In today’s post, we have a really special guest who’s going to talk to us about promoted pin tips for the fashion niche. Her name is Heather Farris. She also runs a Pinterest marketing agency and she knows a whole lot about how to run campaigns for fashion businesses. Before we dive in it with promoted pin tips, don’t forget to hit the big red subscribe button and to hit the bell to be notified every single time I post a new video here on the Kordial Media YouTube channel. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to Heather’s channel as well. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
AZ: Hey Heather, tell us a bit about how you got started with promoted pins and running Pinterest campaigns.
HF: Oh gosh, so I got started a few years back. Promoted pins are about five to six years old now, but I only got started running promoted pin campaigns about three years ago because a client at the time wanted to run promoted pins to test them out. She was also running Facebook ads, which is a common story a lot of us have. I was already running some ads for myself, just to test it out and to learn. Because I had good success with digital product funnels, I just dove in and started running ads for her. They worked out really well and it just blossomed.
AZ: As a fashion business online, should you go ahead and run promoted pins right away?
HF: There’s really not a problem with not having an organic strategy in place before running ads, but just know that if you do run promoted pins on Pinterest, people are likely to go to your profile. If there’s nothing there, it’s disappointing. I know this from my own experience of finding promoted pins on the platform that I just thought were killer, especially for some of the really big brands.
So I wanted to go to their profile to see what other content they had, but that was lost opportunity on their part because there was nothing else there. So while you don’t have to start an organic strategy before starting promoted pins, I would say it’s probably best practice to at least get your profile set up, get a few boards added and at least get some of your most important content on there, in case somebody does engage with your promoted pin and then they want to come back to find more about you.
AZ: That’s a really great tip here because setting up your Pinterest account for success is the number one step before you do anything else on Pinterest, whether it be organic strategy or paid. So if you do actually want to learn how to set up your full Pinterest account, I do have a video that you can check out, all about how to really get started on Pinterest for business.
AZ: What type of campaign do you suggest to start with if you want to drive traffic to a fashion blog or store?
HF: You should definitely use your budget in a consideration if you’re wanting to just drive traffic. Now, bear in mind, you can run traffic ads and still track conversions on your site, so check outs, signups to your email list. However in a traffic campaign, it’s not optimizing towards those events like conversion campaigns would, but you are getting more bang for your buck with traffic consideration campaigns because of how they are billed. They’re billed per click instead of being billed per impression. So they are cheaper generally for us, especially beginner promoted pin advertisers to use and to really warm up our pixel and get that traffic to our site.
AZ: Those are some really good tips to know because understanding the difference between a traffic campaign and conversion campaign is really important, especially when you’re just starting on Pinterest and you have a small budget to work with.
AZ: What if I have a store? What are your promoted pin tips for an e-commerce business who wants to start seeing those sales come in?
HF: The most common e-commerce platform as we know is Shopify. If you have a Shopify store and you’re selling maybe clothes or dresses or accessories or whatever, the easiest way to connect your Shopify store to Pinterest and have that shop tab and have the ability to run catalog ads is through the Pinterest Shopify integration. It’s actually an app that you will find in your Shopify dashboard. You will download it to your store and you will connect it to your Pinterest account. That will not only connect your store to the platform and create a shop tab for you, but it will also place all of your Pinterest tag and event codes in the correct places.
There’s no work for you to do when it comes to actually installing those tags or event codes, which is really confusing for a lot of new people in the advertising space. However, that’s really the best benefit of a Shopify store. Then once you have your store connected, you have the capability to run a catalog campaign.
AZ: What’s the deal with catalogs?
HF: What a catalog campaign is, is it ingests all of the shop listings from your store into Pinterest and it gives you that on the front end of your profile, that shop tab. On the backend, in your ads manager, you can actually set up a catalog campaign, which runs the ads that are all of the images from your store. On those ads, it actually lists the price, the availability and all of that information.
So when somebody is browsing the platform, whether they’re in the explore tab or the shop tab, if they see an ad in their feed from you, then it is likely one of the last items they were browsing on your store. If you’re prospecting and you’re out looking for new store sales, new customers, then it is products that they are interested in based on interests or keywords that you’re targeting. Catalog ads are very effective when done correctly.
AZ: That’s really interesting to know. I also love the fact that that Shopify makes it so seamless and easy to integrate your store and your catalog with Pinterest because they obviously recognize the importance of the shoppable feed on Pinterest nowadays. If you’re considering starting a store and you haven’t just yet, you highly want to consider using Shopify over another platform because of how easy it is to integrate with Pinterest.
