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You're listening to the Simple Pen Podcast.
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Pinterest, for business advice that goes down smooth and easy. Here's your host, Kate All. Hey there and welcome back to the Simple Pen Podcast. I'm your host, Kate All. And guess what? This is episode 400. 400 people. I cannot even believe it. I toyed with what to do for this episode. Maybe a recap, maybe things I've learned. I struggle with those a little bit, especially as a podcast listener. It might not be anything that you guys would find interesting. If you would find it interesting, let me know. Of course, you can certainly email me helloimpleplepenmedia.com if you eventually want to hear that type of episode. But we thought it would be fitting given that Pinterest just released their Pinterest presents, which they do one time per year to recap it and kind of give you my thoughts and a call to action to watch it because it is actually pretty interesting as far as where Pinterest is going in the next year. With that said, before we dive in, I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I recognize that this podcast is just about Pinterest and sometimes every once in a while, I will add in stories of other people. I will share interviews. In fact, in the summer, a couple years ago, we did the Summer Story series. I loved that. I plan to bring it back next summer, potentially. But it's really just about Pinterest. And I know that for not everybody, that is going to be a priority in their business. Or maybe you listened for a while, took a break, and then you came back. But what's important is that you're listening today and I appreciate you taking that time, whether you're driving in your car, you're at work, or you are going for a walk, or you are just simply getting ready for work in the morning. Thank you for allowing me to speak into that. Thank you for allowing me to guide you. I know that when I started this podcast Back in 2016, there were a lot of things that were different about Pinterest. It was a whole different way that we did things, and there really weren't a lot of voices out there teaching Pinterest marketing. Fast forward eight years and we have a lot of voices that are out there teaching Pinterest marketing, some with different philosophies than I have and some with philosophies that are aligned. So I recognize that you have a choice as to who you want to allow to speak into your business. When it comes to Pinterest marketing. I appreciate you allowing me to do that if that is you. And I don't take that for granted. I think through every single episode, I think about what it is I can contribute. I think about ways that I don't want to distract you. I think about how to try to get to the point quicker. I think about sometimes the mistakes that I have made. There's a lot of things I really hold dearly when it comes to this podcast in my. I guess authority isn't the right word, but I guess my position that I hold within this broader community, that I do represent a voice and I represent a voice that can really impact what you do with your time. And I take that also very seriously because I know for me, I have very limited time when it comes to my business. So if I'm going to listen to someone and then work on something that they told me to do, I want that to be profitable. So just know that I'm in this with you. I'm in this current economy with you, this current time and space that we're in, and I'm slogging through business just like you are. So thanks again for listening. If you have not left a review for the podcast, I would love it if you would leave the review. If you've been listening to all 400 Bravo, I want to hear from you because that would mean the world to me. So if you haven't left a review, please do that. If you're on Spotify, you can't leave reviews, obviously, because you can just hit the five star and then if you're watching on YouTube. Thank you for embracing our podcast on YouTube. This is new for us in the past couple of episodes. We're loving it. We're really excited to serve you as an audience too as well. Okay, Pinterest presents. Let's dive into today's topic. Every year, Pinterest does this for the last, I would say two years, three years maybe, where they give an updated look about where they are and the new tools they're releasing for advertisers. This year was fun and quirky and gave some good insight into where their focus has actually been the last two years and where they are going. There's going to be a link below in your podcast app or here on YouTube where you can go watch it. I highly encourage you to do it. There is a way to see individual snippets where the C Suite of Pinterest leadership is speaking. You can go there and you can kind of miss like the actiony, funny stuff, quirky stuff in between, so you can just really plow through. It was primarily focused on ads and how to leverage those ads for the growth of your business. It sparked a lot of curiosity for me. I have run ads from time to time here at Simplepen. We have a full ads team that runs ads for our clients. It got me excited about some new opportunities. Some of the things they talked about are not released now. They'll be released later. But I think it just gave me some inspiration of how to leverage both ads and organic for growth. If you listen to this podcast and then you watch Pinterest Presents and you think, yeah, I'm curious too. I want to dive into ads. We do have two options for you. We have an ads consult call or a strategy call for you, and then our ads discovery call for management if you want to hire our team. So just scroll down below and you can access those. All right, High level is my initial thoughts. Little cheesy at times. They did a great job making a relatively boring topic not so boring. Plus they had an actor from Ted Lasso, which was pretty cool. The premise essentially is they are marketers going to a gym for marketers to learn