to take them out or I'm going to make a new image just so that I'm not constantly sharing things that are not engaging to my followers because Pinterest looks at that and determines like how to distribute your content based on the engagement you're getting. Very good. And
I don't want to, we're about to run out of time, but I have one last question for you. Maybe we need to set up another time about this, some more detail, but I know that some people listening here are interested in Pinterest ads, you know, Facebook and Instagram ads continue, you know, the cost per lead continues to ride. Yeah.
When should somebody consider, or when, when do you think they may be ready for Pinterest ads to at least dip their toes in the water? No little part of the reason I say that is because because on December 26, the the competition for Pinterest ads drops like a stone.
So before that you have all the big brands buying up all the inventory. Even if you're not using the same targeting, it's really hard to get the impressions you want for the price you want. So right now, early in the year is the time to try advertising. Don't do like the just promote button. It's kind of like the boost button on Facebook, right? It might work, but you'll have better control if you go into the ad manager. And just do a little simple targeting.
Pinterest is not nearly as overwhelming as Facebook is when it comes to how to target, but I love them because I really like a bargain. And you can still get them on Pinterest depending on what industry you're in and you're targeting. But also when you promote a pin, even after you stop paying for that promotion, you're still getting benefits. S
o if I pay for a pin to be distributed and because of that, I get 10,000 more views than I would have before and I get a thousand re-pins that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Well that thousand re-pins is going to result in more and more clicks, more and more re-pins that I never would have gotten. But I'm after I stopped paying for the ad, I'm not paying for any of that. Like I'm not paying. If you see someone's repin of my promoted pin and you click on it
And that's just amazing to me cause I'm, you know, I work a lot with Facebook and Instagram ads and I have a Pinterest ad running right now for my own personal business and I love Pinterest ads. Something that in 2020 I definitely want to focus on more of them too. Yeah, I mean you have to be there, there review process is getting more and more stringent.
So, you know, just be patient with that. If you get rejected, don't freak out. They'll work with you to help you get it figured out. And don't feel bad. It happens to everybody.
Well, very good. Alisa, any last minute tip, you want to give the course creators listening here today?
Yeah, I think going forward this year especially what you want to think about is fresh content. So Pinterest needs to keep people coming back to the platform and in an engaged and if, if there isn't fresh content, well who's going to come back if it always looks the same?
So when you create fresh content, that's what gets rewarded. And we're seeing that in real life examples. I just create a couple of new pins for the same piece of content and you can breathe new Pinterest life right into it.
And how often should we do that? So I might have like, I have like 52 blog posts if I remember correctly when I didn't the inventory. How often should we go back and repost it?
Pin those. I mean I would suggest rather than straight re-pinning all the time, just like create a new image for it. And maybe if you have 52, we'll just do one a week. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Perfect. And Alisa, thank you so much for joining us today and all the course creators out there. If you have any questions about Facebook or Instagram ads or setting up your online course funnel, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or DM me on Facebook or Instagram.
I hope you enjoy the episode today. I would love for you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.