How to Promote a Virtual Summit on Pinterest with Meagan Williamson
Not sure how to promote your virtual summit on Pinterest? You're not alone!
We're used to promoting blog posts, podcast episodes, and other evergreen content on Pinterest, but promoting a virtual summit feels totally different.
I'm no Pinterest expert, so I've brought in Meagan Williamson to break down the amount of time you need to promote a summit on Pinterest, what the strategy should look like, and give an overview of promoted pins.
We'll let Meagan take it from here!
Your Pinterest launch runway
Your virtual summit launch runway on Pinterest has to be significantly longer than it would be on a platform like Instagram or Facebook. The people who follow you on other social media platforms have probably been following you for a while and are already sold on what you do.
On the other hand, your audience on Pinterest is huge and a very untapped resource. The good news is that it makes them the perfect fit to get in front of!
While your launch runway is normally a few weeks on Instagram or Facebook, it actually needs to be two to three months on Pinterest!
Look at Pinterest as an evergreen funnel, rather than a place to do one-off promotion. Rather than focusing just on promoting your summit, focus on using Pinterest to grow your email list by offering something high-value.
Using Pinterest to fill your summit
As soon as you can, get pins going on Pinterest.
To start, these can include the name and tagline of your summit. As you onboard speakers, as them for a 2-sentence tip on their topic and make pins from each of them.
Every time you get somebody to click over from Pinterest to your website, even if they don’t opt-in, is one more person you can start retargeting with Facebook ads.
Using Promoted Pins for a virtual summit
You need to adapt your paid advertising strategy to keep up with all the changes that have happened (and will continue to happen) on different platforms. Promoted pins are getting better and better in that way. You can run successfully promoted pin campaigns with an extremely limited budget.
What’s really powerful is that when you combine Promoted Pins with retargeting ads on Facebook or Instagram, it’s like a paid marketing superpower.
You can bring someone into your world, have them touch your pixel on Pinterest for $0.12, and then retarget them for $0.50 to $0.75 on Facebook, and you’re getting a lead for a dollar. This is constantly changing, but recent numbers suggest it is $5-6 per lead on average with Facebook alone, so Pinterest can really help bring those costs down.
The great thing about Pinterest is that when people see your ads, it’s because they are searching for those things, it’s not just randomly showing up like on Facebook. Pinterest marketing is considered additive and not disruptive, which is really powerful.
How to set up Promoted Pins
You can set up promoted pins in a few different ways:
- Lookalike audiences, just like Facebook
- Upload your email list
- Keywords that pertain to your summit. If you put the keywords into your campaign manager, and Pinterest says 10,000 people a month look up that term, it’ll generate what your particular audience is for that campaign.
Promoting your summit directly
What would actually be really smart is to make sure that your content throughout the year is evergreen, and that you are building and establishing your authority on whatever topic or niche that you're within. Then only run time-limited promoted pins for the actual summit.
(Pinterest does offer the ability, if you work with someone on the Pinterest for Business Advertising Team, to do time-sensitive pins where they will actually remove the pin afterward.)
Pinterest is a massive platform that has a place for everybody. People are there to make decisions. If you offer a solution, you should be using Pinterest.
About Meagan
A self-professed Pinterest addict, Meagan has been using Pinterest for almost 10 years. Meagan helps business owners generate more leads and sales using Pinterest marketing and Promoted Pins. When Meagan isn't talking about all things Pinterest with her clients and students, she is busy chasing her crazy toddler around while drinking coffee.
Website | Instagram | Meagan's Website
Resources
- Episode 4: Discover Your Ideal Virtual Summit Audience
- Episode 38: How to Run Virtual Summit Facebook Ads With Tony Rulli
- Summit Host Hangout Facebook group
Free Training Series: Summit to Sales
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