Jesse and Richie dive deep into Pinterest and how
Show Notes
- Pinterest as a visual search engine where people find inspiration
- People use Pinterest to find things they aspire to buy
- Pinterest Business Account
- Connect the conversion tag
- Product feeds and catalog tools
- Shoppable Pins
- Organic Presence, Lifestyle photography, Pinterest algorithm
- Advertising Options — Shopping Ads
- Free $100 promotion
Transcript
Jesse: Hello, Richie. How are ya?
Richard: It’s good. It’s Friday. How could we be doing anything? I always feel weird saying that it’s Friday for us. But you’d be listening to this on a Monday, Sunday, Tuesday.
Jesse: No, I think people are waiting for this download to their phone, and it’s Friday. They’re like: Where’s Jesse and Rich? in case we’re late.
Richard: Of course. So ready for their happy hour.
Jesse: Yeah, it’s probably Friday everywhere. Awesome. It’s another good day because we get to talk about one of our favorite platforms today. For listeners out there or viewers, if you’re on video, we talk about a lot of different platforms here, and we do that because I think everybody needs to find the perfect thing for them, right? Like maybe podcasting is perfect for you, or maybe it’s YouTube, maybe it’s Instagram, Facebook, all of the platforms. But I think for everybody, we talk about really wanting to focus in on one when you find the right one for you. And so not to jump to the close here. But I think for Pinterest that might be the perfect one for a lot of people. Rich, I know you’re a Pinterest fan, as well.
Richard: Yeah, I love it. It’s always an interesting hybrid when we’re doing these shows, because we always want to do things that give interesting information for Ecwid users. But at the same time, I want to learn more too. (laughing)
Jesse: I see you got a computer there. There’s a notebook. So yeah, we’ll be taking notes ourselves. There are transcripts. We have the transcripts on ecwid.com/blog/podcast. We don’t actually have to take notes. But yeah, I’m curious for myself, love Pinterest. I think that you get people in the right frame of mind where they don’t know what they want to buy yet. They’re not ready to pick out a certain product, but they’re looking, it’s like a wishlist or a pinboard. For
Mandy: Hi guys. I’m good. How are you?
Jesse: Fantastic.
Richard: Great, thanks.
Jesse: Yeah, as you heard, we’re excited to have you on. We want to pick your brain on all things Pinterest, and we kind of understand what Pinterest is. We’ve had a little bit of Pinterest information on the podcast before, but let’s hear it from the real Pinterest story. What is Pinterest in your mind?
Mandy: Yeah, that’s a great question. And thank you all just so much for having me on. I think this is a really nice opportunity to talk about how businesses of any size and merchants of any size can leverage our platform and leverage Pinterest to reach a new audience. A lot of people use other platforms to achieve things like ROI, et cetera. You can do those same things on Pinterest. So basically how we define the platform is it’s a visual discovery platform and what that means, or a visual search engine, because people are coming through the platform to be inspired. We consider ourselves a home of inspiration. And what is inspiration? I think that’s a difficult word for people to define, but inspiration is you see something, and it brings you joy. It hits that note in your mind of Oh yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Because people don’t always necessarily know how to describe the vision that they have, so our platform, Pinterest, is available for people to really craft and shape their plan. People are coming to the platform when they’re really considering what to do or to buy next.
Jesse: Okay, I heard what to do or what to buy next. And so for
Mandy: Yeah, I think that buy next piece is really important because they don’t know what to buy for dinner. They don’t know what they’re going to cook that night. They don’t know what they’re going to wear to their upcoming holiday party. So they go to Pinterest to search for those things. And people, when they come to Pinterest, they’re searching like one to
Jesse: Great. And you mentioned, pinning to their board, for people that used Pinterest, maybe you can describe that a little bit more? It’s great if you understand, for the people that are like, what the heck is Pinterest?
Mandy: Honestly, the way that I like to describe this is it is a digital bulletin board. Remember back in the day, used to rip out pages of magazines of cool stuff that you wanted to do or create your own vision board, and then you pin it on a bulletin board. You walk by it every day, and you say: Yeah, I’m going to do that. I’m going to buy that. It’s essentially a digital version of that. Our mission is to inspire people to create a life that they love. By giving them a visual platform, a visual board of what to do, it just helps them be reminded daily. And so the boards can be categorized. I have a board for like I said, living room decor. I have a board for pottery; I have a board for art; I have a board for recipes. You can categorize them to frame and organize exactly what you want to do.
