Hello and welcome to design and business conversations for creatives. I'm Cheyney
and today I'm chatting with you about Pinterest marketing in 2020. I've broken
this video up into four parts. Firstly, I will chat to you about the basics of
Pinterest, go into a little bit of detail about who it's for and how you can use
it for your business. I'll then share my story and how I started on Pinterest
which will then lead into my "strategy" for Pinterest. A strategy, I will say
upfront, which hasn't been necessarily intentional, it has just evolved but it
has paid off and been really great for my creative business so hoping that
whatever I share with you, you can take some nuggets of wisdom and apply it to
your business and hopefully have some success with it too. And lastly I will
share with you some of my favorite tips. Number one, the basics. So what is
Pinterest? Pinterest is essentially a search engine, a little bit like Google.
As a user, you would go onto Pinterest, you would type into the search bar
something that you are interested in that you want to learn more about.
Then Pinterest will return the results that best suit your search. As a business
owner you can use Pinterest for three things. One is to drive traffic to your
website to help sell your products or services.
Number two is to be visible. And number three is to provide inspiration. So who
should use Pinterest? If Pinterest is something that you enjoy using, you
should absolutely be using it for your business no matter what your business is.
Pinterest will work differently depending on your business model but I
do believe that you can introduce it and use it to your advantage no matter what.
Pinterest is particularly useful for anybody that isn't confined by borders,
and what I mean by that is, if you are able to sell your products or your
services globally, you should absolutely be using Pinterest. That isn't to say
that if you are a small business that's selling to a local market that you can't
use Pinterest for your business. If you are a hairdresser and you can only
cut hair for a small radius of people in your area, it doesn't mean that you can't
use Pinterest for your business. You could set up some kind of model where you
encourage your clients to pin to boards the inspiration for their next haircut, or
color, or style. I personally use Pinterest to gain inspiration, but I also
use it to sell my print-on-demand products, so those are my products on my
Redbubble, Etsy, and Society6 sites which I've spoken about in other videos. I use
it for my design business. Not only with my clients so they can pin examples of
say logos they like, or packaging they like, but also I can make up boards for
them saying this is the style in which I'm thinking of using for inspiration.
Through pinning my content I have attracted some international clients
which is awesome. So how can you start? Firstly, you're going to need a Pinterest
account so you're going to need to sign up. And then, I would suggest that you start
pinning other people's content so you can get your head around the platform
and how to use it, and then you're going to want to create a pin and start driving
people back to your website through your pins. Number two, my Pinterest story. I
started on Pinterest way back when it first started. I think I had to be
invited to the platform, and I signed up on my personal account and I used it to
pin images that I like, just like you would on a pin board. Funny that. You
can't see it but behind the camera I have a board where I actually stick
images that I like and essentially Pinterest is exactly the same thing, just
digitally. So I started out with a couple of boards that was probably fashion, home
décor, food, and what I would do is I'd pin images and kind of bookmark sites to go
back to later for inspiration. If you have been following some of my other
videos you might have seen that I have a graphic design business. I'm located
here in New Zealand. This is my second business, my first business was
Camille Co which was luxury soaps and candles.
I took my personal Pinterest and back when I had Camille Co,
I converted it into a business account. I largely used Pinterest for Camille Co to
gain inspiration for the direction of my branding, and my packaging, and my styled
product shots. And I was finding that I would gain most of my inspiration from
Pinterest, and inspiration and stealing are two very different things. That is
something else I will hope to remember to go into later. I have had some images
stolen off Pinterest and that is not okay.
Inspiration and stealing are two different things.
You can be inspired by something without copying it. Back on track.
Camille Co gained a lot of attention through my pins, however it wasn't
necessarily converting to sales. I was driving people back to my website
through these pins. To give you an example, I had some images that I created for my
catalogue that were beautifully styled, mood images, and then I would create a
pin, pin it to Pinterest, link it to my website, and then people would go onto
Pinterest and search 'pretty candle image' and Camille Co images might show up on the
feed and then they might click it and save it to a board, or they would click into
the pin which would direct them to my website. However, if they were pinning
from the States and being driven to my website, that wouldn't convert to sales
to me because I didn't ship to the States.
