Marketing Strategy Academy with Jen Vazquez

You're Consistent on Pinterest But Still Not Getting Clients: Here Are the 5 Things to Audit Right Now

Jen Vazquez | Pinterest Manager, Marketing Strategist + Brand Photographer Season 9 Episode 331

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0:00 | 21:34

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You're doing everything right on Pinterest. You're consistent, you're showing up, you're posting regularly. But you're still not getting the clients you want, and you're wondering what's wrong.

Here's the truth: it's probably not your effort. It almost always comes down to five specific things that are very fixable. And one of them will surprise you because most people assume it doesn't matter at all.

In this episode, I share my exact Pinterest audit checklist: • Why your profile might be completely invisible in Pinterest search • The audit item that surprises everyone - and it's not what you think • How to tell if your pin titles are working as promises or just labels • The sneaky problem that's quietly bleeding your traffic and conversions • The single metric I check first that tells me if Pinterest will bring you clients

I've audited hundreds of Pinterest accounts as a Pinterest Pioneer, and this is the exact checklist I run on every single one. Most people find at least two or three things they didn't know were broken.

If you want support fixing these issues, I offer Pinterest audits and the Pinfluence Power Clean - a 21-day Pinterest refresh where I personally clean up your foundation.

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SPEAKER_00

You've been consistent. You have been showing up, posting regularly, doing the things, right? And you still are not getting the clients that you want from Pinterest specifically. I want to say something real quick before we get into this. That is not a reflection of your effort. It almost always comes down to five specific things that are very, very fixable. And one of them surprises almost everyone that I talk to because they assume it does not matter. I'm Jen Vasquez of Pinterest Pioneer. Welcome back to Marketing Strategy Academy Podcast, where we help female entrepreneurs go from marketing overwhelm to an easy streamlined strategy and system that includes Pinterest and repurposing content to grow their businesses when they have very little time. I'm your host, Jen Vasquez. Let's jump right into it. This is the exact checklist that I run on every single one. A quick note before we jump into this whole thing. If you would rather have me run this audit on your account instead of doing it yourself, I do offer Pinterest audits and also Pinterest audit strategy calls. I go through your profile, your boards, your PIN strategy, and I give you a specific action plan for what to fix first. The link is in the description, but I'm gonna run through part of it right now so you can go ahead and just take a quick perusal of your account while I'm doing it. So definitely pull up your Pinterest account. Audit item number one: your profile is invisible in search. Open your Pinterest profile and look at your display name, at your bio. Your display name should include your name and a keyword or two, not just your business name. Something like Jen brand photographer for hyper-busy female service providers. That's very specific, but I will say the more specific that you are, the more Pinterest understands who you are and who you serve and will serve that up to the appropriate people. So I think it does pay to be specific. Pinterest indexes that display name as one of its first signals about who you are. Your bio should read like the answer to what do you do, who do you help? But it's written in the way that your ideal client would describe it or specifically type it into at search bar on Pinterest. Not the way that you would introduce yourself at a networking event as an example. Red flag, if your bio says photographer, mama, coffee lover, that is Instagram. This is a search engine. So we want to be very specific as I'm probably gonna mention throughout this entire video. Audit item number two, the surprise. Board descriptions. This is the one that really surprises people. Most people have either no board description at all or board titles named for themselves or like cute names instead of for search. My faves or good eats, if you're talking about food as an example, does absolutely nothing for you. Pinterest marketing tips for female service providers gets indexed. Every board title and every board description is a signal to Pinterest about what your account is all about and also who to show your content to. Obviously, we want our content to go to our ideal client. Now, that doesn't mean that nobody else is going to see your content. It just means that Pinterest is going to get very niche into making sure that your content is seen by the people that you want. This again is why you want to be specific. Another thing that I want to point out here is that the way that Pinterest allows you to create a board is part of the problem because Pinterest doesn't require you to add a board description. It only forces you to create a board title. In order to enter that board description, you have to actually click on that board, click on the three dots on the top right and edit that board. Then you can go in and enter your board description. And as you might guess, you want to make sure that you're adding a full human-red description of that board and what people are going to find on that board. But you want to be using keywords because again, the keywords is the way that Pinterest identifies who you want your content going to. For the board description, two to three sentences per board as an example. Again, you want to enter enough of a description that Pinterest