Using Pinterest for Marketing Your Business with Meagan Williamson

Episode 16 of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast

Today on the podcast I want to introduce you to my business bestie and good friend, Meagan Williamson. Meagan is a Pinterest queen and I do not say that lightly. As you probably know, I am not one to fangirl over really anyone in the online space but if you are looking for a true Pinterest guru, Meagan is your go-to girl. 

 

Today we’re going to be talking about all things Pinterest, sustainable business, how to bring leads in via Pinterest so that you don’t have to be marketing constantly on Instagram. Meagan and I actually recorded this interview much earlier this year before the big shifts we’ve now seen in Instagram marketing and the front-facing instant gratification social media marketing. I think this episode is so relevant now as we’ve all been experiencing a bit of social media exhaustion. I also wanted to air it this week because Meagan’s live Pinterest growth challenge—which is a totally free 5-day challenge—starts today. You can sign up anytime this week and get access to all of the replays in her challenge. When I say this is probably one of the best free resources on the internet, I’m not joking. This is really truly excellent. I have my team members go through Meagan’s products all the time. She is our go-to Pinterest person. She knows her stuff, her methodology works, and her program is high quality and high integrity and I could not possibly give you a better recommendation for it. It is truly excellent.

 

Here is the link for her FREE 5-day challenge, and this is her membership (affiliate links).

 

I really want to encourage you to check this out of you’re interested in using Pinterest as a much more massive hands-off way to generate leads for your business and get more eyeballs on your content. Enjoy the interview. Meagan has so much knowledge to share and I’m so excited for you to be able to listen to it.

 

 

Melissa: Hey Meagan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. You are a Pinterest expert, coach, and Pinterest strategist, and you’re here today to talk to all about using the power of Pinterest to grow your business. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your business and how you got to where you are today?

 

Meagan: Thanks for having me. I definitely fall underneath the category of being an accidental entrepreneur. I probably always had it in me, and I think teachers and friends are not surprised that I’m a business owner now, but definitely didn’t intend on becoming a marketing consultant. 10 years ago I was living in Northern Ireland as a Canadian, I could not get a job for the life of me, and I was very bored. I went from having a full career, friendships, all those good things, to relocating to Belfast, Northern Ireland, which isn’t the most open of towns to move to as an immigrant. I had a lot of extra time on my hands so I started blogging. Actually, I recently realized I was probably a VA—or virtual assistant—back when we didn’t use the term VA, but I did it for a woman based out of the US. I was just very tech-savvy, I learned how to code a WordPress website and started using social media as an afterthought to promote my own blog that I had started just to fill my hours. So, I wasn’t just cooking and walking around all day with zero plans. I started blogging, got gigs as a content creator working with brands, moved back to Canada, and was working full time as a school psychologist here in Ontario. Just for a creative outlet, I started working with companies helping them better understand Pinterest, because as a blogger and content creator, it was a natural fit for me and I just love the platform. From there, brands started coming to me saying things like, “We noticed you’re on Pinterest, you seem to really understand it, you have a very large following. Do you think you could help us?” Of course, I had imposter syndrome and wasn’t really sure if I could do it. Before I started working with anyone, I actually asked 10 different business owners, friends, bloggers, service providers, if they’d give me their Pinterest accounts so I could figure out what worked. A system, basically. Then I could feel like I could actually educate and inform other people about how Pinterest could be a wonderful place to generate interest and traffic in your business. I did that just as a side hustle outside of working in the school board. It was always just fun, it was play money, really, from my perspective. I ran workshops, I did one-on-one consulting, then in 2016, I got pregnant with my son Kieran. As I prepared to get ready for mat leave, I took on some extra Pinterest marketing consultancy work to literally buy things like the fancy crib my kid never slept in and all the extra things you think you need when you’re having your first baby.

 

Melissa: Because you want a Pinterest-perfect baby nursery.

