Ep 52 Transcript: How to Use Pinterest as Your Secret Marketing Engine with Sandra Kokotovic

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon, and I am so excited to have you here. You are going to love today's guest because I am already absolutely enthralled with her. She has so much incredible information to share. Today I'm being joined by Sandra Kokotovic the co-founder and creative director at Snap Advantage. What is Snap Advantage, you might be asking? Well, Sandra is a seasoned fractional CMO.

And so she's got a ton of expertise when it comes to your marketing and your marketing strategies. And she has co-founded Snap Advantage and has pioneered some incredible marketing systems that goes beyond the traditional advertising. I'll be honest, I'm not even going to do her bio justice. So I'm going to let her tell you a little bit about her background and who she is. So Sandra, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Hi, thank you so much for having me here.

I am so impressed by so many of the things that you've done. I will say that before we even hit record, I was already like my mind was being blown by some of the things that you were saying. I'm like, oh, we've got to start. We got to hit record so we can get you talking about some of these things because you have just lived a life. You've done so much in your life. You come at marketing from so many angles because you've got so much experience and expertise in a vast number of industries, which is absolutely like

I mean, I can only imagine how well your clients are benefiting from this. So tell me a little bit about some of your background and some of the things that you're working on. Wow. Thank you so much. My clients better listen to this. Thank you. In one short sentence, you know, 80 % of my personality is being a marketer. The other 10 % is cats and the other 10%, you know, I will leave it for a coffee chat.

But yes, I'm the co-founder and creative director of a boutique marketing agency called SnapAdvantage. I co-founded this eight years ago with my husband. And we work with businesses and brands a lot in the health space and biohacking space to scale to multiple seven and eight figures. So brands that have been having a little bit of success, but maybe they're plateauing a little bit and not sure how to diversify their sales, their traffic, and what else they can add to their marketing repertoire.

And I do this by serving as a fractional CMO. So for anybody that needs a lead in their marketing department, I serve as their lead and that extra juice that I need to scale. And I also have an amazing, amazing team that is ready to deliver if these brands and businesses are lacking an internal team. So everything from email marketing, text marketing, social media content, influencer, and Pinterest.

I think this is so important and just spoiler alert, we're going to be talking a lot about Pinterest today. But before we get to that, I think it's so interesting how you talk about the CMO aspect of things that lead in marketing, because I think that, you know, I see it all the time with my clients. I see it with so many entrepreneurs where they're like, I just need a social media person. I'm just going to hire like the person down the street. Their kid does really well on social media. They know things, but they're not a marketer and.

really what you need is a solid marketing strategy and you need someone to lead that. That is so much more important than the person who's actually executing it. Because if you don't have that leadership, if the person who's running the company isn't a marketer themselves, then the direction that the marketer, the person who's posting on social or whatever is going to get is not going to follow a strategy that's going to actually see any success. You're gonna end up just spending a whole bunch of money and yeah, you might get some posts out.

And of course it depends on like, what is your objective? Is it to get awareness? Is it to actually convert sales? Like what is it that people are working on? So when you have someone who can lead that, and I think that is what there's so much noise in the marketing world today, but what we're lacking in is that structure and that leadership in the marketing sector for each individual business, because I don't think businesses understand the value and importance of it enough.

Honestly, I don't think I could have explained it better myself. And look, I get it where businesses are coming from to hire the niece, the nephew, you know, they can do my website, I can do my TikTok, I can do my Instagram. And that's perfect. If you're just starting out, you don't even know your market yet. You don't have an offer, a proven concept yet. And at that point, maybe you don't want to spend money on getting someone, you know, at the cost of a CMO to run your department if there is no department.

when brands and businesses that just get started, in my opinion, the first thing they need to do is sales, right? So I didn't even have a website until I made my first 10K recurring per month because that's what Srdjan who was my business partner and now husband, said to me, he said, you don't need a website. You need to pick up the phone and call. You need to email. You need to do video prospecting and you need to find yourself some prospects, have those conversations and then see what services you can offer. Once you've gathered that information, once people start paying you money for different services,

then you can craft your website, but a website is going to be a distraction. So I get it when brands and businesses don't want to invest in marketing department. However, I don't get it when you are so stubborn and you know you need a help and you don't want the help because I can do a better, I have time to do it. My niece can do TikTok and I've actually had several, I think three or four clients in the past few years that say, you know what, my

sister, my niece, my somebody just graduated university or college and they want to get their hands on experience in marketing and we're going to do the social media. And we were fired as an agency and then we came back after a year or two because exactly what you said, there's no strategy. Now where a fractional CMO can really come in is when you don't have the budget or you don't need a full-time CMO, right? Because a full-time CMO can take

a huge hit on the budget and a lot of the times if you don't have the, if you don't have, you know, if your bootstrapping is really hard, if you don't have investment funds, it's really tough. And a lot of the times you don't need a full time CMO. Frankly, I've worked with businesses at 15 to 20 mill a year that did not have a CMO. They did not need one. They had the president, the CEO, and I worked as a fractional CMO for them.