knows who it's for, but not so much that it's just like keyword, comma, keyword, comma, keyword, right? You want it to be human red. And again, the keywords that you're going to use are not just the keywords you think would be good. You're gonna want to do some research and go on to Pinterest and figure out specifically what are the keywords that are shown to you. This is something I'll go over in another video, but it is something that we actively work on in my membership. And this is something that I find every time I do a Pinterest audit, whether it's a paid Pinterest audit or every couple months I'll do a free Pinterest audit for people. I'm gonna put that link down below, but I am doing one this week. So, real quick, if you're watching this and you're like, I want a free Pinterest audit, you want to definitely fill out the form. When I do Pinterest audits, the thing that I find the most that is not done is boards that have no descriptions. This is something I find on almost every Pinterest account that I'm auditing, unless that person has been actively using Pinterest for a while or who has been taught that in the past. And if those fields are empty, Pinterest is working with almost no information. Also, make sure you check your board count. If you have more than 40 boards, it usually means that the account is a little bit scattered and not as defined and specific and niched down to your ideal client. 8 to 20 focused and relevant boards to your business outperform 50 random boards consistently. This is one thing that I want to say in terms of boards or of anything that I talk to you about on this channel. Nothing that I say in terms of numbers like 8 to 20 boards or anything I'm saying like that, take it with a grain of salt. I have a client who has 82 boards and her Pinterest account is over a million and monthly views, but she has thousands of outbound clicks on her account. She's constantly pinning stuff. She pins about eight times a day. Now, for service providers who I specialize in helping, although I do help others, but in terms of service providers, you don't need as many boards, you don't need to be pinning eight times a day. One or two pins is totally okay daily. The problem is that when you have a ton of boards and you're talking about a huge wide variety of things, I'll give you an example. When I first was, well, I started pinning many, many, many years ago, like 2009 to be specific. It used to be that you would have all kinds of boards so that you had content that people can kind of stumble upon. And nowadays that's not really a good strategy. You really want to be detailed and specific. So I will have a board on marketing, but I have a plethora of boards, as you can imagine, on Pinterest. And I have boards on brand photography, right? So I do have sort of a range, but almost every board is going to be really pointing toward what I offer in terms of services. So whatever I say in terms of the numbers, it can be different. And here's the key: if you are struggling at some point in your Pinterest process, looking at all of these items that I've covered or that I'm going to cover will give you an idea of maybe a mistake that you have. So let's say you're sitting with 70 boards and you're struggling with getting the results or the analytics that you want. Sometimes we're going to scale back a little bit. So I will take two boards that are pretty similar, but if I'm not pinning to them consistently, I might want to merge those two boards because there is something to be said for how often a board is pinned to, or rather, how often you pin to that board. So if you're looking, and this is another thing that I cover as well, it's not in my notes for this video, but I think that it's really important. If you have like 70 boards you haven't pinned to in more than six months, that's a problem. Take that board and merge it with whatever board looks most appropriate to merge with. It is important that you have very specific boards for the topics that you have services on so that when you're creating content, there's a place to pin it to. But you don't want to have so many boards that you don't pin to some of them for more than six months. So look at all of your boards. And if you haven't pinned in six months, then consider merging it with another board. Now, there is a sneaky one. It looks completely fine from the outside, but it is quietly bleeding your traffic from your conversions. And I want to show you right after item number three, so stay tuned. Audit item number three. Your pin titles are labels, not promises. Pull up your five most recent pins and read the titles out loud. Do they include a keyword phrase that your ideal client would search on either Google or Pinterest? Do they make a specific promise? Would you actually click them if you saw them while scrolling? Week. My process. Strong. How I plan a brand photo session around your marketing calendar. Do you see the difference between the two? Week tips for coaches. I see that all the time. I really see that board all the time. A stronger board title would be How to Get More Coaching Clients Using Pinterest without posting every day. I mean, I want to click on that. My instinct is to click on that. That's when you know you have a winning title. The title is the first thing the algorithm reads and the first thing a human reads. It has to earn the click before anything else matters. Item number four, the sneaky one. Links. Click the URLs in your five most recent pins and see what actually happens. When you get there, does the page deliver on what you've pinned and what that basic promise is to the pinner? Is there a very clear next step, an opt-in, a booking link, a service page, or does it just go to your home page with no direction? That's not good. Pinterest gets people to