 

Meagan: I just thought he was going to be sleeping in there for like, 10 hours a night. What ended up happening is actually very different, and I think some people are surprised by this. I love being a mother but I found motherhood a very hard transition personally. I went from working all day, having a job helping people, to being at home all day with a baby that cried almost every hour of his life and didn’t want to sleep. My husband was super supportive, and around three months in he said, “Meagan, a lot of people ask you for help with the Pinterest stuff, we should make you a website.” When my son was four months old, we threw ourselves into building a website offering Pinterest marketing and management support. That was in May of 2017 and by July my husband had to leave his job because I couldn’t handle caring for a newborn and the amount of work that I was getting. That’s how my business started, and I haven’t looked back. Now my son is four and a half, and that’s how I grew my business.

 

Melissa: I love that story, and I can very much relate to the difficult transition to motherhood. 

 

Meagan: It’s weird because I think when I went to mommy groups, I always felt like I’d say things like, “Isn’t this boring? Like, I love my kid but aren’t you bored?” The other moms would be like, “What? I could just stare at my baby all day.” and I’m like, “I don’t know if it’s just you guys, but mine just cries all day. I’m just trying to keep him happy. I love being a mom, but don’t you think there are other things we could be doing?” I think I was just really intellectually unstimulated, so taking on some clients while my child did sleep, and doing calls in the stroller, that’s one of my favourite stories. I booked one of my biggest clients in a laneway, like rolling Kieran up and down the laneway. I did a discovery call and convinced a huge bridal wedding company to hire me while Kieran was sleeping and I was just like, “Please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up,” and I got the gig and never looked back.

 

Melissa: I love it! You don’t do done-for-you services anymore, right? What do you do now?

 

Meagan: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I’ve definitely gone through all the layers of entrepreneurship. I used to offer Pinterest management and consultancy and as time went on, I really loved management. I loved that I could have an impact on different business owners and help them with Pinterest, but it started to feel like I was being throttled, like I couldn’t help as many people as I wanted to. To be honest, I also think I just outgrew it. I would get really excited with the rush of a new client and then two months in, I’m like, “Ah, there, got him going.” So I don’t do much done-for-you anymore. I do offer strategy consultation, but I don’t take on any management clients. I ran a Pinterest Management Agency which I’ve basically closed down, and now I offer strategy, I coach and mentor other women who want to become Pinterest managers or strategists to grow a successful business that they love, and that doesn’t drain their souls. A lot of people get into social media management and quickly become very overwhelmed by how time-consuming it can be. I did a coaching program and became a business coach, so I help other women that way. I also offer digital products that I support people with—I have a Pinterest marketing membership, and I offer a few smaller digital products so that people can DIY their Pinterest marketing without having to work with me in a one-to-one capacity.

 

Melissa: Amazing! Your products are really good.

 

Meagan: Thank you!

 

Melissa: I’ve used them and really enjoyed them.

 

Meagan: That was a hard shift for me going away from done-for-you. How do you take everything in your consultancy work and bottle it into digital products? I struggled with it for years and finally, I feel like I’ve got this. It’s a transition, though, for sure.

 

Melissa: I think that’s a super common hurdle. That’s what we cover in The Society is sort of getting you to the point where your service business is sustaining you, and then transitioning you, not necessarily away from services because some people like to keep delivering them, but taking all those processes and all that knowledge you’ve accumulated, and turning it into something that can make money for you when you’re not actively working.

 

Meagan: Exactly, I think that too! You reach a threshold in your business where it doesn’t fulfill you in the same way. It does feel as Kieran got older, as we’ve looked at the stages of our life, even as a family, I make a lot of decisions. My husband is almost like a business partner as well because he takes care of our son so that I can work so we make decisions together. I’m definitely the CEO of the family, but it’s sort of like, what’s going to benefit everybody? I felt like late nights doing client work or jumping on client calls all day, it just wasn’t really filling me up in the same way that it used to. People tend to think digital products are so easy, but if you’ve been doing it for a long time, you want to make sure you don’t create something and then just leave people hanging with an underwhelming product that is a very small version of what it’s like to work with you.

 

Melissa: Yeah, agreed.

 

 

Focus on Fresh Content

 

Melissa: What do you want entrepreneurs to know? Most of the people listening to this podcast are service-based entrepreneurs or online business owners that are trying to sell digital products, courses, coaching courses, that kind of stuff. What do you want them to know about Pinterest in 2021?

