Let's get your pins in front of people who can't wait to buy them!
You’ve been working on your pins, you've been setting up your shop, and now I'm going to show you exactly where to be to increase your reach and to get your stuff in front of excited customers.
The first step is Instagram. Duh. I've talked about this before. I have a whole webinar that you can watch about how to grow your following on Instagram.
But the biggest thing I want you to know right now about marketing on Instagram is to figure out what is working for you. This is different for everybody. Everyone's audience is different. What they respond to is different. So I want you to go into your analytics and look at these things:
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Likes - what kind of images catch people’s eye immediately
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Engagement - what’s eliciting more of a response from your audience
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Click through - which posts make your audience leave the app and head to your shop
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Followers - which posts get people to follow you
Getting more followers is great, but you want to know what they're engaging with and you want to see what is converting them to click over into your shop. After digging into that date, you can see the exact pins and photos that cause people to click over to your website. Then, you’ll know what works and you can duplicate those kinds of photos.
You can even share those same photos that you know do well. Don't share them too close together, but you can absolutely reuse photos every few months or once a year. You can also duplicate the kind of subject matter that's in those photos and the types of caption used because you know they’re already working.
Okay, so let's talk about Pinterest for a second. This is a platform that I have been experimenting with and I've been really excited with the results of it.
There are entire courses you could take about how to use Pinterest for your business, but we're going to take a higher level look. Pinterest is a search engine, so that means you can put a pin up and then it's there forever. So if people are searching for and responding to pins similar to yours, then Pinterest is going to show them your pins.
You can utilize Pinterest for your shop by creating a board for just the products in your shop. Creating a board for your Instagram content is also a good idea because you can cross promote to both of those boards.
I also like having themed boards. I have one that's dedicated to super cute pins, one for specifically cat pins, and I've gone kind of granular with all of my enamel pin boards. I would recommend using those types of board to promote other pin makers, which is awesome because you're supporting the community and you're showing your followers really awesome stuff that also works with your own aesthetic.
So I think it's really, really fun. It takes minimal effort to get used to it when you’re first trying it out. Of course there are people who make their living managing Pinterest for businesses. But for our purposes I think it's good, if you want to just dip your toe in a little bit, see how it goes, make just a handful of boards and pin stuff and just kind of get a feel for it.
I've haven't even really touched mine in a couple of months and my views, my monthly views keep growing, which is pretty awesome. I would recommend taking some time once a week, or every couple of weeks and just go through your shop and Instagram content and just get the pins flowing on Pinterest.
I think Pinterest is about the fourth or fifth referer to my site. So I definitely get a handful of sales just from that platform. It’s nearly as much as Instagram or direct traffic, but why not take advantage of it if it just takes a couple minutes every few weeks to try it out. Okay. Are you kind of excited to try Pinterest now? I was on the fence about it, but once I started doing it, I got really excited about it!
Okay, this is a big one. Email lists. So I talk about this a bit in my webinar too, again, links below, all that jazz.
But email lists are so important. The thing about social media is that we don't own that platform at all. So Instagram could decide that it doesn't want to post photos anymore. And then what do we do? The thing about email list is you own that list. These are people that have told you directly that they want to be on your email list. They want to hear from you, they want to get your content.
So it's really important to take care of these people. What I like to do is I try really hard to email my people once a week. I try to send them coupons every now and then that are just for email subscribers so they have a reason to be there. Coupons are also the biggest thing that gets people on email list. So if you're not quite sure what to do for an opt in, offer a discount code for people who sign up for your list and treat them well.
These are your people, these are your biggest supporters. I know when I send an email out to my subscribers that I'll get sales, these are the people that support me more than anyone else and they're the ones that want to jump on any kind of specials or promotions or new products that I've got going on.These are my people and I love them.
And if you're worried about emailing people and you haven't done it in a while, just do it. It doesn't matter, if they unsubscribe, it's fine. They wouldn't have bought anything anyway. So who cares?
You can start by doing MailChimp. That's what I started out using. And they're really great. They're super easy to use. You can integrate them in pretty much any selling platform at all. Start your email list. Start it now. Okay?!
In Person
This last one is a little different. I think you should always market yourself in person too. So basically, have business cards with you at all times. My cards have my business name, my name, contact and I include a free logo pin with each card.
People always comment on my ita bag because it's still a pretty new thing, and whenever anyone reaches out to me or taps me on the shoulder, and says, "I love your bag. That's awesome." Then first thing I do is say, "Thanks, I made it." Which is the best feeling in the world but it's also really cool when you can hand them a free pin and send them to your shop.
I was in Target the other day and this gentleman comes up and he asked, "Can I take a picture of your bag for my daughter? She really likes pins." And of course I said, "Sure." And then we ended up chatting. I gave him a pin from off of my bag (I didn’t have an cards with me at the time!) and then they ended up coming to Flair Fest that weekend and they hung out and supported all the other artists there. So don’t underestimate personal connections.
It's the same when you're at shows, always have your business cards. It’s really fun talking to people about my shop and explaining what I do. Having my ita bag there with my pins is a really great way to help people understand what I do, too, haha! I think it just helps build a deeper connection with just other human beings and with your local community, which is really great.
Okay. So we talked about Instagram. So I want you to go into your analytics and I want you to take a look and see which posts are giving you the most clicks. And the most engagement. These are really important so you can duplicate that kind of thing for later.
I want you to take a look at Pinterest and if you've already got one set up, awesome. Let's be friends on Pinterest. And if you don't have one yet, you can look at my profile just to see an example of what someone's doing with pins on that site.
For email lists, if you don't have an email list, get one. And if you haven't emailed your people in a while, do it.
And then don't be shy when you're in person with someone, give them a business card, explain what you do, be excited about it and be confident in your work because you're awesome and you own your own business. How cool is that?!
Okay, so do you feel good about those options? It's not too much. It's totally doable and I actually go into more depth, as I said before in my webinar, the five ways to grow your following fast on Instagram. I talk more in depth about email lists on there too. It's full of tons of free content. It's a great webinar full of so much stuff that you can really put into action immediately to start growing your following. Go check it out.