But if you need someone to, you know, again, scale and put a team together for your put, even VAs or contractors together, or even work with your internal team to mobilize them a little bit better and create that plan of action. That's when you want to start to have a little bit of a marketing strategy and a strategist on your team so that when you're ready to pull the trigger on scaling, you're ready to do it.

so perfectly said. was thank you for, yeah, you just basically added on to everything that I said and just filled it in with your own personal touch. So, so true everything that you just said there. And, you know, it's not to say that you can't get some traction and get some test out the market, test out what's what's working, what's not working with that niece, daughter, sister-in-law, whatever.

And honestly, I've actually seen some people like those people are incredibly talented. You know what they are actually able to come up with a marketing strategy. So I don't want to say that like I don't want to be dismissive about that at all. And at the same time, it's important to understand what your brand needs. And at the end of the day, someone needs to be driving that bus. And so if you as the CEO are unable to effectively communicate what it is that your brand needs to communicate, who your ideal client is, that's when bringing that CMO to help you to at least

establish that strategy and then create a plan for moving forward. So thank you. That's so I do want to get to the topic at hand though, because you and I had some again, some pre conversations and we really connected on the particular topic of Pinterest, which I can almost hear as people are listening, they're going to be like, is Pinterest still a thing? And because I get that question sometimes when I tell people this and what people often find shocking and you can fact check me on this.

because I'm not sure how accurate I am on this, but the last time I remember looking it up, Pinterest was the second largest search engine next to Google. Does that still hold true? I know it's up there. I don't know that still holds true. It's very tied up with Facebook, actually. But yes, it's second or third. It is Pinterest. And this surprises people all the time. So I will often be working with clients and I will say to them, well, what's your Pinterest strategy? They're like, Pinterest? What do mean? I'm like, are you not on Pinterest? And so...

A lot of my clients are interior designers, home-stagers. And I mean, if you're in that world, you gotta be on Pinterest. And I mean, I can tell you till I'm blue in the face, but I wanted to bring Sandra on here, not just to talk about why you need to be on Pinterest, but help you to kind of dip your toe into it a little bit. Like Pinterest, think the biggest challenge, I'll admit my Pinterest game is not top-notch right now. It can be a bit to navigate, but the

results are incredible and so much better than like, see so many of my clients are like, well, I paid to like boost this social media post on Instagram and I paid a hundred bucks to do and it didn't do anything like, yeah, cause that's not where your audience necessarily is. So it depends on your audience. There's a lot of factors that go into this, but where should we even start with Pinterest? Why don't we, maybe we talk about like, what are some misconceptions? Cause we've already kind of talked.

I think we've kind of touched on that where people are like, what? Pinterest is still living. What are some misconceptions you would say about Pinterest? There's a lot of misconceptions about Pinterest. know, like I love Pinterest. Look, I'm organizing myself a birthday party, a garden themed birthday party. I'm using Pinterest for that. So if you're sitting there and thinking, yeah, that's what Pinterest is for.

Although you don't care about my birthday party, you're completely wrong. I care about your birthday party, just to be clear. I'd like an invite. I'll send you photos from it. But that is the first misconception that comes to mind is that people think Pinterest is for the pin girlies that are organizing an event or maybe they want to renovate their house and there's no real traction there with customers. That is the first misconception. But if I told you that you as a brand, as a business, as a interior designer consultant,

service provider that you can double or triple your traffic to their website in the next 12 months just with Pinterest, would you believe me? If I told you that you can add an extra 20, 30 % of revenue this quarter just with Pinterest, would you believe me? If I told you that you as a brand, you have the power to bring on people for free to your website, to your content, to your email list, it may sound like almost too good to be true, but it is true.

Pinterest, again, it is not just for, you know, the girlies that want to do their birthday party in the garden theme. First misconception. Second misconception is that Pinterest is a social media platform. Pinterest is not a social media platform. Pinterest is actually a search engine. So Pinterest is closer to your Google as a search engine. It's closer to YouTube or Bing than it is to Instagram or TikTok, for instance.

Now, Pinterest from a user experience does look a lot like a social media platform, right? So I'm going on my Pinterest and I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm looking for the flower decor and the flower backdrop for my garden party. So it looks like a social media platform has an engaging element, but from a brand perspective, if you are using it as a social media platform, that's where a lot of the frustration comes in and that's where the lack of results come in because

you're thinking that Pinterest needs to be used like Instagram or like TikTok or even like Facebook when in fact Pinterest needs to be used a lot more like your blogging or your YouTube. So if you have a strategy for your SEO content for YouTube or for your blog, then I would say take the same strategy and transfer it over to Pinterest and that's where your start is going to be. I do want to talk about a third misconception.

which is that Pinterest is only for big brands and big companies that have a big budget. Look, 80 % of the traffic on Pinterest is unbranded. People are not looking for a Eritrea or Lululemon leggings necessarily. People are looking for leggings. Yes, they are looking for those branded keywords because as a big company like Lululemon, for instance, you have done so much to optimize your SEO. You've spent so much money, but more people will look for

black leggings, comfortable leggings, natural dye leggings, then they will be looking for Lululemon leggings. So where you can win as a smaller service provider or a business is by just having amazing content that you can create with your own internal team, even if it's the niece or the nephew that can write for you, or use the help of AI. And you don't need those big brands names or big brands budgets to rank on Pinterest.