 

Meagan: It’s funny because I’ve seen Pinterest go through so many changes, and I think it’s often a shiny thing for a lot of people in the online space. As time has gone on, people have had bad experiences or things changing on social media platforms in digital marketing, and they realize it’s in their best interest to diversify their traffic. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, though often we will have success in one place. Whether it’s Pinterest or YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, there is often one place where a strong foundation is built. I think because I kind of started out old school with blogging, and then social media came after, I really value diversifying traffic streams. As entrepreneurs or people in the online space, it’s really important to ask yourself, “What would you do if you didn’t have Instagram tomorrow? What would you do if you didn’t have Pinterest tomorrow, or YouTube or search traffic?” It’s really important that we diversify where our traffic is coming from and how we reach new audiences. Pinterest offers that opportunity because it’s a search engine that not that many business owners are using. What’s really beautiful about it is that the user intent on the platform is that people are in discovery mode. They’re looking for solutions to problems they have, which is very different from other platforms that we might engage in as part of our marketing plan. If you’re creating content for other platforms, it just makes sense. If you have a podcast, if you blog regularly, even if you are sharing the majority of your content to Instagram, think about how you could repurpose it with purpose on another platform so that a new audience could reach you or find you. Looking at 2021 and Pinterest, I think some of the most important things are things that we’ve always known, but it’s even more important. Your content needs to be helpful. It needs to serve your ideal client. Sometimes we get too wrapped up in what we think people need, not what people actually need. So really understand who your person is, what their pain points are, and how your content is going to serve and connect you to them. Remember, it’s a solutions-focused platform, so people are there quietly looking for help and you have to think about how your content can meet them where they’re at, not where you want them to be at. They’re problem aware, not solutions aware, so they’re open to learning who you are but it’s your responsibility to really help them connect with your content. I think that just like all the other platforms, you have to consider your form of engagement and how people are going to learn with you. We know that video is incredibly important. Instagram reels, video pins on Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube, there are so many different formats where we are sort of very impulsive, we love video. Highly engaging content that helps them quickly is going to do really, really well, and that’s true for Pinterest as well. I think just focusing on what we call “fresh content” on the platform. It’s not just a place to throw up something you created for another platform. I want you to come to the platform with purpose, and adapt your content to the people that are there and how they search for what they’re looking for. When you focus on fresh content, and not just recycling the same blog post over and over and over again, you’re going to reach a much wider audience.

 

Melissa: That is a lot. Okay, I’m processing all this information. You know so much. 

 

Meagan: Don’t let your brain fizz out!

 

Melissa: No, it’s all so good.

 

 

The Metrics That Matter

 

Melissa: Okay, so with that in mind, what would you say are some mistakes that you see people making with Pinterest? Pinterest is kind of a longer game, and I also know that there have been some changes in the last six to eight months. A lot of us have seen a downturn in our results from Pinterest, so is that because we’re not keeping up with the preferred type of content? Or are there other mistakes people are making that are affecting their results these days?

 

Meagan: Great question, but it’s kind of a loaded question and I’m going to separate out the two things. One common mistake I see people making is they get really excited about Pinterest, but they don’t actually think about how they have to do any sort of planning for the platform. Pinterest is no different than Instagram, Facebook, your Facebook community, your YouTube videos. You really need to think—and you used the term long game—you need to think about your sales funnel. Even if people are sales funnel allergic, you have to take responsibility as an entrepreneur or business owner for what that customer journey is. People aren’t just going to magically discover you on Pinterest on Monday and buy your product Monday night. That is not what happens, and that doesn’t happen in the real world. Of course, sometimes there are those late-night impulsive buys, but oftentimes those impulsive buys are actually informed. Like if you posted something that you bought and I was like, “What is that item?” You’re like a trusted resource for me, so you’re like, “Well, I bought this, and I got it from there.” And I have a need for that thing. That’s when I’m going to engage in impulsive buying. Otherwise, I generally discover something myself. I look around at different products, I get informed, I see which one suits my budget, which one’s going to fit into my lifestyle. Do they ship to Canada? All those things, and then I buy them.

 

Melissa: Shipping to Canada? The answer is either no, or $100.

