Hi Urška! Could you please introduce yourself to readers, and briefly share who you are and what you do?
Hi! I’m Urška and I’m a Pinterest marketing strategist specializing in Pinterest marketing for designers and wedding photographers. To translate this somewhat vague title, my job is to help creatives get clients from Pinterest by repurposing your existing content and turn it into evergreen client magnets that promote your business on autopilot.
My primary social platform has always been Instagram, and I think that tends to be the primary platform for a lot of designers. What are some key differences of Pinterest vs Instagram?
That’s definitely true for a lot of small businesses, not just designers. Instagram is an amazing platform because it makes it easy for you to build a relationship with your audience. When someone is reading your posts and watching your stories, they are getting to know you. They can see how you work, the designs that you create, the results that you bring to your clients. All of this is very important because it’s helping you build the know, like and trust factor with your followers, and turn them into potential clients along the way.
Pinterest, on the other hand, is a completely different platform. Something that a lot of people don’t know and understand is the fact that Pinterest is not a social media platform. It’s a search engine. It works in a very different way than Instagram does, and it’s also helping you achieve different things. Think of it this way – if Instagram is the platform that makes it easy for you to build a relationship with your potential clients, then Pinterest is the platform that makes it easy for you to establish that first point of contact between the two of you. Pinterest is sort of that person that makes the first introduction. But why does that matter?
We all know that Instagram reach is down. Hashtags don’t seem to be working anymore, it’s getting harder and harder to get new followers, and even your posts are performing worse than they did 2 years ago even though you now have twice as many followers than you did back then. Pinterest can help you out with that. It can get you & your work in front of thousands of people every day without you even opening the app. I know that it may sound a bit too good to be true, but the magic of Pinterest lies in its content. How? Well, your pins have a very long lifespan. To give you a concrete example: my very first Pinterest management client still gets about 300 people from Pinterest to her website every month, even though there hasn’t been a new pin published to her account in over 18 months.
What about Pinterest vs Facebook, or even TikTok?
Social media in general is getting more and more time-consuming and overwhelming for small business owners. It doesn’t really matter which platform we are talking about – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or something that’s yet to come. Just look at how a good posting strategy looked like a few years ago, and how it looks now. We basically went from posting a single image once a week, to spending hours on content creation. Carousels, Stories, IGTV, now Reels. These platforms keep coming up with new formats and every new one demands more of your time.
On top of that, the lifespan of the content seems to be getting shorter too. An average Instagram post lasts maybe 24 to 48 hours. TikTok is a little bit better because your videos can perform for a week or two, some even longer than that. But overall, this is still a very short amount of time. If you compare that to Pinterest, where your pin can be working for you for 6 months, a year, two years or even more, spending half an hour creating a post that will practically disappear in a matter of days feels like a waste of time.
A lot of my clients come to me and decide to add Pinterest to their marketing strategy because they feel as if they’re stuck on the social media hamster wheel. They feel the pressure of having to “show up” all the time, they are spending hours on social media that they’d rather dedicate to client work, and they are searching for something that can bring them long-term results without having to spend a lot of time on it.
If someone has a personal Pinterest account already, would you recommend they just audit their existing content? Or would it be more strategic for them to start fresh with a brand new Pinterest business account?
If possible, I think it’s better to convert a personal Pinterest account into a business one. From experience I can say that starting a brand new account from scratch takes a little bit longer to see results, purely because your account needs some time to get established. That’s why my first choice would be to clean up your personal account and start using it for your business. Get rid of all the boards that don’t have anything to do with your work (the recipes, the workouts, the outfit inspo) and make it look professional. However, if you’re using your personal Pinterest account a lot for saving all kinds of things, then you can totally start a separate business account from scratch and use that one.
A lot of people initially think of Pinterest for blogging, but that’s a common misconception! For the designer frantically googling “how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website” that doesn’t have a blog – what type of content would you recommend they focus on sharing instead?