like so much there that I just want to like dig into. But those are some three solid misconceptions. I know for myself, for the interior design business and the home staging business that I operated before that, one of the things that this is why I say like my game's a little bit off. But one of the things that I I generally have when I create a blog, I have like my to do list for it. And for anyone who doesn't know me, you might not realize I am massively systems and processes oriented. So I create a template for everything. So if I'm going to create a blog,

I want to make sure I've got that checklist of all the little tasks that I need to do. So of course, I've got to create the draft for it. I've got to find my images for it. I've got to post it up onto my website. I've got to, you know, SEO optimize it, making sure my meta tags and categories and everything are all sorted out on there. And then I've got to make sure that it's getting shared on my social media. It's getting e-blasted out to my clients. And we generally will create an infographic, usually an infographic. not always an infographic, but usually an infographic for Pinterest, for that blog that links

back to that blog. And this is where I will admit I've gotten a little laxed on creating those infographics for the last few blogs because I just get so excited to get them out on the to-do list and kind of keeps getting. like when you're talking about increasing revenues by 20, 30 percent in the next quarter, I'm like, yeah, no, like I should be doing that. Absolutely. I should be doing that. And also, like it's not just for interior designers and home stage or like even for my coaching business.

I have so many great blogs that I know would perform so well on Pinterest as well. And so I think that's probably where people get a little bit hung up though is, okay, so they've got, they don't have Lululemon leggings, but let's say they've got leggings or let's say they've got a service based business. what is it? I think that's where they get stuck. Like, well, what do I put on Pinterest? Like, am I, are you pinning somebody else's stuff? Are you...

posting your own boards, how do you organize them? Can we give kind of like a Pinterest 101 for getting started? Yeah, absolutely. So let's say you have a business, whether it's a service business or a e-commerce business, it doesn't matter. Your business has, when you're thinking about your funnel, right? Every business should have a funnel. You're looking at your traffic and customer and lead acquisition. Then you're looking at a

landing page, whether that's your website, it's your booking schedule, it's sorry, it's your booking system, it's your download this guide, it doesn't matter. It is your lead capture or even your actual conversion where people are buying. And then it is keeping them in your system, which would be like your email list, for instance, right? So when you're looking at your funnel, that is your machine for making money as a business, right? Now, in order to get people from hold traffic,

people that know, don't know you into your lead capture or your website or your booking system. You need to basically, you need to drive traffic, right? So a lot of times when I'm thinking about driving traffic, we're thinking about ads, which is a great starting point. We're thinking SEO, we're thinking email marketing, word of mouth, cold calling, cold emailing, whatever it is. So the first thing that I want you to think about, if you're just getting started with Pinterest is Pinterest is a traffic source. So Pinterest, is.

Pinterest is not your landing page. It is not your lead capture. It is part of the lead capture. But Pinterest is not the destination. Pinterest is the traffic. It's the vehicle to bring people to the destination. So when you are creating pins, one thing that I want you to keep in mind is you don't want to keep people on Pinterest. Different with TikTok, different with social media in general, different with Instagram. Pinterest is just the traffic. It's the bridge that...

takes those cold, cold audiences and brings them to your landing page. So Pinterest 101, first thing you're thinking about is, okay, Pinterest is a traffic vehicle. So what do need to do in order to bring this traffic back to my website, to my landing page? What are the elements? I told you that Pinterest is a search engine and I told you that 80 % of the traffic that comes on Pinterest is for unbranded searches. people are searching, let's say you have a, you said that you're working a lot with the,

design industry. So let's say you have a design firm and you were looking for more clients to engage you in a design project. So what kind of information would that person need to research or to search up in order to land on your pins, right? Will it be a specific type of furniture? Maybe it is. Would it be a specific type of style? Would it be a how-to? Would it be a checklist? It can be all of those things, but because the searches on Pinterest are unbranded,

People are going, they're not looking for a specific brand, they're looking for a solution. They're looking for inspiration, they're looking for a solution to, you know, buying the right product, buying the cheapest product, buying the most expensive products, they're looking for leather, they're looking for fur, they're looking for different colors. So all of that information needs to be contained in your pin. So you're thinking, okay, what do my audience, what does my audience need to search for in order to reach my content, right? So that will be your second step. Now.

The third step would be what do do now to get people from that pin to my website, right? So I'm thinking about this Pinterest is my traffic. Okay, so I kind of know what people are going to look for. They're going to look for the absolute best tan leather chair. So I'm going to create a ton of pins, a ton of you talked about articles earlier. That's the best kind of Pinterest content is having a blog post. I would say create five to 10 pins from the blog article.

and then link back to the blog article. Now people are seeing my pin. What do do now in order to get them to my website? Well, you want to peak their curiosity, but you don't want to give it all away. So you want to say, okay, so if you are living under a rock in 2025 and you don't know what the 10 best types of chairs that your clients can have, well, this is where it can get started. So you you start with one or two, but then you want to have a link to your blog article so that people can come on your website.