 

Meagan: Right? I think that as business owners, we have to take responsibility for guiding our customers in a purposeful and ethical way into our sales funnel, and understanding, “What happens when somebody buys from me? What are those questions they ask themselves? How can I insert myself very naturally as the obvious solution to their problem?” When people come to Pinterest, they’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to throw everything up there and then I’m going to start making sales and making money.” No, no, no, that’s not how it works. It’s not any different. You have to think about how they are going to come back to you. How will they remember who you are, what makes you different, and what unique service or product or education you provide? The biggest mistake I see people making is they don’t really have a sales funnel in place, and they don’t really understand what their people need, and then how to guide them through that customer journey. In terms of what’s been happening in the last eight or nine months on Pinterest, what we’ve seen is some huge algorithm changes that have really impacted people who had some rigid mindsets about what’s working, or how to use the platform content has always been King on Pinterest. Pinterest has always favoured accounts that engage in regular fresh content. What does that mean? I just did a live call this morning where a member from Tailwind, which is an approved scheduler, came and spoke with my community about Tailwind and Pinterest. She reiterated the same thing, that it’s more important than ever to engage in a regular fresh content marketing plan as defined by Pinterest or other social media platforms. That means fresh URLs—like new blog posts, new landing pages for your podcast episodes, or something that is new, not all old blog posts from three years ago. They want to see you contributing new high-quality content on a regular basis. Now we’ve also seen some changes, and it’s like a very philosophical question if they’ve changed how they calculate numbers. They’ve changed how they calculate numbers, and so some people saw a big drop in some of the vanity metrics that are associated with Pinterest marketing, or Pinterest analytics, and so people felt discouraged by that. The way that I look at it, is I just look at the numbers that actually grow my bank account, or my business, email subscribers, purchases, actual traffic that leads Pinterest and comes to my website, and I love personally looking at saves. The way that I look at my blog, or if I had a podcast I’d do the same thing, is that I want people to listen or read or consume my content and think, “This is really helpful. I’m gonna save it for later.” That’s what a save or repin is. It’s a metric that indicates if your content is resonating with them, and is so helpful that they’re going to save it for later, literally, that they’re like bookmarking you. The same way that you might do with an Instagram post that was super helpful and a follower might save your post to refer back to it later. It’s the same concept. I love saves, but people get really caught up in impressions or monthly views.

 

Melissa: Can we talk about this for a second? I’m not even a Pinterest expert and this is a huge pet peeve of mine. About a year ago, I had my VA just pin a bunch of stuff to my Pinterest. We didn’t have a strategy at all. I just had a bunch of content, so I asked her to pin it. Then I did absolutely shit all, nothing. Somehow, I hit a million monthly views, and it again did absolutely shit all for my business, because I hadn’t done anything with it. It looked good, but I was like, “Wow, this literally means nothing, this metric means absolutely nothing.” Unless, as you said, you have the whole sales funnel mapped out behind it. I frequently see people on social media teaching Pinterest or tooting their own horn, trying to establish clout using their monthly views. I think this is really important information for people in any space, whether it’s Pinterest, Instagram, whatever. We need to really evaluate the real worth of the metric that somebody is using to establish themselves as an expert.

 

Meagan: There’s a story a lot of people might remember. Do you remember a year or so ago, there was a woman with millions of followers on Instagram who launched a clothing company?

 

Melissa: The t-shirts! She couldn’t sell any!

 

Meagan: She sold like, $200. She had 2 or 3 million followers, and that was very brag-worthy, but it doesn’t mean there’s a correlation. Remember, correlation means that we can say that there might be a relationship between A and B. Like we see that this morning, it was very grey in my city, so I could say, I think it’s gonna rain. It didn’t mean it was actually going to rain. Yes, usually before the rain comes grey clouds, but then 10 minutes later, all the clouds broke up, and it’s super sunny and beautiful now, so it’s not causation. Through my coaching program, I mentor a lot of starting out or aspiring Pinterest managers, and somebody said to me, “Meagan, I finally did an account audit about what you teach, but I didn’t believe it till I saw it.” The account had monthly impressions of over 10 million. Really, really high. She went in and the account was only getting 10 referrals a day from Pinterest. She assumed when you see 10 million, you’re like, “Oh, they must be killing it with traffic to their website.” No, because the account was inflated by images to other things. So, the story I like to tell people is about this guy who got in touch with me. He said, “Meagan, I have a really hard time converting my Pinterest numbers to actual growth. Can you take a look at things? I have over 10 million views.” I was like, “I don’t care what your views are.” I went to his account. He sells gardening products. These are really important gardening products. He’s based out of the United Kingdom selling gardening products and has a blog about gardening. His Pinterest account was pictures of baby tigers, kittens, and puppies and like, animal babies. A lot of people were engaging with his content because it was other people’s content. From the outside, it looks like this guy is killing it on Pinterest, but he literally was getting no traffic, no sales, no nothing. I was just like, “Oh, dear God, where to even start?” As business owners, it’s really important to remember that your definition of success, or what results in business growth for you personally might be different than your friends. If you are a blogger, influencer, or creator, impressions are important, and I don’t want to undermine or say that they aren’t. Unless your work is directly working with brands who are very wrapped up in your reach, don’t worry about impressions. Worry about the things that move the needle in your business.

