AL EP 54: Kate Ahl – Turning Pinterest into Profit

Show Notes

Connect with Kate Ahl & Simple Pin Media here –
Web: https://www.simplepinmedia.com/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/simplepinmedia/_created/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simplepinmedia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simplepinmedia
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-ahl/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/simplepinmedia/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SimplePinMedia

#howto #pinterest #podcast #agency #marketing #digitalmarketing #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurmindset #socialmedia #hiring #employees #employers #management #training

Episode Transcript

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;32;21

Everybody is adjusting to go more agency and transformation Coach and founder of Niche in Control Greater of Leverage for Growth. And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist which scaled from 0 to $200000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of Leverage for Growth Podcast Agency Leverage Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets and leadership styles.

00;00;32;23 – 00;00;55;23

We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money in order for you to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at niche in control.

00;00;55;25 – 00;01;25;20

Com slash key study at niche in control icon slash kingdom. You are now listening to Leverage for Growth. Hey everybody, This is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of Leverage for Growth. Welcome to the Agency Leverage edition. Today I am here with Kate, all the founder of Simple PIN Media and the leading Pinterest marketing agency on a mission to help you increase brand awareness, drive sales and conversions, and scale your business using Pinterest.

00;01;25;26 – 00;01;43;16

Thanks for coming to our show today, Kate. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency? Yeah. So nine years ago it was actually actually more like nine and a half. I was with a friend. We were at a point in our family recovering from the recession.

00;01;43;18 – 00;02;01;22

I had been working for her, doing some Facebook marketing kind of affiliate marketing, getting my feet wet with that. And unemployment had dragged on for a while. My husband had lost his job and it was coming to an end and I thought, What are we going to do? We’re living on food stamps. I have three kids. I know this skill.

00;02;01;22 – 00;02;17;26

I have a degree in political science. I always wanted to teach. That’s not an option. So she said, Well, I just watched a webinar about Pinterest marketing, and I know you’ve been doing a little dabbling with mine, like why don’t you manage for people’s Pinterest accounts? And I literally looked at her and said, like, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.

00;02;17;27 – 00;02;36;11

Like, nobody is going to go for that. But right at the same time, Facebook was changing their algorithm away from kind of this open model with business pages. So this free traffic model was now going to move into this paid traffic model. And so all these people were saying, where did my traffic go and how I’m going to get it back?

00;02;36;19 – 00;02;53;09

Well, because Pinterest was just three years old, there was still this open traffic model, Right. So I thought, okay, well, I don’t have any other options. Let’s try it. So I looked into it and said, How could I manage? How could I be the person? How could I do what I was doing on Facebook and really drive traffic?

00;02;53;09 – 00;03;10;17

And I tested it with her account and it was working. So I bought the domain symbol PIN media, talked about packages and thought, well, what do people want? Like what? What would a business owner want for me? And I really didn’t know. So she asked three friends to be beta clients at a super low cost and they loved it.

00;03;10;17 – 00;03;30;12

And it was like, okay, this is working. They told some friends, they told more friends. And then it kind of mushroomed into a business, I guess, which is even though I had set it up as a business, got the LLC and all these things, I really didn’t think it would go anywhere. But later that year, in 2014, somebody recommended my business in an email newsletter.

00;03;30;14 – 00;03;48;08

And when I say blowing out my email, I’m like 4 to 5, right? So it was like, Oh my gosh, people are emailing me. And so I hired a coach and I said, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to run a business, so can you help me? And that kind of began the first part of my agency journey, which I don’t even think I’d call it an agency.

00;03;48;08 – 00;04;16;18

Then it was service provider because I thought agencies are these big things in New York and they are fancy. And I’m not fancy. I’m just a mom at home. I love it. I love the humble beginnings and also the the testing out in the market. I think one of the keys to starting a business is making sure that it actually there’s a demand for it and the proof of concept to anybody that’s listening that either is just about to start an agency going through a very similar process that’s going to be beneficial.