about what offerings Pinterest has for them to target their audience. So hence there's a heavy emphasis on advertisers and products. So after this kind of fun and quirky opener, Bill Reddy came out, who is the new CEO, and he opened with talking about where they began two years ago, which was to build a more engageable shopping platform, really leaning into what makes them unique and what can make them competitive, and trying to find the best product fit, meaning the best ads fit for that type of platform. They're unlike any other social media platform out there. And so I think that two years ago they really wanted to see, okay, how are we unique? How are we uniquely positioned in this current economy to offer our users something that's really additive to their life and not distraction, not distractive? So he started by saying, I want to reintroduce you to Pinterest kind of this. We've been here all along for the last 14 years, but we want you to come back. We want you to bring your ad dollars here to this platform. We want to bring your organic content to this platform because we are on a mission. So he reminded people that Pinterest is currently at a half a billion people on the platform, all across demographics and across many different countries. And one of the things he said was that Pinterest is aging down, so Gen Z is growing super fast on the platform. And that matches up with their focus on positivity in a safe place for them to be themselves. They want to be focused on being a healthy alternative to other social media. His mission is that they want Pinterest to lead the industry in user well being. Pinterest is proving to be a bet that a better Internet is possible. Those are his words. So they went deep on shopping elements too. He talked about there are five times more impressions when you upload your catalog. This was a big theme continually throughout. So if you are a merchant, if you are an E commerce seller and you have not connected your catalog to Pinterest, you would watch this and go, yeah, I gotta connect my catalog. That is a good next step. And what they say is that those shop owners who connect their catalog, they have doubled their outbound clicks for those advertisers year over year. I'm assuming that stat is also tied to ads. The goal here with connecting your catalog is to make the transaction. And I say transaction loosely, think of it more holistically. They talk a lot about the funnel. You'll hear things like full funnel approach. We're going to focus on the lower funnel. And their goal is to make it very seamless for you to gain a customer, not a transaction. I loved that phrase. So they're saying, we want to work with you to be able to give you the integrations that help you not just gain a transaction, not just get the dollars, but get somebody who might be with you for life. They want ads to be great content, additive to the experience, and not distracting for the pinner. And here's where we talked a little bit about performance and the funnel. He said, Pinterest is now a performance platform. And what I take that to mean is that they are saying, we're competitive. We can compete with Facebook, we can compete with TikTok, we can compete with Instagram, like, we're here to play. And that their lower funnel, which is really where you see the conversion, where you see them say yes to the product to yes to the buy. They've really improved those over the last two years. A lot of the vibe was saying Pinterest wants to be a player. They don't just want people to have aha moments and then go to another platform and buy. When I was teaching Pinterest, I remember at Social Media Marketing World, I think it was 2018, I had been working with somebody at Pinterest and I said, can you give me, like a really cool buyer's journey? And what was interesting in this is buyer's Journey included people finding the product on Pinterest waiting about six months. Then they would go to Amazon or Google and then they showed Instagram at the end where they would post about this particular trip. The goal was to say not just the buyer's journey, but like how other platforms fit into that. So that being said, Pinterest is like, oh, we want to eliminate that Google Amazon piece. These are my words, not their words. And we want people to be able to have these aha moments here and then actually buy the product. So when Pinterest talks about full funnel, I believe I have a podcast on this a while back. There's three elements. Awareness, consideration and conversion. Awareness is the aha. The consideration is hmm, I'm thinking about it. And the conversion is yes, I want it. And Pinterest has been saying this conversion piece has been pretty tough for them. So Bill Ruddy rounded out his opening talk with his commitment, Pinterest commitment to be a positive platform for teens. So they have partnered with Boston's Boston Children's Hospital. They have the Inspired Internet pledge, and they're going to be working with them to kind of measure user well being. And so far, Pinterest has the lowest overall rate of negative user experiences across all platforms. So kind of finalizing and saying, we are committed to this and we are not going to waver. Then we go into another section. Kind of like, why do Pinners come to Pinterest? They come for inspiration, they come for shopping, they come to get ideas and make those happen. And they want brands to come into that. They're saying, we are the place for you to market your products. We're ready. So here's how the consumer lifestyle works. They have intent, then they go to search and discovery for products. Then they save and they organize those into boards. And they say people on Pinterest are deciding days and weeks after pinning. Sounds like they're not deciding, like months and months after pinning. Like they're, they're making a quick decision. So we talk a little bit before. I believe I have an older episode. It's with this guy, Barry Hot. He was great. And he talked about high intent