Your portfolio! As a designer you have a great advantage here because you already have tons of great visuals to use on Pinterest. The logos, brand boards, website designs, patterns, color palettes, etc. your hard drive is literally filled to the brim with content that you can use to market yourself on Pinterest. Take all of that beautiful work that’s forgotten somewhere inside your computer, dust it off, share it on Pinterest and get it to market your services 24/7.
Analytics are obviously an important part of measuring how well this different content is performing, but vanity metrics can be misleading. For starters, what do impressions mean on Pinterest?
Impressions are a metric that tell you how many people see your content. If your pin has 10.000 impressions, it means that the algorithm showed it 10.000 times to Pinterest users in a specific time frame. Again, if the same pin got 10.000 impressions one month, and then 15.000 impressions the month after that, it means that it got a 50% growth of impressions. The larger the number, the more people have seen your pin.
What data are you specifically looking at when reviewing Pinterest business analytics for your clients, and how does that influence their Pinterest strategy moving forward?
The most important metric for me are the outbound clicks which tell you how many people clicked on a specific pin, and visited my client’s website. Of course impressions and saves (the number of times Pinterest users saved a specific pin to their Pinterest boards) are also great, but the magic is in the clicks. My #1 goal is always to get people to your website, because that’s the place where you can actually convert them. On your website, a Pinterest user can sign up to your mailing list, they can buy a product from your shop, they can check out your services and fill out your contact form. That’s why I’m always focusing on creating content that people will actually click on.
A big reason I held off on Pinterest was due to overwhelm. I already have a busy agenda, and learning a new platform seemed like a huge task! But ultimately I chose to hire you since you specialize in Pinterest for designers. Can you share more about what’s included with your Pinterest management service, and who’s a great fit for this?
Of course! My Pinterest management services are for those who want to start using Pinterest to market their business, but don’t want to do it themselves. If you don’t want to learn how to use another platform, or if you feel like your time is better spent elsewhere, then this could be a great fit for you.
My team and I will create a custom content and posting strategy for you, research targeted keywords to optimize your content, set-up and optimize your account, manage it, prepare your content, optimize it for SEO, schedule it, everything. All you have to do is provide us with the visuals for creating the pins, or you can add that to your package and let us design those too so that you can be completely hands-off.
As a designer, it’s really tough to outsource anything semi design-related! If someone isn’t ready for that just yet, can they still work 1:1 with you to set up their Pinterest business account, or create a custom Pinterest marketing strategy?
For sure! Having a 1:1 Pinterest Strategy Workshop with me is a great place to start because we get to really dive deep into your business, your services, your products (if you have any), and your target audience. Then I’ll take all of that info and create a custom posting and content strategy that works for you, helps you achieve your goals and most importantly, doesn’t overwhelm you.
You can also add the Account Set-up to your 1:1 Strategy Workshop and have my team & I properly set-up your account, take care of all the technical stuff, optimize it for SEO and get it ready for you to take over.
You also recently launched a Pinterest marketing course for designers, copywriters, wedding photographers, marketers, podcasters and other online businesses! Can you tell me more about that?
I created my Grow Your Biz with Pinterest online course because I wanted to share all my knowledge, strategies and systems with small business owners who want to DIY their Pinterest marketing or are not ready to outsource it just yet. I guide you through the entire process step-by-step, from creating a strategy, to setting up your account, content creation, scheduling pins and reading your analytics.
I’ve gotten lots of great feedback from past students who told me that they really liked the course because it is very practical, easy to follow and is full of tips that are specific to their industry. Unlike most of the other Pinterest courses out there that are very broad, I wanted to make sure to give you strategies that work for your business. Through the entire course you can watch me work on a real account of a brand & web designer and I also included lessons specifically for wedding photographers.
At the time of writing this, I’m also planning to open a limited number of spots for new students who will be able to submit their work for review and get personal feedback from me on things like their pin descriptions, profile optimization or pin designs.
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