And of course, once people come on your website, you want to capture those leads. So that's going back to your email capture, text capture, appointment setting, whatever your conversion looks like. So that is the journey of getting started with Pinterest. Now, in terms of the technical situation, I do not like anything technical online. That is all my team, but I will try to explain this as easy as possible. I'm more of a strategy person. When it comes to technicalities of it, look at SEO technicalities. So you talked about meta tags.

So even something as simple as naming your pin with keywords. So by the way, Pinterest has a very good keyword extraction. I'll call it like an extraction feature where if you go and pretend you are running a Pinterest ad, it will give you the option to look at keywords and a volume of keywords per month. So you want to make sure that you are looking at keywords that have some sort of a volume. If you're a very local business, then it's okay to have like a couple thousand words volume because chances are you are going to write

rank for it. But if you're going a little bit more statewide or nationwide, then you want to go at least 50,000, 100,000 and up. So gather all your Pinterest keywords, just like you would gather them with, let's say Google Keyword Planner. You can use that too. You can use Answer the Public, another great of- Love Answer the Public. Yeah. For anyone who is not familiar, just one moment here, AnswerThePublic.com. If you are not sure what to write a blog about,

go to answerthepublic.com and it will tell you. Yes, and Neil Patel is like the granddaddy of SEO. anything that means this, I'm gonna listen to him when comes to SEO. yes. So use your keywords like you would in a blog and enter those keywords in your photo naming or video naming in your description without keyword stuffing in your title. And that would be like a perfect, you know, first go at Pinterest.

Again, same thing as SEO rules, don't keyword stuff, don't make sense with it. You're not adding 20 keywords for a 40-word paragraph, but have those elements that will crank. Other than that, would say articles are amazing. Article pins, they will rank better than just regular pins. Regular pins are great.

If you have a team, you have time, you can pin a lot, but article pins, what I would suggest is if you can do one or two articles, and we have AI tools right now, one or two articles a week, and then you do five to 10 pins per article, you post that pin on Pinterest, make sure that your pin is linked to that article and not just your website. I would say if you're doing no Pinterest right now, you will see a lot of improvement in as little as, honestly, two to four weeks.

Pinterest. That's a good turnaround too. that's, I think so. Going back to where this is not a social media platform, no social media platform is going to give you that kind of traction. No. And if you do those idea pins, which are kind of like the equivalent of, of stories on Instagram, you will see traction right away. One other thing that I wanted to add was Pinterest really rewards the real user engagement. So they do not like automated platforms a lot.

they do have one automated platform that it is kind of like a Pinterest partner and it's called Tailwind. My team's been using it for years. I forget what a price is right now. It's like different tiers and whatnot. But if you do not want to do manual Canva designs, what I would suggest to do, you use Tailwind because Tailwind allows you to create one.

So to create multiple variants from one single pin. So now you can change the colors, the fonts, the pictures, whatever. And you can create numerous, numerous pins just from one single pin. And that automates a lot of the process. I would strongly, strongly encourage you to look at Tailwind. Tailwind also allows you to kind of like re-pin. It looks at your top pins, it repins them. A lot of automated rules that you can set up with Tailwind. And Pinterest really loves user engagement. So...

Don't just take, take, take in the sense of like, I'm pinning, I'm pinning. So people can come to my platform, give, give, give a little bit too. So make sure that you are pinning relevant content to your, you know, like your boards and your Pinterest profiles. So if you are in the furniture industry, let's say you're a designer, I would say just go to some furniture companies, Pinterest profiles and just like repin them on your boards.

Pinterest loves it when you go in and engage a little bit. So don't forget to do that as well. That was a lot, but that's- That was a lot. So many things that I want to kind of like take apart there and dissect a little bit more. But I want to circle back first to one of the most important things that you said. And that is that when people are going on Pinterest, they are looking for solutions. This is marketing 101. Like you're-

Any marketing strategy should be focusing on what solutions are you providing to your clients? What problem are you the answer to? What solutions are you providing? How does your product service, whatever it is that you offer, how does that support your clients in solving a challenge that they're facing? And I think it's so easy sometimes for us to get caught up in touting about all the cool features of the things that we're offering without getting into

Why that matters? What's the benefit of that? And I'll admit, I've gotten caught up in that. Sometimes I'll do like a product launch of some sort, like for a new course or something like that. And I'm so excited to get this course out there. And I know everybody needs the course that I forget basic marketing. And instead of positioning it as a solution, I just start touting all the cool things that are a part of it. And Pinterest is no different in that people are going there. They're literally looking for a solution. Imagine they're going onto Google and saying like, I'm trying to solve this problem. How are they searching for that?