00;04;16;24 – 00;04;41;19

Mm hmm. Absolutely. So it kind of. So you got your lunch, you got paid paid clients, either the beta and kind of new clients. Talk a little bit about some of those milestones along the way leading up to where you are today. Yeah, I would say probably one of the first milestones was this idea of having a team and the realization that as a single owner, if you’re working one on one with clients, you can only go so far, you only have so much bandwidth.

00;04;41;22 – 00;05;01;09

And so right into 2014, about eight months, my oldest daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes, which was like a really sudden diagnosis. I was in the hospital. I was trying to email clients and saying, Here’s where I’m at while trying to deal with the grief of what was happening. And I thought, I need an emergency person, just somebody who can take over if this happens.

00;05;01;12 – 00;05;19;16

And so I asked a friend, I was like, I’ll teach you how to do this. Let’s work through this and you can help me do this. And that sparked in me this love of team. I realized, Oh, I’m really good at equipping other people with the skills to do this thing. And that could actually help me serve more clients.

00;05;19;19 – 00;05;36;18

And so I hired a couple more people, always being sure that I looked at my profit margins, you know, where they still making money. And that, I think, catapulted me into 2015 when I hired a business coach when we were growing because there was a need in the market and I could easily figure out how to hire people.

00;05;36;18 – 00;05;55;07

And I was obviously not effective at hiring. And it really went something like this, Like we met at Starbucks and I said, Do you want to work for me? Like, here’s what I do. Do you think this would be cool? And they were like, Sure. And I wanted a local team. So I live in Portland. So Portland, Vancouver, metro area.

00;05;55;09 – 00;06;21;12

If we can meet in person, then we can also strategize, talk about things. And Zoom wasn’t prevalent then, so it wasn’t like you could do a lot of these video calls. So that was really the second lift of the agency was allowing me to multiply myself and knowing that I really loved equipping and empowering people. And I tell service providers and agency owners all the time, like, if you don’t love the idea of a team, that’s okay.

00;06;21;13 – 00;06;43;02

You just need to know that your agency might not scale on the same level because you can’t be on the front lines as much as you were in the beginning. And that’s just like a natural progression. Absolutely. And that is one of the hardest part, is usually perfectionism, keeping people out the solopreneur and then being able to duplicate during that time where you’re doing the duplication.

00;06;43;02 – 00;07;02;08

Because I know that that’s a huge piece and we can talk about client attraction and all that kind of stuff. But the duplication piece, what are some of the things that if you were to do it all over again that you might pass on? It’s kind of like our are like ways to kind of shortcut or don’t do this, do this instead of anything kind of come to mind.

00;07;02;10 – 00;07;25;23

Yeah, I would say probably one of those first things, which is just assuming people wanted to work for me and it was more because I was desperate and I was like not really a very formal process, which is interesting because I got really lucky and fortunate that a lot of those team members are still with me today and they’ve grown up through, I think what I would really what I would probably pass on to somebody is try to be formal in the beginning.

00;07;26;00 – 00;07;43;19

I know it’s hard because you don’t have a lot of formalities and you don’t know what you’re doing. When I was growing my agency, there wasn’t a lot of people talking about it that weren’t super high level. There was a lot of digital marketing conversation, people selling courses, but there wasn’t a lot of this like how to be an agency owner, service provider.

00;07;43;22 – 00;08;18;03

So I didn’t even hear about how to hire people. So I think if I was to do it now, it would be a lot more formal, not too formal, but just how do you relate with the person? And I think that was probably number one is do our personalities mesh? Do we match? I also think, too, there’s a distinct difference between hiring somebody who’s corporate from corporate and hiring somebody who is potentially like a stay at home mom who maybe has a degree but had kids and now they’re coming back into the market and somebody who has a corporate experience has a different expectation of a startup.

00;08;18;08 – 00;08;37;23

Right? Because their corporate comes with structure, a startup comes with build the plane as you fly it. And a lot of people who are from corporate can’t handle that. So I think I would be more aware of where somebody is coming from and that I didn’t have that in my frame of reference. So that’s a good piece of wisdom to pass on.

00;08;37;23 – 00;08;56;12

Is just what’s the previous experience? And don’t just look at you want this breadth of experience because you’re like, this person is going to be amazing. There’s value in training up people in your system, especially if your system is not something that somebody can go out and buy, which is the case for me. With Pinterest marketing, it was like I had a proprietary process.