your front door. If there is nothing inviting them inside that house, they're gonna leave and you are never gonna know that they were there. And let me tell you, when a person leaves Pinterest and they immediately come back to Pinterest, that's a sign to Pinterest that the content wasn't trustworthy. And they may throttle back on serving that up to other people on Pinterest. Also, check for broken links. This happens so much more than people might think. And it constantly happens after website redesigns and it quietly destroys your credibility with Pinterest's algorithm. I schedule everything through Tailwind, and checking links is built into that workflow, thankfully. It takes 30 seconds and it saves you so much grief and so much time. The link is in the description. The single metric that I check first on every account I audit, this is what tells you whether your Pinterest is actually building toward clients or just accumulating impressions that really never go anywhere. Right after this, audit item number five: the money moment. Monthly views feels like progress. You see it all the time, and it feels like the number you should be chasing. Outbound clicks is what actually becomes clients. Most people are optimizing for the wrong number and wondering why Pinterest is not working. Go into Pinterest Analytics, look at your top performing pins from the last 90 days, sort by outbound clicks, not by impressions, not by saves, the outbound clicks. And that number is people leaving Pinterest and landing on your website. It is the metric most directly connected to leads. Email signups, discovery calls, and clients. Monthly views tells you how many times your PIN has shown up somewhere on the internet. And you could have been five pages down, but it's going to tell you you showed up in a search, meaning that the text overlay on your pin or the pin titles or the pin descriptions are in the search. We need that. So it is an important number, but it is not telling you about gaining clients from it. Outbound clicks tells you how many people cared enough or were curious enough to act. A service provider with 8,000 monthly views and 400 outbound clicks is doing better than one who has 80,000 monthly views and 40 clicks every single time. Now look at what content is generating those links. What topic, what format, what keywords or cluster of keywords are you creating more of those? If you're finding that outbound clicks are all resonating around the same content, dive in deep. Make even more of those pins. Or are you still pinning at random? Or are you still pinning at random? If you have impressions but no clicks, generally speaking, it's probably a packaging or a keyword problem, meaning the design of your pin or the keywords you're using on the pin. Back to items two and three. If you have clicks but no conversions, the destination is the problem. You want to go and work on that landing page or blog or whatever it is to make sure that it has the information on what you're promising on that pin. So if you're promising to teach people five things that are really important for you to audit on your own Pinterest account, and I send you to a page where I'm talking about keywords, there's a disconnect there. So it's either the wrong landing page or the landing page is not telling them high up in that blog at the top of the page exactly what you're promising when they get through that blog. Back to item number four. If you have nothing, consistency or timing, keep going and audit again in 60 days. If you have nothing, it may be a consistency or a timing type of problem. Keep going, keep pinning, and audit again in 60 days. And here's the truth consistent posting without a solid foundation is just creating more of the same result. Fix the foundation first. If you ran through that audit and found more than one or two things that need fixing, the Pinfluence Power Clean is exactly what it was built for. It's a 21-day Pinterest refresh where I personally go into your account, clean up the profile, the boards, the keyword strategy, and get 30 pins scheduled for you so that your foundation is very solid. The link below for a discovery call is in there so that we can chat about what you're looking for. And sometimes people call me and they're doing everything right and they don't actually need to work with me at that moment. Can you do me a favor? I really want to make sure that the information I'm giving is relevant and helpful. So drop your Pinterest URL, your Pinterest account link in the comments, and I will do a very quick spot check on a few accounts this week and share what I find publicly so that everyone learns from it. Again, don't forget to fill out that link below for a free Pinterest audit if you want me to do that this week live on YouTube. You now know what the gaps are in your Pinterest foundation, but here is what I want you to think about before next week. Even a perfect Pinterest strategy can only work as hard as your visuals allow it to. If your images are not stopping the scroll, none of the keyword work really matters. If you are scrambling to find something to post every single week, the strategy never gets momentum. Next week, I am gonna be going deep on exactly what I promised a couple weeks ago. How to plan a brand photography session around your content calendar so you never start from scratch again. How to repurpose brand images on Pinterest and how the right visual library completely changes how easily your whole marketing workflow feels. I'm gonna be talking about this from the perspective of getting professional brand photography photos, or even if you're doing your own shoot. Subscribe so that you catch it. It is gonna be one of the most practical videos that I have made. See you next week.

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