HF: It is one of the easiest and the cost is only $29 a month.
AZ: Plus I’ve personally built a Shopify store before and it took me like a quarter of the time that it has to build a WordPress site.
AZ: Should we be using ads to drive traffic and sales to affiliate links?
HF: You can, but it’s not my favorite strategy, and here’s why. If your affiliate has not optimized their website for the traffic landing on it, then you may be putting a lot of money behind an affiliate link and behind an advertisement that’s just going to fall flat.
I’ve tested this for myself, and I know there are people out there who run very successful affiliate marketing campaigns, but they do it a little bit differently. They don’t run it usually directly to the affiliate link, they put their affiliate link into a landing page or a blog post and drive traffic to that. So the only action when somebody actually lands on that page is to learn about that product that they’re outlining. Then the call to action is to obviously shop for that product for themselves.
If it’s a landing page you’re driving traffic to, then they can get on your email list. When they sign up for the affiliate program as well, you not only have collected their email address but you’ve collected a commission on the affiliate and now you can nurture them to that next step where they need to be.
I do this with Tailwind actually and I’ve done it very successfully with Tailwind. I created an opt-in for using Tailwind, and then obviously in that opt-in, I have my affiliate link.
AZ: From what I understand, driving traffic to a landing page which contains the affiliate link is more beneficial for sales than it would be to just drive traffic straight to the affiliate link page?
HF: Correct, because you have control over the page that you own. Whereas you don’t have that control over your affiliate’s landing pages.
AZ: For affiliate income, what are your promoted pin tips for using traffic campaigns vs conversion campaigns?
HF: It depends on the ultimate goal. If I were to set up a campaign for my Tailwind guide and then they purchase the Tailwind subscription through my affiliate link once they get the guide, I could run a conversion campaign for email list sign-ups for that strategy. However, this year in 2021, I’ve just been running a lot more consideration campaigns. Ever since they updated the algorithm back in February, and they have released this new campaign budget optimization, I can test a lot more variables inside of a consideration campaign and actually spend a lot less money. If you’re newer, run a consideration ad.
AZ: What kind of success can you expect as an e-commerce business who is running campaigns with Pinterest for the very first time?
HF: It really just depends on the person, their business, their product, and their customer. Also timeliness comes into consideration in a lot of people’s products and what campaigns they’re running during that time of year. You probably need to give yourself a good 90 days of testing.
The first 30 days when you start running Pinterest ads, I would not expect any return on your investment. Tthe platform is just learning about your product, your customer, and all of those targeting factors that you’re adding into the campaign itself. Consider that first month as a testing ground to really figure out what’s going to work for this platform for your business.
Going into month two, if you’ve got a solid amount of data, you should start seeing some sort of return on your investment, but that’s not always the case, unfortunately.
I don’t have any hard and fast case studies. The first month that I started running ads for my beauty brand, we saw a return on investment within that first month of working together. However, she already had her tag installed on her website for quite a while before that, which is one factor that factored into the success. She was also running ads on other platforms so we capitalized on that data as well. So it’s really going to vary.
AZ: What are your promoted pin tips for a fashion blogger who wants to run campaigns for a digital product?
HF: This is a juicy tip for those of you. Because traffic onsite and display ads and affiliate links don’t always make you the money that you want to make. However, you can take control of that by creating a digital product. I personally am in love with digital products. I’ve been selling them for a few years and I have found a really great strategy for actually creating and selling digital products through a tripwire funnel.
The setup essentially is you give away a freebie, like a checklist, and then right behind that is a highly relevant offer that takes that checklist to the next level. For example, let’s say that you had a checklist for how to create a capsule wardrobe. Then your offer is maybe how to dress your body type with only certain colors for that capsule wardrobe.
The tripwire product is there to help you pay for the ads spend that you’re running on the platform that you’re running it on. It’s a really great way to capture and collect qualified leads, buyers and also be paying for your ad spend.
What this looks like for me is I have a strategy guide and then right behind it, I sell my Pinterest course. For you, it could be like that capsule wardrobe checklist, maybe that style guide on how to dress your body with just a capsule wardrobe, and then maybe you have a whole course on going deeper into styling yourself for every season or something like that.
Watch Heather’s Video!
Pinterest for Fashion Bloggers: How to Use Pinterest to Make Money with Your Fashion Blog
