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Ep 01: What I Learned After Spending $35 Million On Pinterest Ads
Transcript
What I Learned After Spending $35 Million on Pinterest Ads
Alex Ivanoff: Welcome to Mission Control, where we give you step by step instructions on how to take your eCommerce store to levels only a rocket can reach. Each episode, we'll be interviewing an expert in the eCommerce industry that is going to give you simple, actionable advice on how to attract new customers, retain them and build a brand that you are proud of. This show is brought to you by the makers of RocketCart, an eCommerce services and solutions company.
Alex Ivanoff: All right. Welcome to one of our very first episodes of Mission Control. I'm your host, Alex Ivanoff. With my co-host Dave Pancham of RocketCart. And today, on today's episode, we have our special guest, Lindsey Shearer from Pins 4 Profit. Thanks for joining us, Lindsay.
Lindsay Shearer: What's up y'all, so excited to be here to give you some alternative advertising channels. Here we go.
Alex Ivanoff: Love your energy. Love it.
Dave Pancham: I feel like everybody else in this world is coming from like Facebook, Google, TikTok. And nobody's talking about pinning. So, I think this is pretty exciting stuff.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, you know, we've built an entire agency business model on that fact. Which is really fun. But it's amazing. It's such an awesome opportunity for, there are a lot of different kinds of brands. I know, that was one of the questions, you guys are going to ask that work on Pinterest. And so if you can get those metrics right, it's a phenomenal marketing channel that's certainly underutilized. Definitely untapped. We've spent, we're spending like $35 million a year on Pinterest with, for a variety of different clients. And I haven't hit the max yet that I feel like we've burnt, understanding. So I'm excited. People don't really think about it a lot. But we've got some really cool, interesting strategies to talk about with you all today.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah. And speaking of underrated, I mean, that was the first impression that I got when we met a few months ago. You know, you came off, and saying I'm a huge advertiser on Pinterest. This is what my agency models are all based about, based around. And I'm sitting here thinking like, an agency based off of Pinterest alone, and just hearing you talk about, you know, the different opportunities on Pinterest was super exciting. So I'm happy to have you on and we're super excited to learn more about it. So tell us about Pins 4 Profit. What you guys do, tell us about how it got started? What's the story? Yeah.
Lindsay Shearer: Well, you know, my background, my way background was like mergers and acquisitions. So I was doing business sales, and really helping brands get started, which gave me a unique perspective on this early adopter of a new business strategy. And that's given me a unique opportunity with Pinterest because it really is a lot of times the first touch in a customer's journey of exploring a new brand. 93% of brands on there are unbranded, they call it, which means they're brand new. They are learning the process of advertising, they're getting exposed to a lot of DIY-type folks who are willing to test and try out things. And so, in my process of mergers and acquisition, I had started a variety of different businesses and agencies and run large SEO agencies and work for some massive brands creating just search intent marketing. And in the process, about five years ago, I started just kind of throwing things up on Pinterest, I had used it a little bit for organic over the years. And I was like, okay, what happens if we add a really intentional strategy to Pinterest, which is actually a search engine, not a social media site. It, what happens if I apply my SEO knowledge and my search engine knowledge to this platform, what's possible? And so we just started seeing crazy amounts of traffic. And I guess the word got out because it suddenly was like, overnight, we had so many clients coming to us about Pinterest ads, and the different things that we were learning, and just spending a lot of money, and testing a lot of things. And so it was basically it kind of, like, out of necessity everyone was, and still is, looking for alternative marketing channels to just Facebook or just Google. And really, even the last year after all the iOS updates and everything, it's been a struggle for all advertisers to really get good metrics. And so we thankfully have an alternative for adding in really good row as opportunities and things like that for brands, that make sense for the brands. So, or make sense for the platform. So it's been a crazy wild ride. I feel like everything I've learned about business marketing, everything you can think of I use every day in our agency life. So it's definitely been a fun journey, helping clients and really giving them the opportunity to open a new marketing channel that they may have not otherwise thought of. But once you see our case studies and stuff like that, it's really hard to resist the opportunity to want to try it.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, absolutely. We'll definitely get into you know, what kind of brands specifically can advertise on Pinterest and what type of strategies and stuff but with Pins 4 Profit, your agency for Pinterest marketing, specifically, how long ago did that start?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, about six years ago now. We were started mainly with organic and then they launched their ad platform about four and a half years ago or so. So we were really early adopters on that and testing different spend because I had been in the eCommerce world and doing all kinds of stuff for years. And so I thought, Okay, well, let's just try this out. We ran a lot of different SEO campaigns. And so we would kind of upsell that to our clients. Like, hey, try this out. I think it's gonna add more traffic or they were already seeing some traffic on their site. So we decided to start offering Pinterest-only services on that division of the agency because it's a great marketing tool. I guess, as you're looking at placement and branding, and you're creating a new business, we wanted something very niche specific that was going to be able to be targeted with advertisements and things like that much more directly.
Alex Ivanoff: Got it. And did you say that you spend $35 million a year as a collective agency?
Lindsay Shearer: Yes.
Alex Ivanoff: Now, for those that don't really understand Pinterest is a big platform. But it's not nearly as big as Facebook, you know, Google, Twitter, even TikTok at this point. I mean, they still make billions of dollars a year in revenue. But I mean, Lizzie, you got to be one of the biggest advertisers on Pinterest, right?
Lindsay Shearer: Every time I look at their numbers, I think to myself, I did that.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, you're a big slice of that pie, right?
Lindsay Shearer: We really just try and explore it doesn't necessarily mean we have everyone has their own advertising parameters and things like that. And so there are certain brands that are looking for certain metrics that maybe are not a good fit. But in general, we haven't really had too many brands, I didn't feel like I had exceptional results. But I do only take on clients that I feel like have the right pieces to the puzzle. And those pieces include that they're brand market fit, that they already have some tested products, their funnels are pretty tested. And they know what metrics and goals are trying to hit. And they also have enough money, budget and swear with all to open a new marketing channel. Because it is, it's definitely a struggle. It's something that has a lot of ups and downs. And I feel like 80% of my job every day is reassuring my clients, this is normal. I know, it seems like crazy, but it really is normal. And you can't use your Facebook strategy or your Google strategy for Pinterest, you have to look at it like its own channel. So it's, but we have great results for a lot of great clients. We do mainly eCommerce, but we have a lot of info products and coaching, things like that. And then also we do some lead gen for certain clients that are looking for whether they have a giveaway model, or they're trying to just get leads for their info products and coaching programs or high ticket programs, or even for eCommerce, we as your eCommerce brand grows, we come in once you've got some sustainability with ads, then most brands are looking to grow and build a larger set of platform parameters around their business and create a full brand. And the next steps in that process are usually SEO and then adding in Pinterest once they can see what that's capable of. And then we use those strategies together. That's kind of, my trademark is cross ranks. That's the name of it, where I'm using the same strategy to help channels and brands rank on multiple advertising channels at once. So that's YouTube search engines, Google Pinterest, anything that's a search engine, we can use a similar strategy. And I don't think a lot of people are doing that. I've never really heard anyone talk much about that. So that I felt like there was definitely a gap in the industry, especially as you're a content creator, and content is king. And everyone's trying to pump out all this content all the time. If you don't have an intentional strategy, you're really kind of at the mercy of an Instagram algorithm that lasts 24 hours versus creating this long-term sustainable strategy that's going to drive consistent engagement over time.