That's what you need to be answering. So whether it is on Google, whether it is on Pinterest, like you've got to be answering the questions that your clients are asking. And I go through this often with my clients as well of don't answer the questions that they're not asking. Like don't try to answer a question that you think they should ask and you think they should know because if they're not asking the question, you can give them that information, but you've got to focus on what is, how are they asking about it?

and you can't answer a question that they don't necessarily have. And if you can answer a question that they have that no one else is answering, even better. So I'm going to use the home staging as an example, because I spent 15 years running a home staging industry. And I would see my clients are like, yeah, well, I wrote a blog about why it's important to declutter. Or I wrote a blog about why staging works. I'm like, yeah, OK, those have been done like 50 million times. Instead, what if you talked about

How much space should you leave between the furniture to make it optimal for flow for showings? How do you how do buyers make decisions on a property? What is it that's influencing them? And now those are not sexy terms that someone's searching necessarily. Someone's not searching. How much space do I need to leave between my sofa and my coffee table in my living room? But what are they searching? Like, how do I make my home appeal to buyers more?

And instead of saying, well, declutter and depersonalize, they know all of that. There's 20 million different checklists online that they can download for that. What can you teach them that nobody else is talking about? And that's a big thing to be successful on any of these platforms where someone's searching as well as answering the questions that nobody else is answering, but are definitely being asked. And especially in a world of AI, don't get me wrong, like I can go to my chat GPT and ask it any question that I want to. But I would much prefer to hear it directly from an expert than just my AI.

Yeah, I agree with you. And you know, you really nailed it because a lot of the times we're so caught up in our own service and product and we're thinking that our customers and clients, they're thinking the same things as us. Right. When in reality, like you really nailed it. Think about it. If you are a interior designer or home staging, how to home stage is, you know, it's really searched and there's a lot, a lot of content like that. But if you're thinking about the problems that your audience has, even if it's not

I don't want to say not related to what you know, it is related to what you offer, but it's not the one solution that you offer. If you're working with staging, an expensive problem would be how to stage to make a house look bigger, how to stage to make the house look newer, how to stage to close quicker. Those are big, big problems. And the bigger the problem you solve, the more expensive the problem you solve, the quicker you're going to see results and the better the results you're going to see.

Now, in your article on how to stage to sell the home quicker, can you have something about like, by the way, you don't want to stage it yourself. I can do it for you. Let's talk. Right. And then the chances of working with one to three, 10 realtors that are looking for home staging services. It's, in my opinion, so much better than just, you know, how to to how to stage my home, because the person that says how to stage my home is the person that's not going to spend money on staging services.

Actually, that's just brought me to a point, which is I know there's a lot of do it yourselves type of content on Pinterest, and that is good too. But also think about the audience that will spend money versus the audience that won't spend money. So if you are a home stager and you are trying to rank for how to stage my home, you may get a lot of people that don't want to spend money with you because they're thinking about doing it themselves. They're already made a decision. Can you convert them? Absolutely.

But I would rather think about realtors that, you know, I'm in Ontario, Canada, and our real estate market is crazy right now. Like I know a regular commission for a realtor is anywhere between 50 grand to 100 grand per transaction. So that is an expensive problem to solve, right? So if you help a realtor position their house, position their listing as something that will sell faster, that's something.

that's a value he can give or she can give to their clients. And then you can help them solve an expressive problem. I think you're winning, right? So think about who's gonna spend money with you and who's not gonna spend money with you when you're creating your content. Because a lot of times it is easy to create content for people that are not spending money. See, and I'm glad that you brought that up. That was another one of those things that you had mentioned earlier. Like I said, there were so many great points that you had in that kind of Pinterest 101. And one of those was talking about, yeah, like,

If you're an interior designer, what is someone looking for like a particular style or chair? You don't want to target someone who's looking for the hundred dollar target chair, for example. Like you want to target someone who is looking for the chair that's going to cost two thousand dollars to put into their home because they're not looking to go shopping themselves. They're looking for someone to do this for them. But they might.

have some idea of some of the brands that they know that they like or some certain styles that they like. And so you can move them from the idea stage because let's face it, even a non do it yourself or will often spend some time gathering some inspiration. And what do we do as designers when we go and meet with our clients? What do we say to them? Send me any inspiration photos you find and they're going to so they've already been on Pinterest. They've already.

When I'm meeting with my clients, they're like, yeah, so I have like all these things already saved in my phone. Can I show you all these images that I found? They've already been searching for things that they like. It doesn't mean that they feel they can go out and do it themselves. They don't know how to put that chair with the right sofa and design the fireplace to go with it and put all the elements of the room together. They just know some of the basic things that they like, and they want to be able to put those together to be able to then hand it over to a designer to say, can you make this all work together? Can you figure out?

Like based on this, can you figure out my style and put something together? And that's what we do. So if you can find the clients who are searching for the topics that are not, how do I do this myself? That is going to turn into conversions. But I love that you touched on that because I think so many people try to approach the do it yourself or and try to convert them. And don't get me wrong to your point, you can definitely there's a time you can convert where they're like, this seems like way more work than I want to do. Can I just pay someone else to do this? But

If you can get a real estate agent instead where they're going to give you 10 other listings as opposed to that one off homeowner, that's going to be worth your time so much more. So much like exponentially it's going to improve. And I just wanted to add a point that is a little bit beyond the one on one. It's more like the five point. don't don't gatekeep and don't be afraid to offer information. So Pinterest is heavily relying on offering information in the.