Richard: It’s interesting as you were describing that, I not only heard you talking about inspiration and that came out a lot, right? Inspire, inspire. But it’s almost to your comment about the vision board; it’s almost aspirational too. So it’s this thing that they want to aspire to become or one day they will get, and that doesn’t sound like anything like any of the other platforms. That’s what’s happening only right now. And I’m sure there are plenty of people who are enjoying it right now for now and buying stuff right now. But it really sounds like aspirational to this thing you’re looking forward to buying, or in your case, you’re almost building out all the things that you would like your apartment to look like. So when you actually go to move into your apartment, now it’s time to go back to that board, and yeah, you might start clicking and buying.
Mandy: Exactly. Yeah. It is aspirational because we should have dreams, right? We all have dreams. I don’t really think there are other platforms out there that are really very personal, and that’s really why we don’t consider ourselves a social media platform. Social media platforms are really about seeing what others are doing, keeping tabs on your network, seeing where your friends are doing, which is great. But Pinterest is very personal. It’s all about you and improving your life. It’s not necessarily about seeing what others are doing. Yes, you can plan parties together with people on Pinterest if you’re in a group, and you need to design things together, of course. But at the end of the day, it’s really about yourself and making your life the best life. So it’s a very happy place on the internet.
Jesse: There are not many happy places on the internet, so that’s good to hear. Yeah, it’s good. And you generally don’t take a picture of your current living room and post it. You’re like, well, that’s my couch. Here’s my living room. But with that new couch and a new vase and a lamp over there, that’s the vision. And of course for
Mandy: Absolutely. So first and foremost, get a Pinterest business account. It’s free. You can go to pinterest.com and make an account today. I have an account, super easy to do. So first, to do that, and then with our partnership with Ecwid, you can actually get the conversion tag that’s generated from your Pinterest business account and have that really easily put on your site hosted by Ecwid. And that tag is going to allow you to build audiences essentially. So you can track their actions of an ad when they added something to cart or completed a checkout, start to checkout, et cetera. So then you can eventually retarget them later on Pinterest. I would get the business account, get the tag set up, and then let’s get your products on Pinterest. So there’s a couple of ways to do that. If you’re a business, you have tens of thousands of skews. You’re not going to go one by one individually. You can, you definitely can. But for a more automatic and scalable way, we would recommend you take your product feed and then use the Catalogs tool, Catalogs with the capital C. Use our Catalogs tool to automatically push your entire product catalog to Pinterest, where they automatically get generated into product pins. So a product pin essentially takes the image, the description, the categories, all the information you put in the feed, it turns it into a pin, and then you can promote it via a shopping app on Pinterest. So it’s a super seamless way to take it from feed to pin, to take your product for you to make them into inspirational, actual shoppable pins really quickly.
Jesse: So I’m gonna do a little recap for everybody out there because there’s a lot of information. But by the way, I’ve done all this stuff. It’s actually very easy. So business account, yeah, you just say you want to create a business account. When you go to Pinterest, you don’t need to prove your business. You just sign up for a business account. It’s very, very simple — the pixel. So for regular listeners out there, we’re talking about adding the tag, adding the pixel. We always say that because you should always do that. It’s very, very simple that we’ve built the integration into Ecwid for Pinterest. So it’s literally like a clicker too. And you have this tracking pixel, which will track traffic, create audiences. Super easy. Don’t be scared of the word pixel or tracking or tag. It’s very simple — the product feed. There’re product feeds inside of Ecwid. Sometimes that takes one or two shots to make it work and figure out what’s going on there. But don’t let that stop you. It’s very simple.
Mandy: And we have a very easy template. We have a really easy template to follow. You can download it from our help site. It just has all the columns there for you. Some are required, some are optional, super easy to follow.
