Passengers (And Authors), Prepare For Landing

I have travel plans. 

On Friday, John and I are returning to the Lone Star State and I’m plenty excited about the trip. We’re flying into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Despite recent renovations, I am very familiar with the airport layout. I’ve flown in and out of that place countless times. I know my way around the joint. I feel secure there.

In June, I’m taking a trip to Salt Lake City. This will be the first time I've landed at the Salt Lake City International Airport. You can bet, once the plane has landed and I make my way down the jet bridge, I’ll be thinking, “Where should I go?” I anticipate that there will be plenty of well-placed, easy to-understand signs available to help me find my way.  Well-crafted website landing pages need to serve your audience in a similar fashion.

Think about your audience’s travel experience prior to discovering your website. Who knows where their flight may have originated from – a conference, a social media post, a Zoom webinar? Whatever it may be, something interesting compelled them to scour the internet to find your website. If you and your website are familiar, they might be tolerant of some confusion while searching for the information they need. If they don’t know you and cannot easily find the information they desire, they’ll bounce. Bummer, man.

This week we’re crafting the pins for the Second Annual Pinterest Pals Summer Reading Book Club. I cannot wait for you to see these gorgeous treasures. Collage pins. Video pins. Idea pins. Genre-specific collections. Book-jacket standalones. We have also prepared a campaign web page to assure a smooth-landing after they have clicked-through to our website. For them, much like for me in Salt Lake City, orientation will be required. They need to easily understand where to go to get what they need.

The purpose for the Summer Reading Book Club is to showcase (and sell) selected books written by our 2022 clients, and to highlight their Pinterest platforms. This messaging will be creatively communicated through graphics and pin descriptions. By clearly doing so, our click-through audience (All thousands of them!) will know the purpose of their landing and what to do next. As you can see, we’ve made it very easy for them to either view the authors’ Pinterest platforms and/or purchase their books.

ETA for the Summer Reading Book Club takeoff is Monday, April 18. Buckle up and join us as we fly the friendly skies of Pinterest.

Visibility Hang Time From A Goalie’s Perspective

Believe it not, I was once a fierce and widely feared (Feared? That be stretching it, a little bit.) goalie for a women’s league team called The Sugar Cubes. Most of our games were played in the East Dallas area. Our greatest rival was a team called The Charlie’s Angels and, oh…did they ever play dirty. I still recall defeating their best player in a shootout. How can I ever forget? My messed-up left knee reminds me of that triumphal moment every day.

My favorite part of the game was punting. I had a knack for keeping that ball in the air.  I knew I had done well when Sissy, our most ferocious fullback, would cut me a side glance and say, “Nice hang time.” Oh, yeah.

You’re wondering what this trip down Memory Lane has to do with Pinterest, right? Everything.

I learned something the other day that shocked me. I came across a video featuring my friend and mentor Amber Peterson discussing the benefits of adding Pinterest to one’s marketing strategies. During her presentation, which was filmed in 2020, she compared the visibility longevity of Pinterest pins with social media platforms. Using stats from 2019, she reported:

• Facebook posts have a visibility hangtime of 5 hours.

• Twitter tweets are seen for 24 minutes.

• Instagram posts have a 48-hour viewing window.

• Pins are evergreen. They remain searchable as long as the content is viable and one’s platform is live.

Isn’t that amazing? And those numbers are old! Those viewing windows are probably even shorter today. Amber also stated that, next to Google and YouTube, Pinterest is the third largest search engine in the world. And, that Pinterest boards show up in Google searches! Facts such as these fuel my passion for pinning. We need to get our books, programs, and on this powerful platform – Now! (Three exclamation points in seven lines. You get my drift?)

Thanks for reading about my hang-time glory days on the soccer field. Score!!!!

Surfing Trends: How To Catch A Wave With Pinterest

Yesterday, I made a discovery while working on a client’s monthly analytic report. For months, she and I have had our sights set on showcasing her Black History Month content in a big way and we rocked it! However, now that that campaign has passed, her numbers have dipped a bit, telling me that we must always anticipate when the next best trend will swell. No slacking. Here’s how we’re going to do it.

Say, you’ve got a YA about a surfer girl with a passion for dogs who came from Detroit. We’ve got three broad keywords here – surfer girl, dogs, and Detroit. Our job is to analyze and amplify these terms in efforts to clamp onto algorithms in time to, which can be useful to Pinterest paddlepusses, too!

According to Kate Ahl of Simple Pin Media, the Trends Tool is a "keyword tool that helps you see what people are looking for and when they are looking for it." With this tool, we marketers anticipate what and when their intended audience will be searching for their content. I wonder when readers might be searching for our dog-loving surfer girl novel. Let’s find out.

Let’s drop ‘surfer girl’ in the search bar and see what comes up. Wow. We have two crests to ride, the highest being May 22. We’d better get some well-optimized pins going now to catch that first big kahuna.

Our girl is from Detroit. Let’s see what happens when we drop ‘Detroit’ in the search bar. Okay. That's a steady one. We’ll be sure to include that keyword often.

Who doesn’t love dogs, right? Let’s see how her puppy helps our algorithms. Yeow! That one hangs ten at 100 in December! Let’s be sure to post loads of pins showcasing that keyword in the fall, just in time to crest in the holidays. Pretty amazing right?

See why we Pinterest Pals geek out about the Trends Tool? Try it. You will, too.

Contact me if you’d like to know more about how Pinterest can help your marketing efforts. I love to do workshops and presentations for groups - large and small. A captive audience interested in Pinterest? Are you kidding me? Let us know how we can be of help to you. Until then…hang loose.