and low intent with Pinterest. We'll link that below. He really brought up this great point and Pinterest really reiterated it in Pinterest Presents that they want to show you exactly what you want. They want your search to match with that exactly. But they're also going to give you more of what you might want, which is low intent, meaning you might be searching for a great bathrobe but they're also going to show you some great skincare organ. They're going to show you a great candle for your bathroom, or they're going to show you maybe bathroom ideas. They can have things that are connected. So yes, you had a high intent for a bathrobe, but you might also want something else. So they're trying to get really intuitive based on what you've saved, based on what you search, and they want to give you recommendations on that. I love this phrase. Decisions are made on Pinterest after exploring and mulling over. And it's true. A lot of us approach Pinterest. If you use it as a user, you go to Pinterest, you search for ideas, you look around and you think, okay, I think I want that.
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Here are some new features that they also released. Just note that some of these new features they did make clear to say that they are testing these with brands they might not be available for another year. Always hold loosely to those because you just never know if they're going to be released at all depending on the feedback that they get. So they talked about boards being highlighted by Pinterest in the Pinners feed for more inspiration. This can be something like gift guides. I can't remember who it was. She was a woman in the C suite. She talked about shopping for her daughter and when she was searching she got these gift guide boards. And these boards are now going to make it easier to shop from those boards so that you don't have to search around too many places for those particular products. So the call to action they gave was that this is a good way to highlight your collections. So if you have a collection of a pair of a certain type of shoe line, then you would create a board based on that shoe line because it makes it easier for them to search. I haven't yet tested this on my feed yet So I can't look through to see what it looks like. But essentially they're saying this is like your trendy personal shopper. So if you're trying to find something, they want to make it easy for you to shop from that board and they're going to give you more great ideas. And they said this phrase like shopping can happen anywhere on Pinterest. So my assumption is that that will be just easier and easier for you to purchase. If shop owners, you have connected your catalog, that is, that is huge and key here for sure. Now they brought up collages. So when collages came out, in fact, I'm going to open up my Pinterest app right now. It was very much seen as just something for like the pinner. Right. So it wasn't something that it felt like it was for marketers. But essentially you just hit the plus button at the bottom of your Pinterest app and you click on collage and then you can add in whatever you want. You can remix the collage, you can learn how to do a collage, or you can pick up where you left off with some of your images or images from around Pinterest. Here's the cool thing in the spin that they did for product sellers is that you can create collages with your products and link them to your products and then you can run ads. This is something that's going to be released later, but they're working with brands to be able to create collages that encourage inspiration and action. Then run an ad from it to see if they increase sales from a collage. They think Gen Z loves, loves, loves collages. It's going to be a huge point of where they're going to purchase. So they did say that will be released sometime next year based on how that rolls out. Also some of those retailers will be able to add a few details and Pinterest will auto create a collage. A little bit of like an AI model with collages. All right, here's a few other things when it comes to shop integrations, promotions and discounts. So I thought this was actually kind of cool. So if you are having a sale, they will highlight a price change when it's on sale. So something that's seasonal or time bound, you'll really be able to highlight that. I was unclear if that is something that has to be done through the ads platform or if you just connect your catalog, if organically you'll be surfaced as being on sale. It was a little bit fuzzy. The other thing is called promotions. This is kind of tied into the sales piece. So according to Pinterest, last year the holiday season they saw a global average discount rate of 21%, meaning people discounted their products on average 21%. And with promotions, pinners will be able to find your sales more easily. Not really totally sure how personalized promotions serve shoppers. Promotions and sales based on what they've searched and pin allowing advertisers to better reach those pinners when shopping matters most. So my assumption is if we know that people are searching a product in particular and you have that product and then you put it on sale, you can run an ad that targets them because you know you're they're going to be searching for it and then they'll be more likely to buy it because it's on sale. There's a lot of like reading between the lines sometimes on Pinterest presents as to how some of this will practically work. So remember, this is kind of like 10,000 foot level how we get into the nitty gritty. We'll do in the podcast kind of up and coming as we see these things released. There were two things. One really cool thing about ads that I'm excited about and one thing I kind of didn't understand. So Pinterest Capi Capi Connect, they said it's an easy way to connect your API in Pinterest, which is implemented through a cloud service server like Amazon Web Services. And they really didn't expand much more than that. But