 

 

How to Get Started

 

Melissa: What would you suggest would be the first thing that somebody should do? Most of us have a Pinterest account, but it may not even be a business account yet. We have a dusty account full of wedding dresses and brownie recipes and stuff like that. What is the first thing that you suggest somebody should do to optimize their account? What are a couple of steps that they can take?

 

Meagan: I want you to do a few main things. One, switch to a business account. There’s no downside to having a business account. You get access to your numbers, you can verify your website, it’s never been more important to Pinterest that you actually verify and claim your business website. The reason why is because they’re now a lot more stringent about your domain authority and if you’re pinning your own content. On that note, I want you to focus on your own content. We used to have this old 80:20 rule, which meant pinning a lot of other people’s content. We’ve really swung the other way where your own content should be the most important thing on your account. It’s not to say you can’t pin other people’s content. But just remember that your own content should take priority the same way that in your own Instagram feed, it’s going to be your own ideas, your own content, your own pictures, but to your Stories, you share photos from other people to help endorse other people’s products or fans of yours or sister companies, or things that you’ve resonated with, but you wouldn’t necessarily share them to your feed, the same idea. You sprinkle in other people’s ideas. While you’re thinking about your content, I want you to do some content dumping of like, what content buckets do you have? Ask yourself, do you sell physical products? Do you have product listings? Do you have product collections? Do you have a blog as a form of content marketing? Do you use Instagram for your business? You can claim your Instagram account. Do you use YouTube? You can claim your YouTube channel. Do you sell on something like Etsy? I like to get the lay of the land. I teach that in my membership and Pin Potentials. I think we often don’t realize how many content vehicles we potentially have to promote our businesses. My preference is that your content is mostly hosted on your own website, but I understand the reality of 2021 is we often create ideas that might be only for Instagram, or only for YouTube or only for TikTok. I want you to think about how you could take that content and make it work for you on Pinterest. It’s not always about a new idea. Just to give an example, I actually had a call with somebody yesterday, an email marketing expert, and she was like, “Oh, you’ve got this pretty well laid out.” And what I do is I come up with an idea, I do some research. This is another thing people can do. Get onto Pinterest and do some research in your niche or industry or what you want to be known for. What that looks like is entering those keywords. If you’re a sleep expert, I want you to enter in something like, “newborn sleep tips,” “how to get a newborn to sleep,” and I want you to start to learn about the contents out there. Then watch what words are being used to find that content. That’s called guided search. You can also look up things like Pinterest trends, and you could look up “baby sleep” and see what times of the year it’s most popular but I feel like sleep is probably a struggle throughout the year depending on what time of year your baby is born. We know there are seasonal upticks for certain things, like summer baby clothing will probably be trending in the spring. The way I look at it is that I create one idea and cascade it across my channels. Not all at the same time, but I write a blog post, it goes on to my Instagram feed, it goes to my Instagram stories, it becomes pins, and when I have my act together I also make a YouTube video. If I was a podcaster I would also create podcast episodes so that people who want to consume my content in different formats. I adapt it, so what does it look like for my email list? What does it look like as my Instagram post?

 

Melissa: I do the same thing in reverse, so it’s a podcast episode that turns into talking points on Instagram. It’s not on Pinterest yet because I need to get my shit together.

 

Meagan: I joke about that with YouTube though. My graphic designer has been making me beautiful covers for like four months but I have not put out a new YouTube video since December.