Dave Pancham: So if I'm understanding correctly, we're saying Pinterest should not be the first platform that you come to advertise to it should be, how does it fit in the marketing mix for,
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah. Usually don't recommend it unless you're a coaching brand or someone that's doing just straight lead gen. And maybe I would still have to look at their funnels and make sure I generally recommend that you verify and validate your funnels with Facebook or Google because you can get results there so much faster. With Pinterest ads, it takes a longer time, you have a very different buying cycle that people are used to, people, they're very high search intent. But when they come to Pinterest, they have this opportunity that's unique on that platform alone, where they can actually see an image, save it and come back later and purchase it. So just inherently in the buying behavior. There's this massive delayed attribution situation. So you may not know for a month the results that you're going to get from the ads that you put up last month, so it's, it's much harder to test and trial. Trial and error, I would say, versus like a Facebook or Google to at least intent validate your funnel. Make sure that everything's converting you have an idea of a cost per click, your average order value, things like that, and then I can take those numbers and generally beat them with Pinterest.
Alex Ivanoff: Wow! Fascinating. It sounds very complex to an average person, but I'm sure, you know, diving into it. Like it's a simple concept, right?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah. I mean, if you're an advertiser, it's much easier if you're learning the journey of marketing. You definitely have a learning curve just like anything else. where you're understanding that people convert on purchases based on certain parameters. So that may be the way your landing page looks, or it may be your checkout buttons, it may, there's all these undercover psychological things that have to happen. And so we recommend that you find those things out ahead of time before coming to Pinterest, I mean, you'll still see certain things. And we've seen over the years, a variety of different, like, landing page styles and certain strategies and things that work pretty much across the board. But you also have to have the ability to create those kind of pages and stuff like that on a pretty quick basis to make sure that you're not wasting spend trying to figure that out.
Dave Pancham: Do you find it having a bit of a longer attribution, Do you find that a lot of people just give up quickly on it, because they're not seeing the quickest the results that they expect?
Lindsay Shearer: I had over the years, a few clients kind of get impatient, I'm really good about setting expectations in the beginning, like, Listen, this is a brand new marketing channel. And the truth of the matter is, even if your Facebook, Google, etc, if you have a brand new offer, and you're opening a brand new channel, and you have no audience, it doesn't matter. Where do you start, you're going to have to build from scratch anyway, and you can't expect immediate results. Especially now, there's just so many factors that happen to, it happen in the advertising strategy. But because I set really good expectations, like, we normally tell our new advertisers, it's going to be a solid four months before you see enough results, or potentially enough results to actually see what the platform is capable of for scaling purposes. So month one, we're really testing a lot of things looking for different audiences, seeing where we can get some wins testing the pixel, which it's a nightmare. On Pinterest, there's always errors, and the shopping feeds are a total train wreck. So we just kind of build in, it's going to take us two weeks or so to even get all that figured out with a professional dev team. So it's a hard thing to imagine clients kind of trying to do it on their own, I can see why people would get frustrated, especially when you have the delay. But because we have an amazing team, I've pretty much experienced every possible scenario of what could go wrong or just any issue that could ever come up. So I know how to deal with things very quickly. And then we recommend giving it a solid four-month trial for ads. So it's a six months trial for organic and now we actually, like ,require that. So they know ahead of time, this is what to expect, generally, you're going to start seeing radical results after just depends on the brand, but four to six weeks, eight weeks, you'll start seeing, okay, this is actually really viable, then by the end of month three, you're going to start seeing all that delay coming from month one and two. And then by Month four, you're really going to start seeing the scaling potential like okay, got my brain wrapped around this. I understand the delay. Now it's starting to make sense. Even when you go back and look at those numbers from when you very first started, they're going to be much higher generally. So it just takes a little bit of coercion and expectations setting. And then once you start getting results, it's much easier to make that decision. But the first ramp-up is a little difficult.
Alex Ivanoff: So someone's differ, because of the nature of the Pinterest platform. It's very it's a very niche platform, right?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah.
Alex Ivanoff: In a way for the D2C direct to consumer brands that are listening. You know, Can, Can all of them work on Pinterest, can all them advertise on Pinterest, like what kind of brands specifically succeed most often on, on Pinterest?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, so I'm consistently surprised about this. But in, generally, I would say home decor brands do great, beauty, haircare, Fashion, Fitness, things like that we do a lot of there's a lot of DIY type stuff on there. There's crafts, there's gardening, we've tried a lot of different stuff in those niches. And then this last year has really blown my mind because in general, it was typically only taking on products that served women, or mom and baby type brands do really well, things like that, that are geared towards mothers and stuff like that. But last year, we decided to go ahead and go out on a limb we had a couple of larger men's brands come to us and say, Hey, we really want to try and see what the market looks like. And so we got some pretty crazy results with things like luxury watches, wallets, stuff like that for men. And we took more of, like, a gifting angle. During the holidays. Father's Day is also a really big time on Pinterest. People are looking for gift ideas for Dad, brother, things like that, grandpa. So there's there's more opportunity than I even thought was on there as of this last year. And 40% of new users are men. So that's a pretty good amount.
Alex Ivanoff: Wow. Yeah, I mean, we're, we're getting to, you know, almost an even 50/50. Yeah, new users. Now, why do you think, is that because, Is that the reason you think because or the reason why Pinterest is just an underrated platform in your mind? Or because of the connotation that it's a women's...
Lindsay Shearer: That combined, I would say more, it has to do with the search engine behavior that people don't realize the high intent search is some of the highest quality customers that you can get for eceCommerceommerce, etc. So, and most people don't even realize it's a search engine, they think, Oh, it's a social media site. And we get a lot of clients; sometimes they'll come on and be like, people are not commenting on my stuff. I'm like, This is not Instagram. They don't really engage the same way. But that doesn't mean that they're not on there. It's like Google, you don't see any comments on people's search results. So there's just a different way of looking at it. But if you can get a good keyword strategy, and you can understand buyer intentions, when it comes to search engines, it's like it's got some massive potential.