era of AI and content on demand. There's a lot of the same information over and over and over again. Good content will never ever, ever go out of style. I don't care how many platforms come up. Good content doesn't never goes out of style. So if you can educate, if you can offer insight, if you can offer value, if you can solve a problem, then you will build an audience. I also say don't gatekeep because a lot of times you may be thinking, I'm just going to keep going with your designers.

you may be thinking, okay, so I have all this information about, you know, different designs, styles, whatever people are searching for it, but I don't want another designer to see my information when they're, let's say their customer or client is saying, hey, can you look at this Pinterest board for me? It's my Pinterest board, but then they're going to use all these tips. If you are running ads and you have a Facebook pixel on your website,

that person's data is going to go on your website. So then even though you may not have them as a customer or a client right now because another designer is working with them, your pixel, your website will be fed that data and then your pixel will continuously optimize your ads to find more people like that person so that eventually you're going to be that designer. It's not going to be someone else. So don't be afraid to...

gatekeep because I know that a lot of us service providers, business owners, product creators, we've spent so much time crafting what we're building and we're afraid of giving it away for free. But the chances of someone stealing your ideas versus the chances of someone finding you and really wanting to spend money with you are like that. So giving value.

That is OK. And I was definitely like that's a 5.0 version because, it requires a little bit of text up with the Facebook pixel. And it means that if you're running ads, but that's just one example, too, of how that's going to pay for you exponentially. But to your point, yeah, don't gatekeep on anything. I think that people get hung up on here's the thing. Most people in the world are good. OK, let's focus on that. Have we all been?

Let's just say it like have we all been screwed over at some point in some way? Yeah, trust me we have. But if we punished everyone else we encountered because someone did some wrong by us, that's not fair to the rest of the world that is going to appreciate the value that you give. I am someone who has been in the public eye for a lot of years now. It has not come without its fair share of drama and challenges.

And at no point have I ever decided to pull back though, because I know that I'm helping more people than the ones who are getting upset about whatever it is that I'm sharing or the people who are stealing things. Like I have had my entire website plagiarized more than once. It sucks. Don't get me wrong. But you know what? It happens. You move on from it. You send your cease and desist and whatever. it's there's, you know, whatever you take the actions you need to take.

But don't let that weigh you down. Don't let that bog you down to the point where you're just so upset. I actually had, this is totally off the topic of Pinterest for a moment, but I had my, my car was vandalized a little over a year ago. And I was actually, I'm still in the process of dealing with the claim for it because the replacement that was done or the repair that was done didn't quite work out. So they're having to redo all of the work. The company I'm working with has been absolutely phenomenal about this.

And so I was actually at the automotive shop this morning talking to, it actually the dealership and there was the ones doing the repair. They're lovely there. And I was talking with one of the women there about what had happened. She was like, Oh, I remember when you were dealing with this a year ago, like, can't believe that. And basically the shortest version of the story is that someone burned a hole and slashed my soft top all to steal a bag in my back seat, which all it had in it was my bowling ball. So like it was a $10,000 vandalism.

to get a bowling ball. my god. it sounds, yeah, it don't get me it sounds horrible. Was I upset about it? Of course I was. Was I frustrated? Of course I was. But I don't know who did it. I don't know why they did it. And spending any ounce of energy on any of that is completely pointless. Yeah. It's not going to do me any good. And I just don't see the point of wasting my energy. And when I was speaking to the woman at the dealership that I was dealing with about this, she was like, that is just such a great attitude. She's like, I really need to incorporate that more into my life.

because I think we spend so much of our time and energy on the things that it's done. There's nothing you can do about it. Like move on. It doesn't mean if someone is, yeah, plagiarizing your website. Yeah, contact them. Get it. Like take them to court if you need to. But don't spend a ton of time agonizing over why did they do this and who would do something like that. And I'm going to protect everything that I'm doing now because of this one person. Because in my experience, majority of the world is good.

that you're coming from such a place of kindness, kindness first and then abundance. Oh my goodness. I want the whole world to have that attitude. I love it. I love it because you can be mad about it and you could have also said, yeah, people are going to do that to you, screw them. But you're like, no, I have better things to think about. I love it. And to be honest, I don't think I know a single successful person that has not had some sort of

some sort of a violation like that. know, like if you're thinking about your favorite, anything, business people, celebrities, like we had our whole brand stolen. Like we had a new website, people are taking money, not delivering products, and they were sending them to our customer service manager to deal with it. So I had like, the calls exactly. And like she had to work with like their ad mix and guide them. And it was awful. I had previous,

disgruntled contractors and employees who not only they stole my case studies and I saw my case studies on different websites and I'm like, oh my God. And then I was thinking, you know, do I want to get, do I want to get involved in it? I'm thinking if you can't even get your own, you know, your own case studies, you're not going to be able to get clients. So I'm just going to let you fizz out girl. And she did fizz out unfortunately, but it's, you know, it's going to happen. It's going to continue to happen for me, for you, hopefully not to that.

That is awful, by the way, that the car is just such a violation. But again, I love how you're coming from a place of kindness and abundance. And I can see that serving you right. just. thank you. And I'm sorry that you've had to deal with that as well. But I mean, again, it also goes to show why you've got the perspective that you do on don't gatekeep. Because despite these things happening to you, did you take all your case studies off your website so someone couldn't steal them? No.