 

Melissa: This is truly behind the scenes. We have six-figure businesses and we’re still dropping balls all the time, so don’t worry if you were not getting it all done because nobody is.

 

Meagan: Nobody is! Well, in a perfect world, right? I was thinking last night about something I emailed my list two weeks ago. Then it was a blog post a week ago and then I was going to post it on Instagram last night and I was like, “Man, I am getting back my flow!” because sometimes, life happens. I had a bunch of life stuff happen in the past like, two months and I feel like I’m still recovering from that. I think that you lay out the plan and it’s sitting and ready for you when you’re ready to get back on the horse. When I know I have all these YouTube videos to do, I’m looking at a batch day, and then I’m thinking, “Well, when I’m filming those, can I film some video that will be like Instagram reels and my video pins for Pinterest?” Don’t make everything single-use. You can do things in a way and adapt them for the platform to make it work for you.

 

Melissa: That’s amazing advice. I feel like we could keep talking about this for hours. Thank you so much for your time, this was insanely valuable and I know that everyone is going to get a lot out of it.

 

Megan Williamson is a Pinterest Strategy and Marketing Expert. Check her out at meaganwilliamson.com and give her a follow at @meaganawilliamson.

 

If you want to learn even more about Pinterest, check out her FREE 5-Day Growth Challenge.

Her Pin Potential membership is now open for those who want to grow their business with the untapped potential of Pinterest.

 

 

Action Items

 

A. Your content on Pinterest needs to be helpful and serve your ideal client. You need to understand who your person is, what their pain points are, and how your content is going to serve and connect you to them.

1. 1. Pinterest is a solutions-focused platform. People are there quietly looking for help and you have to think about how your content can meet them where they’re at, not where you want them to be at.
   2. They’re problem aware, not solutions aware, so they’re open to learning who you are but it’s your responsibility to really help them connect with your content.
   3. Consider your form of engagement and how people are going to learn from you. We’ve seen from other platforms (like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, etc) that video is very important and effective. Creating highly engaging content that helps them quickly is going to do well on Pinterest.

 

B. Focus on “fresh content”. Pinterest is not a place to just throw things that you created for other platforms.

1. 1. If you have a podcast, blog, or even share the majority of your content to Instagram, think about how you could repurpose your content with purpose to Pinterest so a new audience can reach you and find you.
   2. Come to the platform with purpose and adapt your content to the people that are there and how they search for what they’re looking for.

 

C. Remember that you need a strategy. You have to take responsibility for guiding your customers in a purposeful and ethical way into your sales funnel.

1. 1. Ask yourself, “What happens when someone buys from me? What are the questions they ask themselves? How can I insert myself very naturally as the obvious solution to their problem?
   2. Consider how your customers are going to come back to you. How will they remember who you are, what makes you different, and what unique service or product or education you provide?

 

D. Don’t get caught up in vanity metrics that actually have no bearing on your success as a business. Pay attention to the numbers that grow your bank account, business, email subscribers, purchases, or actual traffic and leads from Pinterest to your website.

1. 1. An important metric to consider is Saves. This tells you that your content was valuable enough that someone has bookmarked it and saved it to come back to again later.
   2. Unless you are a blogger/influencer/creator and you’re working with brands who are wrapped up in your reach, don’t work about impressions. Worry about the things that move the needle in your business.

 

E. If you’re just getting started, it’s important to first make sure your account is a business account.

1. 1. With a business account, you have access to analytics and you can verify and claim your business website. Pinterest has become more stringent about domain authority if you’re pinning your own content.
   2. Best practices around pinning other people’s content vs. your own content have also changed. Your own content should be the most important thing on your account, and you should prioritize it.
   3. When you’re thinking about your content, consider what kind of content buckets you have. Physical products, product listing, collections, a blog, Instagram, Youtube, Etsy? These are all content vehicles to potentially promote your business.
   4. Consider how you could take that content and make it work for you on Pinterest. It doesn’t always have to be new ideas. They can be repurposed. Don’t make everything single-use.
   5. Start doing some research on the platform. Do some research in your niche or industry using keywords that people might search for and see what comes up in the guided search. Check out Pinterest trends. Filter for seasonal content if that’s applicable to your business. Get to know the platform and the resources available to you.