Dave Pancham: Can you give an example kind of like what the typical buyers journey is like for somebody that comes through Pinterest?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, So we test a lot of things for brands, whether it be driving them to collections pages, for example, where, so say, a person sees, say, you sell shoes, and a person sees one pair of shoes, we don't necessarily always drive back to a product page with just that one pair of shoes. A lot of times will drive to a collection page where they can review a lot of different things that they might like. We also do a lot of shopping ads where they're seeing certain products or a list of different products based on their search intention again, and then we do retargeting of the dining. That's the only place on Pinterest you can do dynamic retargeting, so it'll serve back the ad, say, you saw a blue pair of shoes you like. If you get a retargeting ad, a dynamic retargeting ad, it's going to show you back I'm sure you guys in the audience understand the retargeting journey of, like, oh my god, I just saw that on Google. And now I can't get rid of this ad until I purchase it. My buddy and I were, like, early adopters. And he's now the VP of Marketing for Manscaped. And I helped him do a lot of their stuff in the beginning, before it was anything. And we were like, our philosophy was you're going to get retargeted until you die or purchase. So, and then, yeah, there's a lot of different things you can target both interests and keywords. And so really just depends on the client, we'll look at their strategy and figure out what's going to make the most sense if it, if it means, there's a lot of people that read blogs on Pinterest. So sometimes we'll drive traffic to a blog to a lead gen opportunity, or we kind of help them create their blog into more of, like, a funnel situation where at the bottom of the page, they may have an add to cart, where you can see products down there that, that are relevant to this blog post where they can get this educational piece, because 80 some percent of users on Pinterest are, they don't just go to one page on your website. So if they land on a blog page, or they land on a product page, they're going to go to the homepage, and then they're going to go to the About page, they want to know about you about their brand. So we try and make that journey shorter by putting all of that information on whatever page we're driving traffic to. So if it's a blog page, then we beef it up and make it look more, geared towards the Pinterest buyer journey.
Alex Ivanoff: So this leads perfectly into my next question, because I wanted to ask what tips you have for brands that are posting organically on Pinterest, that we talked about the niche nature of the platform to make content, you obviously have to make it contextual to the platform. What are your tips for someone trying to make, you know, content organically on Pinterest?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I mean, they have some great search tools. Now, for Pinterest trends, there's a Pinterest trends tool. So you can actually get on there and start looking at different keywords and stuff that are currently trending. And then also just just like you would go to Google to start searching something or like learn a little bit more about something. When you type into the browser bar, your text that you're looking for, you're going to get a list of other potential matches for that word, are things that other that Google is saying other people are searching for, that may be more highly relevant to your search. The same is true for Pinterest. So definitely get in there. And then you once you click that, you can see other advertisers and other organic posts that are showing up really high in their algorithm. And you can start looking at how they're creating content and kind of mimic that idea because those are your number your highest search posts. So you want to definitely be competitive with those type of messaging designs. I'm personally a fan of really bright images. I think you mentioned that on one of our notes and like your branding is really bright. It is we want to stop this role. I want to interrupt everything that you're doing focus on this.So what's more, the cool thing about Pinterest though is it's less disruptive marketing like Facebook, where you're interrupting someone's personal family time or whatever they're doing on their...
Alex Ivanoff: Looking at cats on the internet. Yeah,
Lindsay Shearer: Watching random videos. And then you're, you're actually hitting higher on their intentional, of their search intention. So, what they're really looking for, so you're not interrupting them as much. And 83% of people plan their purchases on Pinterest. So they're actually planning when they're going to purchase. 93% of users on Pinterest in general have made at least one purchase.
Alex Ivanoff: So if I'm a brand looking to advertise, and I want to figure out, you know, how do I, how do I put out an ad that is most congruent with what the audience is doing. Obviously, I want to go to a place where they're already looking to buy and 83%. I mean, does any, do you think there's any other place in which that number is that high?
Lindsay Shearer: I doubt it. Maybe Google, but I doubt it. Still because people are still looking for search. And not, definitely not YouTube, because most people are looking for, like instructional videos or how-to's so really, I doubt it.
Alex Ivanoff: I mean, that's incredible.
Lindsay Shearer: It's a very unique platform for sure.
Dave Pancham: What are some of the simplest mistakes to avoid? Like I know you're talking like making sure people have, like, good proven funnels, so like, what a big no no being saying somebody directly to a product page?
Lindsay Shearer: No, oh, not necessarily. No. Typically, we do that more for, like, our retargeting journey, but it really just depends on the client. Some clients only have eight products, so you're not going to send them through 37, you know, warm-ups, such scenarios, bridge scenarios. So you may just drive directly to it depends on so with shopping campaigns, they're always going to go directly to product page. So you can rest assured that you'll have that being tested in the background, I kind of consider it versus we're usually more intentional with a lot of times people will spend a lot of money on obscure products, or they won't give them enough budget to actually create conversions. And I see some of this sometimes on Facebook, to, where if your cost per conversion is generally $30. And you'll only give your ad set a $15 a day budget, I don't know how you expect that you're going to get a sale from that. So you've got to get your budget, high enough in accordance with how the algorithm works. So that you can actually, if you want to get five purchases a day and your average purchase value is our average purchase order or your CPA cost per acquisition is $30, then you need to have at least $150 in your budget, if you expect that to convert four or five that day. So that's, that's probably one of the biggest things that I see. Or their images are just terrible. They don't really actually say or do anything. You'd be amazed at how many creatives I look at. I'm like, Oh, my God, what were y'all thinking? I don't know.
Dave Pancham: So are they just pulling the product image from their, you know, from their product page and just putting it in?
Lindsay Shearer: I don't usually, you know, Pinterest is very, kind of specific on their content. So pulling product images is not something we normally do. People do that, or they just have, you know, there's a lot of different things, bad lighting, or you can't really read anything on there, or they have no text, which I don't recommend. Because it's a visual search engine, you need to have some text to tell people what to do for their next step in the buying journey. So I see that a lot of times too, for sure.
Alex Ivanoff: You mentioned spending a lot of money on obscure products. Can you define what an obscure product for Pinterest would be?
Lindsay Shearer: I would say anything that's not really, like, tested, per se. So say a brand has 10 products, and three of them are their bestsellers, and seven out of those 10 are consistently sold. And the other three are, like, maybe sold sometimes. I would definitely not start with those other three.
Dave Pancham: So lead with your best sellers.
Alex Ivanoff: So lead with your best sellers. Make sure that you have a lot of text or even some texts. Basically don't have no text on your, on your images. What else? I mean, there's a bunch of them, right?
Lindsay Shearer: Have enough budget. Did you say that?
Alex Ivanoff: Yep.
Lindsay Shearer: And actually think of it as a search engine versus just a straight social media site that you're creating purchases and stuff on so gearing your content to be more search related to where you're actually answering the question that someone is searching for. What are they looking for, you got to think about, okay, if I'm going to Google and I want to learn how to do ballet, how, how am I, we have a client that's doing this now talking about this, they have an online dance class dance class membership, and if the client is Searching how to do ballet, you're not going to show them. Here's 97 Modern Dance opportunities, you really got to get more intentional about here's how to do ballet. Here's how you do stretch techniques. Here's how here's how you increase your flexibility. Here's a choreography class like things that are related to that.