Jesse: I agree. I don’t want people to get scared by any of those steps. Like those are all pretty easy steps. If you just sit down and focus for like a few minutes, you will, you’ll get this done. You could always hit up Ecwid support, as well. They’re gonna help you, work you through any issues you have or any questions. So but then once you have all this stuff done, now you’re unlocking the power of Pinterest and the different advertising options. And then I think you mentioned too, so these products, all your products are now on Pinterest and available as pins. There’s a lot of stuff you can do organically with that as well. What can you do there?
Mandy: Absolutely. You can have an organic presence and a promoted presence on Pinterest. We recommend you have both because organic presence honestly helps you build trust with the pinner, with the consumer, and then obviously a promoted and paid media presence. It means that you’re able to target specific audiences and help drive home campaign objectives for it. From an organic perspective, we definitely recommend that, first and foremost, the images that you’re uploading for your products align with everyday life decisions. Like what nail polish am I going to wear? What am I gonna cook for dinner tonight? What am I going to wear tomorrow to seasonal moments? What’s my Halloween costume? What’s my holiday party gonna look like? Because when we see that, when pinners see images of people using the product, they’re able to visualize themselves better using it themselves. We really recommend that. And then really use broad search terms and broad keywords when you are uploading your feed. I think I was saying earlier; around 72% of searches on Pinterest just use one to three queries. Really make sure they’re using broad keywords and then frequently if you’re doing this organically, we want to make sure that you are pinning consistently because our algorithm favors fresh content and the more you pin, the more algorithm is able to better learn about what’s working best and who your product is resonating better with. Definitely infrequently for organic.
Jesse: That’s great. Now I’ve got a couple of questions here. I know Rich is probably chomping at the bit here with a couple as well, going to dive into that. But yeah, usually your product pictures, they’re fine, but they’re usually not lifestyle images that you talked about. You mentioned for recipes; when you’re cooking a recipe, this is more of an action photo rather than here’s a picture, a stock of celery. That’s not exciting with a white background and celery.
Mandy: Delicious. (laughing)
Jesse: To describe that a little bit more, so you’re cooking soup, you’re providing lifestyle shots. How can you connect that to
Richard: I’m going to add to this, so pause your answer for a sec. I don’t think he’s saying literally, we know you can just put a link, and it’ll go to a product, but in a way that has a flow, that doesn’t seem like a strange transition. So for example, or actually we have someone, Kent Rawlins, he does like barbecue. He’s cowboy cooking out on the зrairie. But he sells the seasoning. He would be showing a picture of the finished product, but is there a way to have it flow to where it makes sense when they land on a blog post, and then it’s the seasoning, or is it strange to just have it go to the seasoning?
Mandy: Yeah, that’s a great question. No, it’s not strange to have it go to the seasoning. I think what’s really important is first having the pinner understand what you’re trying to promote or what you’re trying to sell within that initial pin. Like you said, just having a photo of a bottle of seasoning. Yeah, sure. That’s going to get the point across. You’re selling seasoning, but in order to get people to resonate with them more and actually get them to purchase a product, have a photo with someone using the seasoning when they put it on a steak and then have the product shot next to it. We also work with a lot of creative partners that can help take your existing creative and optimize it. So we can really drive home that message of what you’re trying to get across to that pinner. Then when they click on the pin, they can be driven directly to your seasoning website to buy the product. You could also have them drive to a blog post. It’s whatever you’re trying to do. I imagine you’re trying to make some sales, so you would drive to the retailer site or your business site to make that purchase.
Jesse: Would that be the example of using the word shoppable pins. I want to repeat that for SEO purposes as well. So the shoppable pin, is that where it can be a lifestyle shot and then there’s the link to the retail store from that?
Mandy: Absolutely. Yeah, because you know, the product image on a white background shot, that’ll do the trick. But if you want better performance, we would really recommend a lifestyle shot. And that’s because we can make any pin shoppable. That’s just going to make it perform better. Our goal is to have every single pin be shoppable. That is the goal because we are the home of shopping inspiration, and we want to make sure that people are going from inspiration to action really, really seamlessly. You can drive directly to the site from that pin.
