5 Strategies for Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business with Dominique Dunlop

5 Strategies for Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business with Dominique Dunlop

Welcome to this episode of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host. I’m Amanda Tento, and I have with me, Dominique Dunlap. She is a former teacher-turned-digital marketing-obsessed Canadian mom of two through her done-for-you content repurposing services and lead generation. Pinterest, VIP days.

Dominique’s goal is to help you develop a low-effort, high-traffic marketing strategy that will allow you to attract leads on autopilot and be everywhere your clients are without leading to content creation burnout. That sounds like a dream, first of all, But I also wanna just touch on what we’re gonna be talking about today before I allow you to.

Kind tell us how you got started in Pinterest, but we’re gonna be talking about five strategies for using Pinterest to grow your business. So this is gonna be a killer episode. This is actually something that people have been requesting forever, so I’m glad that I found you and that you’re here to talk about it.

But how in the world did you get started, like specializing in Pinterest? Honestly, through a series of random online rabbit holes. When I left my teaching career after I had my second child, I basically decided that I needed to figure out a way to earn my income from home. Because I couldn’t go back to the classroom, I started blogging.

I started out with a learn-from-home play-based preschool program that I had put together for most stay-at-home moms and took my teaching expertise that route. The more I got into that and started learning how to actually market the preschool program, the more I realized I liked the marketing side more.

The preschool side at that point. So in talking to a few of the online connections that I had made over the past while, and people I had connected with in trying to market my program, I ended up connecting with a few women who I call very close friends now that were Pinterest experts, and one of them had a program that trained Pinterest VAs.

I decided to give it a try, thinking maybe I would use it for my own marketing. Maybe I’d go a different way, not really sure what was gonna happen, and soon after I. Took the plunge and completely pivoted away from the preschool program and into the marketing space instead. So do you feel, this is gonna be like a mom question, but do you feel more fulfilled and do you feel like that switch has allowed you to have more time with your kids?

Like just not having that hands-on, half-to-hands-on? Such a tricky balance, and I’m sure most moms can relate. I was putting so much time and effort into the classroom, into other people’s kids when I was teaching. Not to mention we also live quite rurally, so I had quite a drive on top of things, but now it’s just balancing.

Home life. So, there are days that I feel like I’m not giving my kids the attention that I need to be because they’re at me and they’re needing this and they’re needing that. And I try to balance client work and that, but at the end of the day, I get to be here with them and. That’s been really critical for our family through the pandemic, not having to worry about childcare.

So some days, no, I’m not as present as I would like to be with them for sure, but it’s still definitely been the best decision we made for the family. I love to hear that. And I can completely relate to that. Like I know like sometimes my kids are like, but you’re always working. And I’m like, but I would be working like not even in the house.

Like you couldn’t ask me a question, you couldn’t ask if you could have this or do this, or, like I couldn’t resolve any fights or anything like that. And like I’m here like I’m always working, but I’m also. Available. When they need me, which I absolutely was not When I was in the classroom after I had my first.

 And especially with a commute like that too, like Woo. . . . Awesome. Let’s talk about these strategies. What are the five strategies that you’re gonna teach us to grow our businesses? Alright, so there are a few things that we need to understand about Pinterest before we can even talk about strategy.

First of all, Pinterest isn’t social media. It gets lumped in there all the time. It gets lumped in with those social media apps, but it. Really at the heart of it is not. It’s a search engine, and if you think of Pinterest more akin to Google than you do to social media, you’re going to start to really transition how you can leverage Pinterest to grow your business.

I see people all the time, they jump on there with their social media tactics and strategies that worked on Instagram. It’s not going to work. On Pinterest. The other really important thing that we need to understand about Pinterest is because it’s a search engine, it takes time and it is a slow burn.

You have to be in it for the long haul and you’re not going to get instant results. So I would never recommend Pinterest be your sole marketing platform right from the get-go. It’s going to take time before that snowball starts. That’s my big disclaimers and caveats about Pinterest.

One of my mentors likes to refer to Pinterest as the ugly stepsister of social media because it doesn’t get the same attention that the other platforms get. But at the same time, it is such a powerhouse if we can invest some attention in interest. And the other thing about Pinterest is once you’ve got your strategy in place, which we’ll talk about today.

You can have your Pinterest marketing completely automated and going operating in the background in as little as about four to six hours a month, which is way less time than you’re probably spending on other social media platforms. And you can sit down and do it in one shot for the month. There’s no obligation to show up and engage on a daily basis and just be present.

You can sit down, do it, bang it. And it’s done until next month. So that’s something to keep in mind too when we’re talking today. I have two quick questions if you don’t mind answering them. One is, do you find that people give up like they’ll say, okay, I’m gonna go do Pinterest, and then they get started, and then because of that slow burn that you talked about, it just doesn’t happen?

And then they’re like, Ugh. Done. And so many people give up right when they’re at the cusp of things that could have looked different for them. Just to give you an example, what we’re talking about when I say slow burn, slow burn. When I take on a monthly management client, I do a minimum of a six-month contract because I don’t even expect to see a whole lot happening in that first six months.

Something that I take a lot of time to prime my clients with is that we have to trust the process here. We’re looking at a year or so before we’re really going to start to see the fruit of our effort happening. You don’t eat the fruit the day you plant the tree. So what I see a lot of times with people who are getting started with Pinterest or managing their own Pinterest, they will, they’ll go gung-ho for 2, 3, 4 months.

and then they’re really disappointed in what’s happening in their statistics. So they bounce. But if I come back to that same account down the road, that effort that they put in for those four months is still bringing them traffic two, or three years.

And you’re gonna have, and we’ll have the link to book a VIP day in the show notes as well. Definitely check that out too. So thank you so much, Dominique, for being here for sharing your amazing wealth of knowledge with Pinterest, and I am sure that we’re all going to go right now and look at our Pinterest accounts and kind of evaluate them, and get started.

For sure. And as you’re saying that, I thought of one more little key tip. I’m gonna slide in there. You’re not using a business account. Please make sure you switch it to a business account. If you’re still on your personal account that you planned your wedding on and you’ve got all your kids’ birthday parties planned on, you need to switch it up to a business account and you can either start fresh or you can just toggle that in your settings.

You can switch from personal to business, but you need to get it on a business. That’s a great tip too. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dominique, for being here. Thank you for having me. It was such a great chat.