they interviewed Chase bank where Chase was running an ad on Pinterest to be able to get in front of their customers. They didn't really go much beyond that. So all I know is it looks like C API, but they pronounce it Cappy. This is the part I was really following, which was a thing called Performance Plus. It's kind of the suite of, I would call it an AI tool to create a Pinterest ad. And their goal is to offer creators and merchants a full funnel advertising solution. Remember, we go back to that full funnel again. We've got awareness, we've got consideration, we've got conversion. Right. So I believe their goal with this is that it's going to make it a little easier for you to run a Pinterest ad with AI and automation features. So they say in their alpha and beta testing show that most advertisers saw at least a 10% improvement in cost per acquisition for conversion and catalog sales, or a 10% improvement in cost per click for consideration. Remember, consideration is I'M thinking about it. And conversion, conversion is okay, I'm going to buy it. So you have a couple different options. You have Performance plus Creative, bidding return on ad spend, budget and targeting. So they can basically apply AI. So let's say like creative. So you can take a product that doesn't have a background or maybe like a super bland background. And their example was a perfume bottle from Walgreens. Now you add a super cool background with their performance plus creative and Walgreens sees a 55% higher click through rate with those backgrounds, which I thought was kind of cool. Right? So essentially it speeds up the time it takes to start a campaign. Now, as people who run campaigns for people, we go, well, I don't want a robot creating campaigns because I don't know if I fully trust it yet. So there's a little bit of this. Proceed with caution if you will. If this is something you want to do with Performance plus, whenever it rolls out, I need to confirm if it's now or in the future to everybody, then I would recommend you do a consult with our team first to figure out if that's the way that you want to go. And then you can also consult with our team throughout the process so that we can guide you. So remember, that link is below in the show notes or the description. They ended with this, which I thought was really cool because we started with, here's a reintroduction to Pinterest. And then we end with, here is a reaffirmation of Pinterest, kind of a why do you want to use it? And they said, it's a place to grow your audience. There's more shopability, lower funnel offerings equals conversion, automated performance plus basically AI ad campaigns. And we are a positive platform. And the Andrea Mallard used this phrase like, it's a new era at Pinterest. And I gotta say, I really liked how she wrapped this up because she said, you know, other CMOS chief marketing officers are coming to me and they're saying, I'm struggling to get good conversions on other platforms. Can Pinterest do it for me? So she's like, I feel that with you, I want Pinterest to be a place where you can get good conversions, good return on ad spend. And she said, maybe you tried advertising on Pinterest three or four years ago and it didn't perform for you. We may not have been ready then, but we're ready now. So it's this call to action to say, bring your ad dollars, we are ready. We are up for the Challenge, we are going to get creative. They ended with this last screen that I thought was really good. This mostly applies to merchants, but also can apply to content creators. And we're going to link the slide here and down below. If you want to see some of this on YouTube, remember you can go to YouTube and search Simplepin Media and you'll find us there. It was a slide that said how to grow your business on Pinterest. Upload your catalog, Enable Pinterest performance plus. Okay, so it is available. Launch additional ad solutions aligned with your specific goals. Implement Capi plus your tags and reflect your company values in your media choices. I look at that and only like 3 and 4 are a little bit fuzzy to me. But uploading your catalog check, we've already done that. Enable Pinterest Performance Plus. That's something we're going to go play around with. And then their number five, which I would call number three, reflect your company values in your media choices. That just basically says, like what you're putting on Pinterest, let that reflect who you are so that it can go to the consumer. And they're like, yeah, I want to shop with this brand. You could definitely launch additional ad solutions aligned with your goals. And if somebody is like real geeked out on Cappy plus tags, love to hear from you, let us know. Okay, that's it for episode 400 of the Simple Pin podcast. And my call to action for you today is go watch Pinterest presents. I did do a pretty good job, I would say so myself, giving you a recap, but I think it's always good, especially if you are doing your own marketing on Pinterest, to really lean into some of this stuff and really learn more about where Pinterest is going. I am a big fan of this C Suite. Chief Marketing Officer, CEO Chief Revenue Officer. Like, I think they're all really good and I think they have really good goals for Pinterest and helping to connect retailers and Pinterest content creators and Pinterest as well as serving the audience to make sure it's a positive platform. So I'm going to give them huge props for doing that and I am proud to be a teacher of how to market on this platform because I stand by it. I think it's pretty great. Again, thanks so much for listening to episode 400. If you are listening listening to the podcast, scroll down below in your podcast app. You'll find all the details you need if you are watching on YouTube. Hello, welcome. You can scroll down below in the description and you can get everything you need there. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening and watching to the Simple Pen Podcast.