Richard: I want to go back to something you said there. It was very interesting, and it played into that inspiration and action. Here you are literally taking a picture of shaking the seasoning on it. I like the way that, because you could almost have the finished look still, but it almost has like action in the shot. And I’ve read a lot of stats. I don’t remember them exactly right now, but a lot of them were in restaurants when they’re showing action, like here’s the spoon going in and it’s dripping, and you see the little whatever coming back up or cheese hanging. It seems to inspire people into action even more. But there was something you said; there was another picture next to it. Was that a positioning?
Mandy: Yeah, you can just take the product shots itself and overlay them on the image. If you really want to highlight the actual products you’re selling, you can overlay on the image. You can also do text overlay if you want. If you have a sale or you want to encourage them to shop now or buy now, you can definitely overlay that copy on top of the pin.
Richard: Got it. And do you have an area in Pinterest where it talks about that, where someone could learn more about how they could actually get more creative with that?
Mandy: Of course we are filled with ideas. On our business site, we have our creative best practices and all of our specs for static images and video pins, as well. And we also have a carousel option where you have a few different static tunes in one catalog.
Jesse: That’s cool. That’s great. And now I’m reminded of another question I had from previous. This goes back, when you want to pick your favorite platform; it does require creating content. So you said pin frequently, the algorithm’s gonna like fresh content, of course. And then sort of the tips to people listening. This is another platform where you’re going to need to take pictures. You can’t just turn it on and expect magic to happen. You do need to take the pictures. But these pins live in a long time. A tweet lasts about 15 minutes, and it’s yesterday’s news.
Richard: If you’re lucky.
Jesse: Email, Facebook and Instagram too, they last maybe a day and nobody sees them organically. Every platform has its lifespan of the current content. But with Pinterest, you spend the time to make a pin, and that can live on for years, really. There’s a big advantage in taking the time. You make this lifestyle image and then if you spend a little time making the overlays that Mandy mentioned. You can dress it up a little bit, it will live on a lot longer, and people will repin it, and it just seems to pop back up again even years down the road.
Mandy: Yeah, for sure. And that’s because that’s the way that Pinterest works. Anything that you do in your daily life is going to happen to someone else in their daily life. Everyone’s got to eat, and everyone’s got to cook dinner. Christmas comes up every year. The 4th of July comes up every year. So these seasonal moments in everyday life decisions happen all the time. This content is going to continue to come up and continue to be relevant. So it is definitely worth investing in creative, it’s not like you have to throw a ton of money at this thing. We just want to be clear that the pinner really demands a
Richard: I have a question since a lot of Ecwid users are just getting started, and they might get worried: I gotta be doing this frequently. Is there any advantage to taking the time to do it? Maybe every, I dunno, I’m making a number up. Every 10th pin could potentially be a photo you’ve taken and already pinned prior, or does a clutter up or how does it work?
Mandy: Yeah, you could definitely do that. The platform is available for you to test and optimize and iterates your heart’s content. But we honestly really recommend doing is throwing a bunch of pins out there and then seeing what works over like a two week, four week period, seeing what’s resonating most and take those other pins down that aren’t working right. There’s no reason to keep them up there if they’re not working. We definitely recommend you playing around and putting a bunch of throwing stuff at the wall, and then seeing what sticks and then you can use our targeting or audience targeting or keyword and interest targeting, demographic, geographic targeting, et cetera, to really hone in on the audience that’s performing best with.
Richard: Are they going to actually get SEO value out of this too, with that backlinks to their site from Pinterest and they’re going actually potentially to rank better with those keywords just by using this? They’re actually getting more than just a picture out there on a platform. They’re actually getting SEO value too, it sounds like.
Mandy: Absolutely. We would recommend you use SEO strategies for our platform. People are searching on Pinterest. So there are three ways that a pin can be surfaced. There’s the home feed, search, and related pins, and I can quickly go through those. First and foremost is home feed. This is what shows up when you open up the app or open up the desktop. It’s related to the interests that you tagged when you first signed up for the platform, but also the pins that you’re engaging with currently at that time. If your pin in a lot of pottery stuff, you’re going to see a lot of pottery. If next week you pin a lot of recipes, you’re gonna see a lot of recipes. Search is search, and it’s keyword base. If you type in holiday homes decor and you have, aligned your pins or tag your pins for those keywords, you’re going to show up in those results. And then related pins, it’s really like a recommended pin. You click on a pin, it goes into a closeup, then there’s going to be all these other pins below it that look similar to what the user has clicked on. But it’s not exactly the same. It’s going to recommend them to go to other pins.