Alex Ivanoff: Got it. So this is a, this next question is almost rhetorical, because based on our last conversation, I kind of had an idea how you might answer it. But what is the biggest challenge you're facing in Pinterest marketing right now? And how are you guys tackling it?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, Pinterest, always the problem is attribution. Because of this delayed buying cycle, there is no third-party platform that tracks properly, we've literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars working to try and find a solution for this. And I always tell people, if Google who's a billion-dollar company has not found a solution for attribution, the likelihood of it coming out anytime soon, is very low. So because you have a delay, you have this unique buying cycle where people are seeing things, they're coming back to purchase later, most people are trying to hit a Facebook attribution window, which is only seven days, which is extremely short. For us, we're more like 14 days to 20, the average purchase time on Pinterest is 20 days. So from when a person sees an image says it comes back later and a purchase is 20 days, generally, that's about three times as long as Facebook. So we usually tell people, you need at least twice as long in your buying cycle than what you're doing on other channels. So that's always the struggle, I would say. And the reason why people get frustrated or whatever is like they may have a third party tracking software. And they're like, I don't see a lot of things happening from Pinterest. So I'm like, Yeah, you're probably gonna see clicks and impressions. Also, Pinterest is a nightmare for dynamic UTM parameters. So they just don't pass back. I've literally spent hours with the engineering team, I can't even tell you how many hours, trying to figure out how do we pass back data that's actually going to be accurate.
Alex Ivanoff: So it's a struggle.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, it's not my favorite.
Alex Ivanoff: So I want to clarify this, though. Because, sorry, brands, brands might hear that and get discouraged. Because right every brand, every every company that puts money in advertising might look at it and say, hey, I want to put in x amount. And I want to know what I'm getting back with, you know, rough, undefined attribution. That's very hard. But in the grand scheme of things we've been dealing with this in the marketing industry for, right, how are people understanding what their ROI was on a billboard, you know, 50 years ago. So generally, you would still agree, though, that we've come a long way. And just because it's delayed, in some cases, doesn't mean you're not ever gonna understand how you're..
Lindsay Shearer: No, no. We have customer reports, I have the best tech developers in the industry. And we have built custom reports, to get them data that allows us to make optimization decisions. And then also now most people are going back to this NER, basically, which involves the amount of money in to the brand that you're making a profit or sales, versus the amount of money out on all advertising channels is how they're optimizing their metrics. And this is the thing that people don't realize is, or they should realize that I don't know why they don't, but that there's so many things that contribute to a customer journey. It's not necessarily I see a Facebook ad and I purchase it. Today, we have shiny object syndrome like no other. And we're constantly being bombarded with messages about everything, every little thing. Even back in the days when I was doing like financial stuff, asset management, and all these different kinds of things. Just because I was interested in it, we wanted to see how lead gen went, minimum eight to nine touches before somebody purchased anything. So and I would think it's even more than that. Now. I thought it was like somewhere around 8 to 13 the last set of different things that I've read in the marketing channel, my millions of newsletters that I read every morning like the newspaper.
Dave Pancham: We're working to cut through the noise now.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, so you have to really consider that Mar number which is your money in versus money out in the entire scheme of the customer journey, especially as you're building a brand brand versus just let's just get some sales because drop shipping is really like out the door these days. Most platforms are not about it. They ban you Pinterest is really hard about that. If you just have a store that doesn't look legit, they will ban your shopping feed and they'll just kick your stuff off of there. But that's really the only thing that I've ever seen them be extremely stickler on except for they don't do CBD. You can do it organically, but not on ads. So they're a little bit more stickler about certain ads, but definitely not on organic. You could do a lot of things on organic.
Dave Pancham: Can you expand a little bit about, like, your customer reports like How was your team making optimization Decisions?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, so we have certain metrics like our custom dashboard, we pulled data From directly from Pinterest, and have a custom dashboard that we're making decisions based on how the creatives are performing, whether it's mostly with the client goals, whether it's their ROAS goal, their average order value goal, their cost per acquisition goal, their cost per click goal, cost per lead. And so we're looking at all those metrics, but in general, we make our optimization schedule is much longer. So I'm generally not making a lot of optimizations on brand new ads after up to 10 days, maybe longer. Sometimes, just in general, I'm looking at a 14 to 30 day look back, versus the last seven days, you're not going to really collect much. Sometimes, you know, I'm surprised on a daily basis of this how much data we can get for some brands on seven days. And I feel like over time, if they're an advertiser on Pinterest, what I've seen is, especially if we're doing organic, and we're increasing their relevancy score, they the time for purchases seems to shorten. So once the algorithm is feeding new good people and they found a good spot, then sometimes we can look at shorter windows to make decisions.
Alex Ivanoff: So if I'm, you know, a smaller D2C brand, and I'm not ready to work with Lindsay quite yet and work with Pins 4 Profit, but I want to try to do my own Pinterest ad campaign. What are the, some of the basics there? First off, I should set some ads up, give it about seven to 10 days before I make any, any changes? What metrics should I be looking at to figure out is this seem like it's performing well, or it's not?
Lindsay Shearer: Initially, you want to look at your click through rate just to make sure that your images are getting decent impressions and things like that are actually spending sometimes there's a spend issue, because people try and get super granular on their targeting. And it just doesn't work. It's kind of like an open CBO campaign on Facebook, where you're letting the algorithm decide initially, I would not recommend trying to go super granular. A lot of people do that. Initially, I just had someone freak out last week about this. And I'm like, You don't understand this is not Facebook.
Dave Pancham: So how, how open is to open or how granular is too granular?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I would focus on level one interest to start. So you've got level two and level three on there, I would definitely stick with a larger audience to start. And then you can look out over time where people are hanging out, they have kind of some custom features in there. And you can see, okay, these categories are getting most of the spend, or this category is getting a ton of spend and no conversions. And then later, you can go in and optimize more.
Dave Pancham: So if I had. If I had like a kid clothing brand, you'd say just focus on the parents, right? Don't go super. Like they'll take it from there.
Lindsay Shearer: Focus on clothing, and then let that kind of shake out.
Alex Ivanoff: Cool. What about click-through rate? What's a you said you're looking at click through rates and impressions. What are you looking for numbers wise?
Lindsay Shearer: No, it's crazy. Because sometimes click through rates don't always correspond with conversion rates, which is so weird, you would think it would be illogical. There's so many things in advertising where I'm like, Dude, this makes no sense. But I would say anything over point five, five is a really good for traffic. For conversions. It's lower, just because of the way their algorithm works. So anything over really 0.13, we seem to be fine. So that's my those are some of our target metrics.
Alex Ivanoff: What are, like, the CPMs? On Pinterest?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah. So between, you know, it's cycles back and forth. It's very seasonal. But on average, between 2 and $6, sometimes lower. Wow, we have a few clients that are, like, less than $1. So it's very cheap impressions. You can afford to have low click-through rates like that.
Alex Ivanoff: Yep, yeah, relatively speaking. I mean, for those listening, you know, you're probably getting on Facebook, somewhere between $15 and $25. CPM. Maybe if you're really good you’re getting around 15.
Lindsay Shearer: Over and your account is seasoned or whatever. You've been working on it for a while.
Alex Ivanoff: Right. Yeah. So the big opportunity, I mean, you're spending way less money to get in front of way more people.
Lindsay Shearer: Yep.
Alex Ivanoff: At the end of the day, whether you're getting conversions or not, the first metric is still a win.