00;08;56;12 – 00;09;17;26

I knew how I was doing things and I wanted to teach that. I didn’t want to send them through a course. Now I love it. And there’s so many gems in what you just said. Okay, so now talking about the proprietary process and kind of niching, obviously I have a great passion for niches, what made like obviously there was kind of like an external factor.

00;09;17;28 – 00;09;44;17

Facebook’s changes leading towards organic traffic within the service offering within Pinterest, was that always do you always have the same services within Pinterest itself, or has that kind of evolved over time? Yeah, well, what’s great actually is Pinterest has been a pretty slow moving platform. It’s kind of a sleeper platform compared to all the rest. Where Instagram it was coming on the scene during that time, but it wasn’t as prevalent as Facebook.

00;09;44;17 – 00;10;04;18

Facebook. You had more of your name attached to it, whereas somebody could easily be someone else on Pinterest. So it didn’t require this facial piece or I mean, it does a little bit more now, but we can still manage it just as easily. But it felt like it was easy to look at the data and interpret what to do.

00;10;04;25 – 00;10;27;28

And because the CEO over there for a long time, he’s not the current CEO anymore, was much more of a slower moving CEO. You had things change less. Whereas on Facebook it was don’t write this, write this, don’t use a scheduler, do this. You didn’t have that on Pinterest. You really had like three main components of consistency, keywords because it search and discovery and images.

00;10;27;28 – 00;10;48;22

And if you could get those things together, then we could remain pretty consistent with the exception of them going from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed, which obviously sets up for ads. But other than that, it was fairly easy to market on it as somebody else, which all the other platforms were just so difficult at the time to do that.

00;10;48;24 – 00;11;14;14

So I just loved I also loved the fact that there were no comments, so you didn’t have to worry about interaction with the community. And so then it also made it easier to be somebody’s presence because you didn’t have to comment back to somebody else. Mm hmm. Awesome. It seems like it’s a good channel for a lot of different reasons, from consistency to being able to make it to where it’s very focused.

00;11;14;17 – 00;11;38;00

Yeah. So who’s kind of like your ideal clients? So if anybody is listening and they’re like, Oh, you know, I never thought about Pinterest, you know, who’s got your ideal client these days? So we would say Top is a creator, and second is e-commerce. And those views together are actually the best because Pinterest is fueled on really great content because people want to read articles or they want to look for products.

00;11;38;06 – 00;12;03;01

And when you have a client that has both of those together, they tend to work really well. These clients are usually focused on Google SEO. So Pinterest is a great sidestep because it has the same SEO component search except words with images. We have worked with some clients who do services, but we find that it’s harder to convert a Pinterest user to say yes to your service because they’re so much more warm up involved.

00;12;03;03 – 00;12;28;08

So we have people in the food space or people in the DIY space or the creator space of physical products like jewelry or beauty weddings. Obviously is pretty big as well. But we really try to focus on mainly if you have a creator component and an e-commerce component, that’s like the magic happens at that point. Awesome. So we’ve talked about a lot of different topics.

00;12;28;11 – 00;12;45;13

If you were to give any advice, kind of looking back. I know you talked about the hiring part and but if you were to look at the whole experience of being an agency owner and looking back and giving some type of advice to somebody who might be one or two steps before you. What advice would you give them?

00;12;45;16 – 00;13;05;25

Yeah, I think probably for me, one of the biggest traps midway was I was immersed in a community, was talking about digital marketing and courses. And so I felt this tension between services and selling courses. And I don’t think I realized how different of models those were. So I thought, Well, I’ll grow my service side of my business.

00;13;05;25 – 00;13;39;12

Then I’ll sidestep also teaching Pinterest and will create a course. Well, that’s a totally different, you know, lead source, right? And you’re getting completely different. And so I wish I would have realized that a little bit sooner. To immerse myself in more. The agency owner, service provider community, because we speak a different language. And I think also as I was growing up in this business, I saw a lot of digital course creators in their marketing using language that said, Don’t be a service provider, don’t trade time for dollars, come do this.