There's more benefit. Yeah, there's more good than bad in that. So I think so too. Yeah, just to end that note, if my former Sicilian boss had had get kept get gate kept her tiramisu recipe, I would not be making the best tiramisu right now that my whole family enjoys.

I was like, yeah, it's from a Sicilian person. Can you imagine if she decided to gatekeep that for me? My life would be different. love Tremiso, but anyway, that was my ending for that point. I love that. love that. so, and I can't believe how the time is flying by on this too. So what else am I not asking you about for Pinterest that you feel that people need to know? Because like this is a topic that I'm so passionate about and I feel like

I feel like I'm missing like 16 other questions, but we don't have time for that many questions. So I'm just going to pass it to you. What else am I missing asking you? What else do people need to know about Pinterest? Yeah. Maybe one thing that people ask me a lot is when should I start Pinterest? No, should I start it only after I have like a big team, only after I've mastered other sales channels? I would say start it right away because again, it is a search engine. So why does search engines need to work?

time, which you can't really cheat unless you have a lot of money and like an army of people to work. So if you don't have that luxury, I would say start with Pinterest right away. So once you open your business, your website, your store, start a Pinterest account, start posting content. I'm not advising you to start, I'm not advising you like on pedal to the metal situation, but just post, post. Even if it's, you know, five pins a week, post five pins a week, it's fine.

start right away because Pinterest needs time to marinate. Now, the more effort you put into it, the quicker it gives you results, but start right away. Now, when is the time to start investing into Pinterest? That is a trick question because even I don't have the answer. It depends on every business, but a few things that I want you to look at is, first of all, have you mastered other sales channels? So I would say if you're a product-based business, ads is your best bet. So that would be,

Facebook ads, Google ads, perhaps influencers. If you're a service business, would say if you are a B2B business, nothing compares to outreach, nothing compares to actually doing email outreach to find business, partnerships with realtors or even partnerships with furniture companies. So it really depends on your timeline. But what I want you to look for is how I mastered

When you're looking at the Mazel's pyramid of marketing, which he never made one, but we'll imagine that he made one, Pinterest for most businesses is not at the bottom of it and that is okay. You want to look at your paid media first because we live in a world where paid media delivers the quickest results. you want to be somewhere in the middle. So you've mastered a couple of paid media or if you're a B2B, I would say your sales, then you can start putting more just into Pinterest.

You feel like you're getting traction without even trying too hard. That is a good indicator that you're in a very niche niche and people are really finding your pins in your content and maybe it's time to double, triple or even 10X. Or you want to diversify your paid media spend. So if you're spending money on meta, you're spending money on TikTok, you're spending money on Google and you're like, you know what we have?

We found our sweet spot with these platforms. We want to diversify our traffic now and we're okay to go paid, then go paid with your Pinterest. That's when I would. It's not like a timeline of like, should I start it after six months or 12 months? No, it's in stages. You've mastered your paid media first. You want to diversify, then start putting more juice into Pinterest. If you have someone on your team that is passionate about SEO and Pinterest, I would say that's a good time to start putting more juice into it.

If you're doing a lot of content, if you're doing a lot of articles, I would say definitely pair them up with Pinterest. But if you feel like you're struggling right now to create pins and just really energy draining, that's going back to your 80-20, right? Like what is the 20 % of your effort that brings 80 % of your results? If Pinterest is not in that, then do not spend too much time on it. There are other things to master first, but have it in mind and just kind of like maintain it.

And I think that's a really good point too, because I think, you know, we get so caught up as business owners of trying to do all the things. Well, I was told I should be on TikTok and I need to be on Instagram and I need to be on Facebook. And then now I'm being told I need to be on Pinterest and I was thinking about doing some Google ads and the list goes on and on and on. So you've got to look at, what are your objectives? What is it that you're trying to get? Is it that like, do you have a killer website that you're like, if I just got more people onto my website, that would be, that would increase my business significantly.

Okay, well then instead of trying to create the latest trending reel on Instagram or TikTok, maybe Pinterest is your best strategy. But I also think that everything that you're saying there, not to give another plug for Sandra services by any means, but everything that she's talking about in terms of when to do this, that and the other, that's where a CMO really does come in though, because you need to have a strategy, not just a strategy, but you need to understand what are our objectives and then pair that with what aligns with those objectives.

And sometimes as the CEO, you're too close to it to even be able to see that in focus. And so it is, that's where an outside source can definitely come in. And fortunately, Sandra's actually offering a free one hour strategy to scale your brand. So how do they get that call with you, Sandra?

Yeah, so you can find me at snapadvantage.com or you can actually email me at sandra@Snapadvantage.com or find me on LinkedIn. I'm there all the time. It's Sandra Kokotovic So if anybody, I guess, comes through you, you can just forward me their information. Can I just give you one simple formula so we can paint a very good picture on how Pinterest can help a brand?