Lindsay Shearer: Exactly. And you you're able to influence people, Pinterest has a unique opportunity to influence buying behavior on a very subconscious level by being one of those first look brands for a new consumer. So and having done mergers and acquisitions, that's where that comes in, for me is a lot of those metrics people were always looking at because you don't think about certain brands like Crest for example, or large toothpaste or whatever when they very first started out. They're not even looking at top of funnel acquisition. They're like hitting their spending all kinds of money and not expecting it to convert. And they're expecting the conversions to come when you go to the store, you have this psychological trust factor with something that you've seen unconsciously when you walk into the store. So they, large companies know this, they bank on this.
Dave Pancham: Totally going with a branding play.
Alex Ivanoff: So for the brands looking to get into Pinterest advertising, what would you say is some of the most important, you know, strengths are personality traits that you need to hammer-in and double down on in order to have like a successful campaign on Pinterest?
Lindsay Shearer: The number one is you have to be patient, you have to be I always told my brands, I'm like, listen, you're paying me to be not emotional about this. I'm not emotional. You are, I'm not going to be influenced by you being stressed out about this. Like, you have got to trust that I've watched a 1000 brands do this. And I know it's stressful, but you have to have patience, you have to wait the mind behaviors longer. I've had I can't even tell you how many brands have come to me and said, you know, are they like pause their account, then two months later, they look back and I'm like, Oh, my God, are they like hire someone else to come in and look, and I'll look at their account again, and I'm like, Oh, God, you there's just this missing piece of this expectation meeting the actuality of the timing on Pinterest. So having patience is the number one. And having the budget to be able to have patience without freaking out because if you start making decisions in the strip any ads, if you start making decisions about being emotional, you've lost, you have to it's like it's kind of like crypto or like, I don't gamble that like the stock market base. That's my form of gambling is like crypto in the stock market. You cannot make decisions based on your emotions, or you're going to buy high and sell low. That's just the opposite of how you make money. The same is true. In advertising. You have to make decisions based on facts and data and not emotions.
Alex Ivanoff: So what are the three questions the person can ask a brand can ask themselves to say, Am I ready for Pinterest or not?
Lindsay Shearer: Are you do you have tested funnels? Are you able to make good Creatives that are going to actually match the buying behavior? Do you have enough money to be able to open a new marketing channel without freaking out and having a meltdown? Those are the three main that I would recommend.
Alex Ivanoff: Is there like a minimum amount of spend that someone should be willing to commit?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I would say for lead gen anywhere between 1000 to 1500 a month. For eComm, you're looking at more like 3500 to 5000 a month. Depending on the the number of products you want to test. That's minimum. Usually we recommend more than that, if you can stomach it, but, and then for info products, it really just depends on their CPA, so but you're definitely getting cheaper acquisition costs than Facebook typically.
Dave Pancham: Wow.
Alex Ivanoff: Dave this is so much gold, I'm having so much fun. I'm learning so much, I an't imagine how much the audience is.
Dave Pancham: So people, like, should be expecting, right? If we're talking like 3500, kind of like on the lower end. So call that like. And we're looking at month four is potentially when you really start to reap the benefits of it. So it's like be willing to burn, you know, maybe 15-ish grand or so before you, can you stomach that because if you can't,
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, you're still gonna get tons of conversions. Don't think that you're not. But I am personally a fan of setting expectations extremely low, so that clients can be pleasantly surprised. And you're not constantly fighting this uphill battle, because it's going to be hard enough as it is any advertiser. I mean, I went going to this conference that we were hanging out at a couple months ago, I could not believe that the average retention for an agency is like two months for a new client that is unbelievable to me. Because of the massive barrier to entry that it requires to have success in marketing. You could never expect an outsider to come into your entire marketing system. And within two months have this crazy, amazing situation for you. That's going to really change everything about your marketing. I mean it does happen in the sense of sometimes you just hit it the right combination of things, but there are so many factors that have to be done and adjusted and so in general expecting a new agency to be able to do anything for you with that's sustainable in less than three or four months. I can't even imagine it. So yeah, definitely setting expectations.
Alex Ivanoff: What do you think about, I'm sure there's a lot of eComm brands out there that feel like they've been burned? Right? Yeah. What kind of advice do you give to somebody in this, in that kind of situation to make sure they are picking the right person? And not be like, That's false expectations on the agency's part, if they're losing a client within two months? How does somebody find the right marketing Partner?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, that's a really interesting concept. I mean, you do have to take a lot of risks. There are there's the referral. I only hire based on referrals. People that I know that have worked with brands, I look at case studies, I talk with them, I asked them really specific scenarios. I look at all of their I ask them certain questions about what is their daily communication and stuff look like? You know, what am I to expect as far as certain things and I'm also not going into that situation expecting someone to save my entire business and every single part of the marketing problems within two months. So when I hear people say their marketing agency failed, I have very suspect of what their expectations were. What you know, a lot of marketing agencies will take way too much on to try and help a client for a really low price that breaks my heart because the amount of work it really takes to do email well, or do SEO Well, or do PPC Well, or do Facebook well, is a lot. You're talking about creatives, copywriting, constant optimizations, keeping up on new trends, we're doing twice a week meetings with our reps, like in the account all day long. We do all creatives on our side, there's just a nonstop it takes eight team members for one brand for us. Just for Pinterest ads in organic. Then you add in SEO, we do a lot of other things like that. There's a lot of things happening behind the scenes that people it's like, there's a disconnect sometimes of like, I'll hear people say, oh, I want to open a new channel or I want to do all this stuff. And if they were to sit down and try and do it, which they probably have tried to do parts of it. They're very, very aware of that. It's impossible to do it by yourself.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, so many brands are gonna try and hire one person.
Lindsay Shearer: There's no way that someone could be exceptional at every part of that process. Unless they're me. No, just kidding. I've been doing this for 18 years learning every single part of the process and running big teams where I can get data much faster than the a person starting a brand new brand, trying to figure out Product Market Fit, trying to figure out their distribution, trying to look at conversion rate optimisation, opening new ad channels, making new creatives, writing emails, I mean, there's an endless list of stuff. You've got to hire.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, so many brands, or even like local businesses, right? They're always like, Oh, I gotta revolutionize my website. I gotta do a whole new like Google listing, I got to even then I got to do all these ads and all this content and, and I’m like just hire an agency man, like,
Lindsay Shearer: No way, dude.
Alex Ivanoff: It's easier.
Lindsay Shearer: You need to focus on your highest one of the most important things that any of my coaches ever taught me in this process of life, is that you have got to figure out a way to focus on your highest and best use of your time. And as you grow and get a little more meat on your bones, as far as financially hire, hire, hire, and in the beginning, you have to take a risk and hire anyway, when you don't really have the money, because you're not scalable without help. And that you, one of the questions on your checklist was what would you do differently if I want to, if I had started again, or if I whatever that would be it? I definitely in the very beginning did not hire fast enough.
Dave Pancham: What have been some of the first key hires that you would have made that you didn't make?
Lindsay Shearer: What have been some of the first key hires that you would have made that you didn't make? Content creator, copywriter, probably number one.