Jesse: Wow. Okay. That’s good stuff. For people listening, most of what we talked about here are really all on the organic side. That means put a little time curating, getting your products in there, taking pictures, pinning. That’s all free to you. Essentially we’ve talked all free strategies to help get traffic to get sales to your store. Now we do want to talk, and we want to go dive deeper. What if you want to jumpstart this process, and you want to advertise, what kind of advertising options does Pinterest have specifically for
Mandy: Yeah, great question. The most scalable advertising solution that I would recommend is our shopping ad. Our shopping ads are directly related to the product feeds that you upload via catalogs. When you have a product feed, as we mentioned, you’re putting in a bunch of information in there. The price of your item, is it in stock, what’s the size, the color, the link to it, images, yada, yada. And keywords. And what is the category it falls into. When you push that feed to our platform, we take all of that data, it automatically turns it into a pin. So when you run a shopping ad, you don’t have to do any targeting yourself because we already know the targeting; we know the categories in the interest in the keywords because you already gave it to us in your feed. We do all the work for you, take your feed, turn them into pins, and then you promote them via shopping ad. And we’re going to target it to the right people because we already know what keywords and interests relate to that hat or those gloves or et cetera. That’s a really quick and actionable way to get promoted pins on shopping ads on Pinterest.
Jesse: Awesome. For people listening, we’ll use an example of Kent Rollins again because we’ve already talked about them. With Kent Rollins, let’s say they’ve uploaded their product feed already. They have all the pictures, prices and then like what is it? Cast iron, what do you call those things? Cast iron. Like a
Mandy: It is. And what’s great about our product feeds and catalogs is that they also allow you to organize your products by category. It’s a product group. If you’re a business, you probably have more than one thing. Let’s say I own a retail store, and I sell clothing. I have hats and scarves and skirts and pants and all that good stuff. When I want to run shopping on, I don’t want to promote all of those together necessarily. We help you organize them into categories. I put all hat images together. I put all skirt videos together, et cetera. Then you can smartly and strategically promote your ads.
Jesse: Okay.
Richard: Can you do
Mandy: Absolutely. We have
Jesse: Okay. How about remarketing?
Mandy: Yeah, so again, if you get the Pinterest conversion tag put on your website, this is going to be huge for you. The Pinterest conversion tag, it doesn’t only just show you the actions that people are taking on your site, but on the flip side, will show you conversions from matched users. A user meaning someone that was on Pinterest and saw your ad and then went to your site and took action. Maybe they bought your product or added it to the cart. That conversion tag is going to help you prove out things like your return on investment or whatever campaign goal that you had. And you can remarket that way.
Jesse: Perfect. Good reminder, install the pixel, everybody. It’s very simple. You can do it. You can do remarketing. Great. You can do remarketing now. What about other options? By the way, a little side note, I have advertised on Pinterest. Some of these questions I already know the answer to. But what about
Mandy: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the bulk of what a lot of people do and what a lot of businesses do on Pinterest. We have a whole team here that can help you with the keywords that you should be targeting because you never know what people are searching for when your brand could be relevant. One stat that we have is 97% of the top 1000 searches on Pinterest are unbranded. People are not searching for a specific graham cracker cookie, they’re just looking for s’mores recipes. If you’re on the platform, you would show up without those answers but going on this s’mores cake. We found that this graham cracker company ad index higher for the keyword searches slumber parties and sleepovers, which is adorable because that’s what kids are doing. They have s’mores parties out there at their sleepover. It’s a fun way to think more creatively about your product and how it’s resonating with an audience.
Richard: Did you say 97%?
Mandy: Yes. People are not searching for a specific brand needs. When you mentioned Ken Rawlins, maybe. But like you said, they’re probably searching kitchenware, outdoor camp, fire grill, whatever.