I know we're running out of time, but I know it's hard. I was gonna ask you what's one last thing you wanna leave people with. So here we go, yeah. I know it's hard to visualize this. So I'm gonna open up my calculator here. Oh my God, I hope my dad doesn't see this. My dad is like a PhD engineer and math in our lineage is important, but I don't wanna mess it up. But when you talked about that strategy, right? So the way I look at business acquisition, so call it new clients, new customers, repeat clients, repeat customers, leads.

It's a machine that you're building. I've been told before that maybe I'm leaving emotion a little bit too much out of client acquisition. I'm obviously very passionate about what I do, but when it comes to making money as a brand, as a business, is, it's numbers. It's honestly just numbers. So when you're thinking of Pinterest as an extra traffic source, right? What I like to look for is first of all,

Pinterest can bring a lot of impressions and a lot of traffic to your PINs. So it is not out of reach to go from zero PIN impressions to like hundred thousand PIN impressions in six months if you are doing it well. So if you now have a hundred thousand impressions on Pinterest and let's say even just 2 % of those go to your website, that's 0.02, that is 2000 people that go to your website. So if you have your numbers correct and you have them top of mind, you have them in your spreadsheet, you're looking at your reports,

every day, every week, every month, then you know what 2,000 people on your website can do for your bottom line, right? Now, if you are a, let's say a Shopify store, like a general low end conversion right now, it's 1%. So if you take those 2,000 people that now came to your website and you're looking at 0.01, that is 20 extra sales that you're getting a month that are new sales from new people, right? So now-

You might get repeat sales from them. This is just their initial sale. Exactly. you're getting 20 new people that are coming to your website. Now, what can those people do for you? Well, repeat purchases. You want to have like a good follow-up system with email marketing and text marketing. You can get testimonials from them. You can get reviews. You can get user-generated content. So these are people that have found you. They're passionate or interested in a subject and a solution.

that you wanna ask for feedback and say, actually, you know what, thank you so much for coming to our website and trying us out. Do you wanna win your product back? If you do, we would love to have some user-generated content for you. We don't wanna hire models. You may look like a model, but we don't wanna hire professional models that are scripted and prompted because we believe it's important that people that are looking for specific solutions will also find our product just like you did. And there's so much you can do with that. can run your ads, can, you know, there's so much.

PR and that is just from free pinning. Like a hundred thousand is not even that much. There are brands that can get millions of pin impressions every month. So that is just 10X in your results. And that is from not even spending extra on Pinterest. is literally just doing your connecting your Pinterest to your website, just having those rich pins, maybe having those blog articles and using a tool like Tailwind that I think is like 20, 30 bucks a month or something like that.

and you can get, and also it feeds your pixel, right? So if you're running ads, it feeds your pixel. So that is a simple formula that you can follow to see if Pinterest makes sense for you in your business. Take that 100,000 and make it whatever number you want, but 100,000 is really not hard to reach as a Pinterest impression. And then- is so helpful. You can optimize every piece of the machine, right? Maybe you want to go for 3 % traffic, not 2 % traffic.

So that's how you can see Pinterest, how it can work for your business. But it can work for honestly almost any business. It's again, if your business can use content, if your business can use SEO, then your business can use Pinterest. And the other thing that I just wanted to add to that though is if you are getting that kind of traffic and you're not getting the conversions, Sandra kind of touched on this, but there's other, you can optimize other aspects of that funnel. So if you are getting the traffic to your website, but no one's buying,

What is it that's turning them off on your website? Is it unclear messaging? Is it not understanding the value of something? Is it the navigation of it? Is it just the verbiage that you're using? There's something there that's not capturing them. Doesn't mean you don't have a good product or service. Doesn't mean that your website isn't fantastic, but there's something that's not capturing them. So if you know that that's the great thing that Pinterest can also do is you can be tracking what that traffic looks like.

And if you're getting that kind of traffic and not getting the conversions, then it helps you to identify where you might be losing someone along that sales funnel as well. So that's some really good data to have. I actually, loved it when you talked about your dad being an engineer. I actually have a bachelor of mathematics myself. So I am all about the numbers. Like I just had this whole conversation with my group coaching clients today where

A of different things that came up, and I'm what do the numbers say? What do the numbers say? Numbers don't lie to you. So review the data. And Pinterest will give you so much valuable data, even to see what people are searching for and how they're finding you. OK, how do you capitalize that across other platforms as well? Because if this is how they find you on Pinterest, that's how they're going to find you potentially on other platforms. So so much incredible content.

And I mean, that pretty much that was my, I was gonna say, do you have one last thing to share with the audience? And you nailed it. Yes. Thank you. Honestly, Sandra, I cannot thank you enough for this. I feel like we could talk for another hour and maybe another day I'll have you back and we'll have a whole other conversation. But this has been so fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much. You are a wonderful host. It's been a pleasure and I really hope this is not our last collaboration. I agree. Thank you. And so listen, if you are listening to this episode and you are loving it, which I know you are, please do me a favor. Leave a review. Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And you know what I want you to really do, because I ask you this every single week is if you have a fellow female entrepreneur that you know can really benefit from this episode, share it with them. That is the best way that we can continue to support each other as a community.

So thank you so much for tuning in and until next time, keep thriving. Thank you so much.