Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
On Pinterest, people love ads. Like they not only like to look at them, they actually save them and go back to them time and time again. Other than the Super Bowl, when else does that happen, right? So if you want to spend money on ads and you want your money to go a long ways, definitely think about Pinterest. But before we get into the nitty gritty of who's on Pinterest and how to do ads on Pinterest, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my story. My name's Alex Evjen. I am an influencer, I am a creator, and I'm a strategist. I'm a woman who wears many hats. I'm also a mom, I'm very busy if you can tell. First and foremost, I'm a creator. I have a company called AVE Styles that I started eight years ago. I started it to simplify the complicated world of fashion for men and women. And I would go around on closet floors and just try to organize things and help people with their emotional problems about their body image. I mean, it was an intense job, but what I learned thro...
ugh that is that I'm passionate about creating experiences for people so that they can feel like their best selves, and ultimately I love telling their story and creating spaces and moments and whether that's an outfit or a wedding, I love helping them just make life special and meaningful. And I did this as a small business owner in Phoenix Arizona, and I started using Pinterest all the time, so I saw this as this great way to organize my thoughts and ideas, and many of you probably use it for this same thing. But as I started using Pinterest to help organize my life and organize my business, and I was sharing incessantly all these crazy cool things I was seeing online, my community started growing and I became an influencer, what we now call someone with a lot of followers. And really though, I think influencer is more of like someone who just loves community and loves people, and so it's crazy to think that I have almost a million people who listen when I share something and who can give me feedback, and all because of Pinterest. It really has changed my life. It feels like a fairy tale. And that, combined being a creator and an influencer together has made me create, given me opportunities to create content for companies like Target and companies like Calvin Klein, and I've had opportunities to create ads for them, so not just create content that they share on social media, and then I share on a blog. I'm actually creating and spending time thinking about their brand story, thinking about, oh you want to target moms who have students going back to college, like how do we create an advertisement that makes people want to engage with Target? So that's what I do all the time, and I work as a strategist for an influencer marketing company called August United, where we match brands with influencers, kind of like myself, together to create and tell unique stories. So without Pinterest, nothing of this would be possible, so I'm so glad to be here to share my excitement for the platform with you all today. So I want to ask you some questions. If you're thinking about ads, you're probably like, I'm not gonna spend a lot of money there, or, I'm a small business owner and money's so precious, I don't know if this is a wise investment for me, I'm interest in it but I don't really know. Let me ask you some questions today and that will help you discern whether spending money on ads is right for you, cause it might not be, and that's okay. I'm not gonna tell you today, everybody needs to buy ads, that's not who I am. We can only invest in things that we know are gonna work, and we need to be smart and strategic about it. So, my question to you, first question is, would you rather find your exact customer or cross your fingers they've already found you? Ads help you find that exact customer. Through targeting, you can find based on their interest, based on demographic information, based on whether they've already engaged with your content or visited your website, you can know that when you're serving an ad to them, you're serving the right person. If we're reliant upon the fact that they've already started following us, yeah that's really great, it's like having a blind fold and throwing a dart at a dart board and hoping it reaches them. Whereas where you spend money on ads, you take off that blind fold and you throw that dart and you nail it. So in essence, ads are actually saving you a lot of time which is also money. So, again, driving that point home. Are you reaching the same people over and over again? I mean, we want to nurture those relationships with our customers, we don't want to dismiss them, especially if they can be repeat customers. That's why we continue to engage on social and continue sharing ideas with our followers. But I also want to know if a new customer is out there, and I want to experiment, and ads create that opportunity to say, hmm well I know that the female millennial mom is definitely my main customer, but I wonder if a grandma would be interested in these childrens books too. Maybe I'm gonna take time to nurture a new customer base. Ads will help you do that. Are you on a time crunch? I mean, the truth is, when we have something that has to happen right away and we need immediate engagement and immediate ROI, ads can help us do that. The truth is, on Pinterest, it's a beautiful thing that content lives forever and continues to perform for you, so when you save a pin, and then you save a pin, and then you save a pin, it goes exponentially, and that's all well and good, but it takes about three and a half months for a pin to reach its half life. So given that it takes a while to do that and you might have a product that's like, I need to get this out now, I need a ton of downloads now, run some paid to make action happen quickly. Are you getting frustrated with algorithms? I mean, blah, who isn't, right? Well, when you spend money on ads, you can just ignore all algorithms and just know that it's gonna work for you. So if you're frustrated, maybe trying to figure this out, and spending a lot of time and energy, reading a lot of blog posts about algorithms, just spend money on ads and save yourself some time. Use Pinterest ads. So today, I'm gonna kind of give you a run down of what we're going through today. We're talking about why Pinterest, why you should consider it as an ad platform, the types of campaigns you can run on Pinterest, so what kinds of campaigns work there, how to create your ad, how do you execute your campaign, so once you know what kind of campaign you're running and you have your artwork, how exactly do you implement that and then some success stories on what has worked for some brands that you know very well and you love, I'm sure. And measuring and testing. How do we know that it worked, how do we know the ROI?