Alex Ivanoff: Would you say that goes for a brand as well?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, that's a big one. For a brand, I would probably hire an agency first. Fulfillment like and then probably first, I would figure out a distribution problem, like whatever the fulfillment issues maybe, because you can't scale, it's pointless to hire an agency if you can't deliver the product, you're going to get a million chargebacks and it's going to be a nightmare. So and you may ruin your ability to ever collect payment on any normal platform ever again. So don't do that. Definitely get your fulfillment in order and then hire an agency and then hire a product manager and get your butt out of the daily operations and focus on doing PR and meeting clients and making strategic partnerships and those kinds of things. We built our, our entire brand has been built, we have never run an ad for done-for-you services.
Alex Ivanoff: As in Pins 4 Profit hasn't you think.
Lindsay Shearer: Never not yet. We're going to start, I'm forcing myself to do it. But we've never had to. I've spent the time building strategic amazing relationships with great people that making it a win-win helping clients serving clients. We've never had to do it yet. And that's miraculous, like, I've talked to so many business owners, but you can definitely do that. If you get niche-specific. And you really start hustling, and doing different podcasts and media outlets, you don't have to pay for money for ads, this goes back to my whole reason why we love Pinterest so much, because this organic search intention for content is so much higher quality than having to pay for ads, you're going to have to weed out a lot more people, you're going to get a lot less qualified people in certain parts of the funnel process. It's going to take more man hours to qualify people.
Dave Pancham: So my question was, was that strategy very, very intentional for you? Because I know it sounds like when you first started, you just kind of hit the blue ocean, like, I'm doing Pinterest stuff, and everybody's looking for you all of a sudden, like, did that like, Oh, I like how this is going, I'm going to try to spread the word more, or, like, how did you, like, how was it?
Lindsay Shearer: No, I never even really thought about it. I just was, like, Okay, we're gonna do, we're gonna reach out to our network, I had already been building communities, because I knew the value of relationships just in general, it's such a faster way to get to wherever it is you want to be in life through relationships than it is to like just slave labor yourself and try and hustle with no strategy. Thankfully, in my life, I have always been willing to hire a coach, or someone to teach me how to do the shortcut. And I, maybe that's the lazy workers way of doing life or whatever, I don't know, I'd much rather go directly to the source and figure out what works, then try and spend and waste years of my life, trying to figure it out on my own. So thankfully, I already had been building strategic relationships with people that had different communities and all different kinds of stuff, and adding value to their lives. And really just coming in from not what I can get from you type of situation, but more about what can I give? How can I support people? How can I just educate, I'm, I love educating. So for me, it's like, okay, how can I educate people to, and I love entrepreneurship, and I really have a heart for people, starting businesses, and I've been through pretty much every pitfall you can think of when it comes to business ownership, from legal to contracts, to, you name it, we've been through it. So I have a heart to help people cut the learning curve to success. And so I think that comes forth in your relationship building process. And so as we were seeing things working, I'm like, Alright, we're gonna just do podcasts and connect with people that we know and offer them a joint referral, we don't really do a lot of Facebook ads anymore. Great. Facebook ads is very specific for certain types of brands. I have a whole network of people that I think, you know, when I get people in my network, I'm like, okay, this person is looking for a Facebook advertiser, these people do infoproducts really well, I'm just gonna refer them and then they refer us the people that need Pinterest, because most agencies don't do it, or don't do it well. So I just kind of always looked at it from a larger perspective in that sense, but it was never something that I was like, That's just who I am. It wasn't something that I was like, Oh, this is our intentional strategy. You know, that's just how we roll in general.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, literally the same story for everyone just kind of, you know, learn as you go. And, you can't really plan too much for success. gotta always…
Lindsay Shearer: That's one of our, that's our new, we're doing a limited edition series with a new software company that I'm working with. And it's called the Infinite Journey. because entrepreneurship is an infinite journey. There's a million peaks and valleys in the road. And, yeah, I mean, there's just you can interview any entrepreneur and they'll be able to tell you a different story about some crazy stuff. You know, that has happened in the past.
Dave Pancham: What is your crazy stuff stories?
Lindsay Shearer: Oh, My god, I had a business partner embezzle a bunch of money. We were starting a television network I had. I've just had so many weird things. I had like a best friend like try and it's so many things, like just manipulate people. And just so many betrayals, I was thinking about this recently. I'm like, man, maybe I need to go do like a healing session about things that have happened in my entrepreneurial journey where people just like had unrealistic expectations or they got greedy or just there just something weird happened along the way. But we've had like patents stuff, legal stuff. Client disputes, like, you name it, people have done it. So I feel like you really have to build a thick skin. And you really have to figure out your process as far as like contracts and protecting yourself. That was one of the first things that I did, because I had done a lot when I did mergers and acquisitions, I used to write contracts, we did a lot of patent trademark, international law. And so I knew going into this process of being an entrepreneur, I always had really good, great Terms and Conditions on my website and just basic stuff, click-through contracts, when people make payments, they can't, you know, they're forfeiting the right to make disputes and all these kinds of things that I know I'm gonna deliver the greatest service, but other people have weird expectations, you're dealing with the general public, there's just so many weird factors that can happen in the process that you have to protect yourself.
Dave Pancham: Protect yourself before you wreck yourself. Oh geez.
Lindsay Shearer: Thankfully, I never had any of the wreck myself qualities. I don't really drink and that kind of thing. I but I've seen a lot of people use that as like a self Medication in the industry. But you know, you've got a good head on your shoulders for sure.
Alex Ivanoff: You know what, Lindsey, you mentioned thick skin, like even beyond that, I think the best entrepreneurs and brand owners, or any any business owner is going to channel that energy of a negative experience or a failure or something like a really hard time into something greater whatever is next. I mean, you know, taking that emotion or that fire in you, and going out and proving that person wrong, even if you never talk to them again, or, you know, proving that, you know, client or company that you worked with that maybe screwed you over proving them wrong, right? Yeah.
Lindsay Shearer: Well, the crazy thing is now I just have an expectation of, you know, kind of like the entropy situation where before I'm like, like, even this week, we're launching this massive new product, I've had so much weird crap happen. Like, there's just sometimes there's just this resistance to things that are going to be released into the world. And so I, for me, it's confirmation that we're on the right track, like, Okay, if there's, like, a weird resistance going, then for sure, I need to become the type of person that's going to be able to release this into the world and handle what comes with that. And so I need to deal with my own crap. And I used to think this was like the worst advice I would go to like, all these business seminars when I was like, super young. And they would say, you need to work harder on yourself than you do anything else in your brand. And then you will be unusually successful. And I was like, I want to punch you in the face. I don't believe it. And now as an older person, that's been through a lot of stuff. I really truly believe that that's true. If your capacity personally, that you can't handle certain things, or you don't have the money or whatever, to hire someone to handle it. It's gonna destroy you. But as you get older, as you go through more experiences, like the things that happen for me now, I don't really get riled up. It's kind of like, okay, that's par for the course, I have a system in place to deal with it. I'm not going to get emotionally disturbed and well, some of that stuff that I probably did when I was younger. Like, I didn't have a way to handle it, whether that's emotional coping skills, tools and resources, legal contracts, like whatever it was. Now I'm like, Okay, I'm equipped. Bring it on.