I used mainly Pinterest in my Camille Co business for inspiration, and also
marketing and business tools and resources. Say you want 20 blog ideas for
your next blog post, you can go into Pinterest and type in '20 blog post ideas'
and it will bring up screeds of information where people have provided
that for you in a simple image and you can gain inspiration, and apply that to
your business. Pinterest for Camille Co was really good
in that sense. I gained a lot of inspiration for the look, but also the
direction of my business and the strategy and the marketing of my business,
without using Pinterest to gain sales. Fast forward, and
I now own Design by Cheyney, which is a freelance graphic design business, and
Pinterest gains me clients and makes me sales. I also still use it for
inspiration, don't get me wrong, and I also encourage my clients to send me
their Pinterest boards when we start a new project so they can put together a
board say they're doing a packaging project they can say, I don't know,
skincare packaging ideas, and they can pin a whole bunch of skincare that they
like and send it to me and it gives me a really good visual basis on the
direction that they would like to take their product. How I use it to drive
sales is, I have print-on-demand websites which I have spoken about in other
videos, and a lot of you here might have print-on-demand so this is applicable to
you. I create pins that link back to those platforms. I am also getting a lot
of international clients through Pinterest by pinning my own content, my
own logos, my own packaging, and linking it back to my own website. How do I know
this, is through my analytics. I love Pinterest. I have always loved Pinterest
and I think to have anything work for you and your business, you do need to
connect with it. If it isn't for you, it isn't for you. I would give it a go and
see if you can get your head around it, but if you're feeling like it's not
connecting, then it isn't gonna work. It's like anything, I always think that you
should put your energy into what you enjoy, because you're gonna get the most
out of it, and people can see when you enjoy something. So, going into my
strategy. This is more of a story than of a how-to because honestly, I know a lot
about Pinterest, but I don't know the most about Pinterest, and I also don't
want to preach that I do because that isn't true. I think sharing my experience
could help. So my strategy isn't so much a strategy, as just something that I fell
into and it worked. Everyday I pin 10 to 20 pins. Pinterest
has an algorithm that will recognize what you enjoy and will put it on your
home page. In the morning, I will go onto Pinterest and repin about 10 to 20 pins
that I enjoy to a multitude of different boards. For example, I have a board that
is packaging, I have one that is food, I have one that is style, I
have a logos board and whatever I see in my feed I basically just pin it and
organize it. If I need some inspiration, I can go to that board, say if I'm working on
a new logo, I can go into my logos board and see everything that I've pinned that
I like, over time, in one place, and it can really help get my creative juices
flowing and inspire me in a direction. So on top of pinning 10 to 20 of other
people's pins, every day or every couple of days, I create my own pins. So
if I'm sharing a logo, I have a preset in Photoshop, I can make the pin at a
certain size, which is 1,000 pixels by 1500 pixels, so that's a vertical pin
which Pinterest favors, then I can link that to my website, post it on Pinterest,
and then anyone that likes or repins that pin will be taken back to my
website if they click on it. For my print-on-demand sites, I'll make a mock-up of
the product on placeit.net, which I've spoken about before and I highly
recommend if you are on print-on-demand sites check it out, even if you're a
designer, it's great for mocking up business cards, packaging etc. I have a
preset saved in my Photoshop where I can upload my Placeit image, crop it to
Pinterest dimensions, upload it to Pinterest, type in the keywords, which is
key, you need to make sure that you have the right keywords in there that is
going to ensure that the user who's looking for that image can find it. For
example, if I'm uploading say a tote bag I will say 'kiwifruit' 'tote bag' 'Society6'
'designed by Cheyney', something that has a lot of information in the title, where
it can be placed high on the ranking, and then I can drive traffic to my
print-on-demand websites by adding in the little website box, rather than
directing people to my website, I can direct people to a custom URL, so my
Society6 store. Now the key for Pinterest, to know it is working, is to check out
the analytics, and not just the Pinterest analytics that are offered to you with a
business account in Pinterest. I have my website on Squarespace, I actually go into
my Squarespace analytics and I can measure the amount of traffic
that is being driven to the site from Pinterest. Not only that, I then have a
further step to test my Pinterest marketing. I have a contact form on my
website that has 'how did you hear about me' with a drop-down menu, and Pinterest
is one of the options, so that I then know, if I'm getting traffic, where it is
coming from. So, often I'll get an international
client email me and I know straight away, if they've contacted me through my email
form, that they've found me through Pinterest. The best advice I have around
this is follow the path. Once you create a pin and upload it to Pinterest,
make sure you track its progress. A couple of things I don't do on Pinterest,
which a lot of people talk about, is use Tailwind or any scheduling tools. My
experience on Pinterest is all organic. I don't have any automation and I think
that's just because I enjoy it. I'm not saying don't use them, by all means, I
know that a lot of people have a lot of success with those tools. I don't know
about rich pins. I have tried to get my head around rich pins, something there
doesn't connect for me. Paid advertising on Pinterest, I have done it about three
times, it didn't work for me, I found it very confusing.