Jesse: Yeah. Actually, what I’m thinking in my mind is that’s almost the complete opposite of this big company named Amazon, where it is super competitive and highly brandable. It’s very hard to compete in that world as a new merchant. The Pinterest world, if you’re talking, these are short phrases they’re not really looking for a brand. You’re hitting them before they’re not ready to buy maybe that moment. It’s a level playing feel, I guess, might be one way to look at it.
Mandy: I think that’s a really good point you’re making versus platforms for specifically what you’re looking for. Pinterest is like a mall. Remember, we all used to go to shopping malls and get inspired when we walk through stores and other shopping malls.
Jesse: I’ve heard of those. (laughing)
Richard: People used to go outside.
Mandy: You go to malls because joyful. You get inspired, you get ideas for what you want to do. Back to school look, etc. And that’s what Pinterest is for. You’re going to the platform to figure out what you want to do. You don’t really have a plan. So you take this journey. You might go here, see that, get inspired, go there, yada, yada, and go through this path that’s ultimately going to lead you to make a purchase, of course. But you don’t necessarily know what that purchase is going to be right off the bat.
Richard: I see it now. Pinterest is going to bring back the layaway model. (laughing)
Jesse: OK.
Richard: I don’t even know what that is. (laughing)
Mandy: When I was growing up, I had toys and my mom’s like: It’s on layaway. I was like: What does that mean? — It’s a rain check. — What does that mean?
Richard: Someday you’ll see it in about nine months. (laughing)
Jesse: That’s a foreign concept right now. You expect it in like two hours right now. It’s times of change. But anyway, Pinterest, we’re bringing it back. So we talked about a lot of several different things. The shopping ads being the kind of a no brainer easy way to go. I know there are all sorts of other advertising options. We don’t have time to talk about the Shop the Look Pins, which I would like to talk about offline for a lot longer.
Mandy: Or you can also find information on our website. Just go to Business.Pinterest.com, search Shop the Look Pins. Easy way to find out how you can get your lifestyle images linked to products for purchase.
Jesse: Awesome. All right. We got a good 30 seconds. How about Lens?
Mandy: Yeah. Lens is super awesome. It’s a camera feature in the search bar of Pinterest. You point the camera at anything. Maybe a
Jesse: Even better. There are all sorts of cool stuff here. If you just get started with the platform and dive in and check out, those are the new things that are going on, and not even that new. There are a lot of cool stuff you can do. If you just get started, how do we get people started? Mandy, can we throw some money there a way to get them going? What do you think?
Mandy: We can! Like a game show, I love it. (laughing)
Richard: Wait, there’s more.
Jesse: What’s behind door number one, Mandy?
Mandy: It’s a way to get started and thanks for listening through this podcast et cetera. We are going to be giving you a $100 promo code that you spend on Pinterest ads. We would just really recommend that you get a Pinterest tag up on your Ecwid site and then put this promo code into your business account and then spend some money on ads. It’s a hundred dollars. The offer is good through December 31. There are limited quantities available, so please use it. I can mention the code now too, probably, I’ll do it.
Jesse: Let’s do it.
Mandy: It’s ECWID100.
Jesse: Awesome. All right, 100 bucks everybody, if you made it through the full podcast, you now have $100 free. Just gotta install the pixel. Do the best. The Pinterest business account. Use the code, it’s awesome. I feel like we should get a commission back, so everybody listening, sending a dollar. (laughing)
Richard: Out of profits.
Jesse: We’ll call it even. (laughing) All right. With that hundred bucks probably start with shopping ads.
Mandy: Get your product catalog up there. It’s super simple because all the product feeds are going to get turned into product pins automatically. It’s a really easy way. Spend some money on shopping ads and see how it performs. Black Friday is coming up. Holidays are coming up, so now is a great time to be getting your products into actionable shoppable pins.
Jesse: Awesome. I think that’s pretty much it. I hope everybody out there is excited. Richie, any last questions here?
Richard: No, I’m good. I’m just looking to start setting this up right now. (laughing) Okay, I’ll wait.
Jesse: Focus. All right, Mandy, I really appreciate you being on the show. Guys, everybody out there listening. Get over on Pinterest, start pinning, free $100.
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