Why I Dropped Pinterest From My Marketing Plan

Why I Dropped Pinterest From My Marketing Plan

Knowing when to break up with a low ROI marketing channel. 

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I own a coaching business for female entrepreneurs — Pinterest was supposed to work for me. After testing Pinterest for 6 months, I dropped it from my marketing plan. 

Despite the wild success businesses in the same industry with the target market as me have had with the platform, my numbers weren’t showing it.

I averaged at 30K monthly views on my page, rolled out an intense Tailwind Tribe strategy, and SEO-ed my heart out on all my posts. I took courses, did all the things.

Here’s how I approached testing Pinterest for my business and how I knew to drop the platform. This conversation will be useful and applicable even if you want to understand how to test the viability of any platform outside of Pinterest.

I also have a strong suspicion as to why the platform didn’t work for me, more about that below.

Don’t Take “Proven” Strategies At Face Value

I have a rule with all marketing and sales strategies that I adopt for my business — always trial it before adopting it.

Even if a carbon copy of my business is thriving on a social platform, I will not accept that as truth until I test it out for myself to ensure that it’s a fit for my business as well as how I run my business.

When you’re a small business owner, you’re running on limited time and money, which means that you have to ax out the strategies that don’t rake in high returns on investment (ROI).

So even if Pinterest provided some benefits for me and my business, if it didn’t make my top 3 ROI channels, then I don’t have time to manage it anyway.

While I was trialing Pinterest for my business, I noticed 2 important things:

  • The increased traffic wasn’t resulting in a boost in my email audience.

  • It wasn’t providing any qualified sales leads.

After making these two observations, I tested if it was:

  1. A content issue (was the imagery and copy I was using in my posts not effective?) that was leading to a lack of conversions.

  2. A numbers game — I spent a little bit of money (around $60? It went a long way on the platform) to test if I would see more conversions by increasing my audience pool.

After running those tests, I still didn’t see an increase in my email audience or qualified sales leads after testing this for 6 months.

After making a pivot from my first round of testing and running my second test for several months, it was clear that Pinterest was not for my business.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — traffic isn’t an important metric for business, conversions are.

Even with conversions, I am strict about the types of conversions I want to see. 

For example, if a platform does deliver a lot of email leads to me, if I don’t see that email audience convert into sales within 6–9 months for one of my high ticket items, I’ll strongly consider dropping that lead generation source.

In summary, here are the 4 takeaways you can apply to your business:

  • Always trial a marketing or sale strategy for 6–9 months before fully adopting it into your business’ marketing plan.

  • During the trial period, make initial assessments on what’s working and not working and revise your strategy to see if you can improve your ROI.

  • If the strategy has traction but no sales yet, determine whether it needs more time to run because it may potentially lead to sales with a bit more cultivation and fermentation. 

  • If you see no improvements in your ROI after 2–3 rounds of revisions, drop the strategy.


Why I Believe Pinterest Didn’t Work For Me

Here’s why I think Pinterest is so popular amongst female educators and coaches within the startup world but wasn’t vibing with me.

While I was observing who was repinning and engaging with my posts, I truly felt like I was in the thick of an endless string of coaches coaching coaches coaching coaches.

Because of the nature of Pinterest’s ecosystem, where you post pins that are relevant to your industry, the people engaging with my posts were other coaches and educators that probably weren’t going to hire me to work with them. 

There are certainly coaches out there whose business models depend on being hired by other coaches, but my business is not one of them. So Pinterest didn’t take off for me. 

I also didn’t find that there were many customers within my target market using Pinterest to plan their next moves for their business.

So even though I had the traffic of 30K monthly views on Pinterest, all of that traffic was traffic I didn’t really want for my business.

This is a great illustration of why you must always test a “proven” strategy on your business before banking on it. 

Even though a strategy may be working for some businesses within an industry, it doesn’t mean that it’s working for all of them. There’s a possibility that it is being branded to be a lucrative strategy by the 1% of businesses that are benefiting from it. 


You can find more tips like this to fine-tune your marketing and sales plan for conversions by taking my free 5 day challenge

Sophia Sunwoo