00;13;39;12 – 00;13;59;10

And so I thought, why am I doing something wrong here? And I think a lot of that just because I wasn’t around other agency owners and now that I am nine years, almost ten years in, I’m saying I want to be with agency owners because then I can understand what is the trend that they’re following. But especially in this economy, right.

00;13;59;11 – 00;14;23;22

Like agents, when I was in a mastermind call in December with agency owners and I heard this same thing that I was feeling, I was like, I found my people. Like I found those those struggles identified with that. Everybody got hit so hard in August, September, know, October. They were like this wave came out of nowhere. And people are easily cutting marketing budgets right now.

00;14;23;22 – 00;14;47;22

They’re cutting these extra agencies that they’ve hired. So I think I just wish I would have realized early on that there is a distinct difference between being an educator and being a service provider. Mm hmm. That is huge. And yeah, there are definitely a different business models for sure. Yeah. So what are you working on right now? And what are you excited about in the next 1 to 3 years with your agency?

00;14;47;24 – 00;15;08;09

Yeah, I think there’s two things. One, I think I’m starting to think about. Okay, what does that look like to land the plane of the agency? Is this something that I don’t think is going to be passed down to my kids or anything like that? So what does it look like to have an exit plan? Not necessarily that I want to always execute on that exit plan, but at least have a target in mind.

00;15;08;11 – 00;15;29;05

And then I think number two is current economy and where we’re at. What is it like for people to say yes to Pinterest marketing and that investment when it’s not something that feel there’s no quick wins in Pinterest marketing? Like it just it’s the same with Google SEO. It’s you build it, you plant it, you nurture it. And so figuring out how do we communicate with customers?

00;15;29;07 – 00;15;56;28

Because I grew on referrals, I grew on word of mouth. I have a podcast. It was very easy for me to get clients and now I’m learning. But there’s a lot more work in that. So really putting myself in positions that say, How can I be educated about what good lead gen looks like and not in the LinkedIn pitching nonstop kind of way that I see all the time, but how can I really find the clients that I want to work with?

00;15;56;28 – 00;16;17;27

Find the clients that I want to see their success and communicate that in a way? And then I think also understanding who I am as an agency owner and realizing I am a creator too. I love creating podcast content or video content, and I’m not so much a digital marketer. So if you put any ads in front of me, I’m just like zone out, right?

00;16;17;27 – 00;16;41;07

And that I think is a lot of learning who your identity is and what you like and what you don’t like as an agency. So I see in the next 1 to 3 years as further development of me and being confident in, Yes, I’m good at this. Nope, I’m not good at this and I have a choice in the not good to hire somebody pending cashflow or to say it’s just not important and that is okay.

00;16;41;07 – 00;17;08;20

There’s nothing wrong with that. So yeah, the one next one or three years I think are going to be interesting. You will often, well, what’s what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you or do you have any offers for them they could take advantage of? Yeah, actually on our website, simple pin media icon, we have kind of like this encyclopedia of Pinterest marketing just for people to get an understanding of what it is and what it can do for their business or even their clients.

00;17;08;23 – 00;17;43;03

So going there just checking things out. We got a ton of free resources. You can book a discovery call, obviously with us too. Another way is the podcast, So we’ve been doing our podcast now for seven years, which is crazy, talking all about Pinterest and I love it. So if you want to get an idea of how we teach what we’re kind of working through, that has a huge don’t start at the beginning because Pinterest has changed since then, but started the most recent and work through and just to see what it’s all about and don’t overlook it for the other platforms that feel flashy because I think Pinterest still drives so much traffic for

00;17;43;03 – 00;18;02;04

people. It’s kind of this foundational platform that’s easily forgotten, but it’s such a workhorse for businesses in the background. So you can really focus on other platforms too as well. Hmm. Cool. And for anybody that’s listening, I’ll put the links to Kate in the show notes. And Kate, I just want to thank you very much for being on the show today.

00;18;02;07 – 00;18;24;13

Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been great to chat about this agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day.

00;18;24;16 – 00;18;42;15

Go to niche in control dot com slash case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year to live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about.

00;18;42;18 – 00;19;07;06

Go to niche in control dot com slash case study that is niche in control dot com slash case of now.