Alex Ivanoff: I think that's relatable for at least some, everybody's watching. This is some sort of business owner is, like, stress management.And sounds like you know, you you've been through the wringer. Right, like, what are, how have you learned to tackle and deal with it better? What would you give, What kind of advice would you give to the young entrepreneur, Lindsay?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah. One. Exercise is important. It's always been something that's extremely important in my life, getting enough sleep. Learning how to delegate is extremely important. I personally have an amazing relationship with Jesus, I don't know how I would be able to function in life without that. And I do a lot of different meditation, I would consider practices where I'm like, listening to music, and I'm just like, Okay, I'm going to shut off every single one of my devices and notifications and actually disconnect from slack or whatever, and try and create systems to where you don't have to immediately respond to things. So, because that immediate response, like I don't know if you guys have this, like I've, I call it SOS, like, slack effective syndrome. You're like, Oh, my God, my flag is going off a million times all day long. And then there's like this unconscious thing that happens to us where we like, get frantic, kind of, in your spirit if you're not actually learning to put that into place. So there's simple things you can do like turn your notification sound off. Just create designated times where you're checking your emails and checking your slack and not getting overwhelmed by this process. So another great thing about I learned from mentorship was, whenever something like that happens, you need to put it into the correct box of either delegation or a to do list that subconsciously removes it from your immediacy issue. It removes it from the mental immediacy of having to deal with it.
Alex Ivanoff: I love that. I might try that.
Lindsay Shearer: It works.
Dave Pancham: Interesting. I know we, I think we kind of briefly spoke about this at the event, but it sounds like through all of your times, do, now, do you, also, do some coaching as well.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, actually, we are launching two massive coaching programs. One is just solely for Pinterest marketing, teaching people, it's a four month or six month, you can come in, and we'll do everything with you and kind of teach you and train you the whole process. There's a course included, it's called Pin Ads Academy. And then we have bankable digital agency, which is teaching people how to grow and start a marketing agency and deal with all the SOPs, client fulfillment, all of that kind of stuff in the coaching container. But I've done a lot of different coaching over the years for digital marketing and helping brands I used to do a lot of, one for coaches, a group coaching program, it's called the Jumpstart Your Coaching Business, just to teach them the basics of digital marketing, creating landing pages, fulfillment, contracts, payment processing, just basic stuff like that. And now I've kind of focus more on agencies and things that I feel like I have a lot of expertise that I can share, pretty readily available. So yeah, that's going amazingly well. A lot of people need help. I wish I had had that when I first started.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, well that we'll be sure to put the links in the description. People can check those out whether you're a brand or agency or whatever type entrepreneur, I'm sure they can benefit from hearing from your following.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, Absolutely.
Dave Pancham: You guys have a lot of courses.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, So many. You know what’s funny? I think you said, you mentioned you named it Jumpstart Your Coaching, right?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah.
Alex Ivanoff: Dave, didn't You didn't you name your original fitness agency couple years ago Jumpstart Your Gym or something like that?
Lindsay Shearer: Jumpstart Your Jam? Heck yeah. Is it Jam or Gym?
Alex Ivanoff: Gym.
Lindsay Shearer: Well, gym, maybe I'm in dance mode.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, someone that, some dance teachers listening to this, they’re gonna go start Jumpstart our Jam.
Dave Pancham: I almost did work on the dance studio. So,
Alex Ivanoff: Love it. So Lindsay, you know, with everything that you've been through, and, you know, so much experience under your belt? What is one thing that you think you know, something in your job or field of expertise that no one agrees with you about but you're very passionate about?
Lindsay Shearer: Oh, man, that's a good question. I would say. Are we talking about Pinterest-specific or just life-specific? Alex: Let's do Pinterest and marketing, but then Yes, life as well.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I would say with Pinterest that goes back to the delayed attribution. No one wants to accept that they're still delayed attribution in life. Like what's wrong with you guys. And then in general, I would say that the internal healing process of your entrepreneurial journey is the most important part of the journey. And who you become, and who you are, in this process is way more important than anything else, whether it's your results, or your client expectations, at the end of the day, you're going for me home to my husband at night, and that's what's most important to me is like our relationship and who I am, and my integrity of holding true to my core values and beliefs. And also, I would say being in alignment, or a lot of people and I made this mistake for a long time of, I just want to make money. You know, I know this is a great industry, I just want to I know there's a lot of money here, I just want to make money. And for a long time I had this internal battle of like, I'm not actually putting something out into the world that I'm congruent with. And this is something that I'm diving, we're hiring a full new sales agency right now. And so I'm working on our sales process and just looking at one of the most important factors buying factors is people want to be congruent in how they perceive themselves what they want in their life, and what is actually lining up with what's happening in their life. And I had a pastor years ago that did a tethering exercise with me. He called it where he looked at the hours in my day, and the things that were most important to me, and do they actually line up? Was I spending time on the activities that are actually most important to me and most of us the answer to that is no. And so until you take an intentional, actionable decision making process about making something happened in your life, it's not going to happen, or it's going to happen half assed, or it's going to happen in a way that you're not really truly in congruency about. And so as I'm creating new programs now, and as I take on new partnerships and stuff like that, I've gotten to the point where I'm like, if this this energy is not congruent, if this is not congruent with what I desire on a deep level, I'm not going to entertain it. And you'll hear oh, billionaires, all these people say, my most important decisions, were not saying yes, they were saying no, I really, truly agree with that. The more, the busier you get, the more success you have, you have to do it. And it's hard. It's extremely hard to say no to good, really good opportunities that you know, are going to make you a lot of money in this kind of stuff, or great opportunities that are going to be in congruent with your deep true life core values.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, no, it is. It's a hard conversation. But I think everybody should have it with themselves for Sure.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, daily.