I have pins that are doing a lot better than the three pins that I have actually
paid to promote. So for me, Pinterest is completely free which is great.
It just takes my time, which isn't free. I am a part of a couple of group boards,
and how you discover group boards on Pinterest is, I just Google group boards
and find group boards that are suitable to my niche and my business. The
little circle, in the bottom left corner I believe, is divided up, rather than
having one profile picture, it will have a couple divided, and that's how you can
tell a group board from just a single board. In my Pinterest experience,
I'm pinning about 60% other people's content for my own inspiration, and I pin,
to that 60%, probably 40% which sells my products and services. I recently had a
pin go viral and I actually can't tell you why, how, where, all I can tell you is
that it was super exciting and I woke up one morning checked on a pin and I
tracked its progress over the next couple of days through my analytics
and it had something like 4.2 million impressions. Great. I'll pin the image so you
can see the actual stats, I'm just running off the top of my head but it had a certain
amount of resaves, and then it drove hundreds of people back to my website
and through having that form on my website where I can track Pinterest
clients, I have actually had quite a few people approach me for some design
work from that pin. I can't tell you why that pin went viral
exactly, however I am thinking it's because it was a pin that people, well
people largely repinned it, that's why, but why that pin over any other pin
I'm not quite sure. One thing that I will say, and this, I'm gonna share some tips in
the next part of the video but I'll add a sneaky tip in here, I don't watermark
any of my pins. I think if something has a big watermark in it, people are
unlikely to repin it. However, that has left me really vulnerable, and people
have actually stolen my artwork. I get tip-offs from all over the internet
saying, hey I saw this online I believe it's yours, and someone has taken my
artwork and claimed it as their own, which is not cool, don't do that. It's
actually illegal. It's a funny one, watermarks, because watermarks do protect your
artwork but, in terms of repinning, I think people won't repin your content
as much if it has a watermark in it. However, you do leave yourself open for
copycats. Okay, so lastly I'm going to share some of my tips for you to use
Pinterest in your marketing strategy in 2020 for your creative business. My first
tip is create high quality content and high quality pins. Make sure that they
aren't pixelated, and that they are something that look good, that people are
going to want to repin. There are a number of places you can create pins.
Canva is really great, Placeit is really great, or you can hire a designer or VA
to do these things for you. Next thing, if you have google chrome you can add a
Pinterest extension, which means that if you're on a website and you find
something that you like that you want to add to your Pinterest, there's a little
'Pin it' button in your browser, where you can just pin it and it will be linked to
your Pinterest account, and take you straight there. But pin cohesively, so
anyone on Pinterest can get an idea of your style. Pin 10 to 20 times a day.
Based on my strategy, pin 60% of other people's content and 40% of your own.
Repin your own pins. Repin them to different boards to set them back in
circulation. If you follow group boards, which I recommend that you do, repin them
to group boards so the pin's exposure is exponential. Open a business Pinterest
account so you have access to analytics, and track your analytics. Follow the path.
And whatever you're linking your pins to, follow the analytics on that path as
well. Check out placeit.net, specifically if you're selling print-on-demand
products. And lastly, have fun. If you enjoy it people will feel that. You
can find Design by Cheyney on Pinterest, I will link the URL below. If you liked
this video, give it a thumbs up, comment below, or subscribe by clicking the
button below and hit the notification bell. I am starting to post videos more
regularly, I really appreciate the positive response and I will try and
respond to every comment below. If you have something that you would like me to
hone in on, I'm happy to make more videos, I would like to get your feedback
on what you'd like to hear about. If you have constructive feedback, feel free to
leave it, please be kind, anything hurtful is not gonna be helpful, so keep it
constructive and I will see you next time. Bye.