Dave Pancham: Is that, was, kind of going granular a little bit on that. was that. Was that. You're talking about first was like, I just wanted to make money. And does that mean Like, were you running into a situation where you felt like you probably were taking some bad fit clients just for the money? And you're like I'm putting out? I'm not getting great results, like, when was that when you when we were, like, feeling very, very conflicted. And what maybe some of the examples of what was going on?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I would say this was before my marketing life in general. I had different businesses and I was taking on different clients that I had to do. I live in San Diego for so many years, it's extremely expensive to live there. And just like your normal life, and at the time, I was not positioned well enough, yet, I still was getting a lot of great opportunities. But it was kind of like, until you choose your positioning, and like double down on that you get a lot of opportunities that are like in the peripheral. And you're not sure if that's going to be, you just don't know, because you yourself, haven't made decisions internally about what your boundaries are going to be as far as projects that you take on, or people you engage with. And so I feel like it wasn't like, necessarily, in the beginning, it wasn't as intentional was kind of like, okay, I want to explore this, or I want to explore that. And then I had a holistic medical clinic for a long, long time that I was doing marketing for just because I have a passion for health and wellness. And I remember thinking, there were a couple days where I went to my clinic, and I was treating patients and I was like, I literally never want to come to this office again. I was like, Okay, I need to make a significant change in my life like this is I don't want to feel like this every day. And the same is true now. Because time to time, I'll get amazing clients in the beginning. And then something happens, and I guess their true personality comes out or something I don't know. And the whole dynamic changes. And I've just come to the place in my life where it's like, you know what, it's not worth it to me emotionally. I'll deal with the conflict that makes sense. And we'll address it head on. And I'm not saying anything like that. But I'm saying, from my own mental health perspective, I'm not going to get up anymore at three o'clock in the morning and deal with panic emails, and you know, panic Slack messages and stuff like that. So it's a filtering out process. But no, in general, no, I don't take on clients anymore just for money. But I know that is part of the process, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs, and you get more meat on your bones. And then you can say no, you can be more selective.Yeah, I would say this was before my marketing life in general. I had different businesses and I was taking on different clients that I had to do. I live in San Diego for so many years, it's extremely expensive to live there. And just like your normal life, and at the time, I was not positioned well enough, yet, I still was getting a lot of great opportunities. But it was kind of like, until you choose your positioning, and like double down on that you get a lot of opportunities that are like in the peripheral. And you're not sure if that's going to be, you just don't know, because you yourself, haven't made decisions internally about what your boundaries are going to be as far as projects that you take on, or people you engage with. And so I feel like it wasn't like, necessarily, in the beginning, it wasn't as intentional was kind of like, okay, I want to explore this, or I want to explore that. And then I had a holistic medical clinic for a long, long time that I was doing marketing for just because I have a passion for health and wellness. And I remember thinking, there were a couple days where I went to my clinic, and I was treating patients and I was like, I literally never want to come to this office again. I was like, Okay, I need to make a significant change in my life like this is I don't want to feel like this every day. And the same is true now. Because time to time, I'll get amazing clients in the beginning. And then something happens, and I guess their true personality comes out or something I don't know. And the whole dynamic changes. And I've just come to the place in my life where it's like, you know what, it's not worth it to me emotionally. I'll deal with the conflict that makes sense. And we'll address it head on. And I'm not saying anything like that. But I'm saying, from my own mental health perspective, I'm not going to get up anymore at three o'clock in the morning and deal with panic emails, and you know, panic Slack messages and stuff like that. So it's a filtering out process. But no, in general, no, I don't take on clients anymore just for money. But I know that is part of the process, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs, and you get more meat on your bones. And then you can say no, you can be more selective.
Dave Pancham: I would imagine when you started to make that shifted, and that changed your decisions in other areas of life and other areas of business too.
Lindsay Shearer: Absolutely everything. relationships, friendships. You name it.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, it's like you have to have a mission statement and core values for yourself, not just for your business.
Lindsay Shearer: Absolutely. No life profit and business plan.
Alex Ivanoff: Life plan, a business plan, a relationship plan, right, a health plan, everything. Love that.
Lindsay Shearer: Not a relationship plan because my husband is definitely not what I would have originally considered. He has a lot of great qualities that I wanted. But there are so many things that I did not expect. So you have to leave room for certain God interventions. But, But, yeah, in general, there's definitely good boundaries and parameters to be had.
Alex Ivanoff: Cool, so Lindsey, as we begin to wrap up, what do you think is the best place for a brand to learn from you, follow you, get to know more about what you do.
Lindsay Shearer: You can check out all of our Pinterest stuff at Pins4Profit.com We've got some great intro courses if you're trying to learn Pinterest ads or organic and that our mentorship program is being launched. So that's really fun and exciting. I can't wait to help dive more deeply into different scenarios and things like that for Pinterest, and then you can check out my personal website, LindseyShearer.com. We've got other mentorship courses, other kinds of things like that going up, new software that we're creating, that kind of fun stuff.
Alex Ivanoff: Awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll have you back to talk more about that. That's very exciting.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah. We have some fun things, iron is in the fire for you.
Alex Ivanoff: Love it, we'll be back for it. So to close out, we always like to ask, if you could sit in a room with a bunch of mentors once every morning to help guide you and talk to them about, you know, whatever is going on in your day or life, who would be in that room? and it could be alive or dead.
Lindsay Shearer: I wrote a list. My husband and I were like sitting up last night thinking about this. So for sure Jesus, the apostle Paul and John, King, David, Enoch, Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Thomas Edison, my dad and my husband. That's what I think.
Alex Ivanoff: Basically a bunch of geniuses.
Lindsay Shearer: There's one more, Helen of Troy, just because she's a badass. And I realized I didn't have any women on my list. I'm like, What's wrong with me?
Dave Pancham: We're all we are all those people dead.
Lindsay Shearer: They are all dead. Except for my dad. My husband. Yeah. And I would, I would, I almost felt like I was going to be too cliche if I said, someone like Elon Musk, too, because he's brilliant. But yeah, definitely some brilliant minds.
Alex Ivanoff: Yeah, a bunch of Geniuses. It sounds. I mean, yeah, Elon falls in line a lot with Tesla, Edison, and Einstein. So, what about them? Why? Why? Like, what is it about, like, that type of intellect that fascinates you that you want to learn from?
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, like King David, you know, Apostle Paul, those kind of guys. They went through extreme adversity. And I felt like they had this prophetic vision for the future. And they had this understanding that was like ahead of their time. And I feel like that's true for Nikola Tesla's, definitely, actually probably everyone on the list. And so I have struggled just personally with feeling like, you know, when you're skilled with a lot of different things, it's really hard to figure out which direction or which path to take, I think in life, and it's easy to get distracted by a lot of great opportunities. That's why I was saying earlier, giving up the good for the great has been an extreme struggle for me, because I see, and I love people so much, and I just see so much great potential. And I see great things that can be brought into the earth and all of these things that can change our society and make significant changes in people's lives and help them become fully alive to their full potential. It's hard for me to watch people not walking in fullness. And so I feel like each of those people had some time of an experience that was connecting a past system to something that was being brought into the earth that was going to radically change the earth. And so having that type of relationship and you know, mentorship to be able to see that and mitigate the emotions and the human experiences and all these things that come with that is something that I struggled with probably the most. And so that's, that's the reason why I chose pretty much everyone on that list.
Alex Ivanoff: Well, it's a great list. I'm happy you prepped it.
Lindsay Shearer: I had to, I was thinking about it.
Dave Pancham: I feel like that's a strong group to really help create some clarity on a daily basis. And a life basis.
Lindsay Shearer: Absolutely.
Alex Ivanoff: That’d be a very fun room.
Lindsay Shearer: You're correct. Every day.
Alex Ivanoff: All right. Well, thank you so much, Lindsay for hopping on. It's been a pleasure. On behalf of Dave and I, we've learned so much like I said, I had so much fun, so many gold nuggets about Pinterest, about marketing, about life, business, entrepreneurship, everything that I know our listeners are going to benefit from, and I can't wait for them to hear it. So thank you so much for your time. And we'll put all the links in the description. Go follow Lindsay on, on Instagram and go check out Pins 4 Profit.
Lindsay Shearer: Yeah, I thank you guys so much. This has been amazing. I'm super proud of you. If you're an entrepreneur or you're starting an eCommerce Store, you're growing, you're scaling, you're taking risks every day. So definitely reach out if you need help. We love to support you in any way that we possibly can. And thanks for having me.
Dave Pancham: Thank you, Lindsay.
Alex Ivanoff: Absolutely. Thanks, Lindsay.
