053 | Megan Auman on product photography and leveraging Pinterest for sales

Megan Auman is a designer, metalsmith, educator, and entrepreneur who has built a multi-faceted business around her passion for art, commerce, and visual content creation! (Which is just a fancy way of saying she's obsessed with Instagram and Pinterest.) In addition to running her Megan Auman jewelry line, she runs the site Designing an MBA, where she writes and teaches about the intersection of art and business.

On today's episode we're talking about product photography and why you should be leveraging pinterest to get more sales.

ON TODAY'S EPISODE:

• A common mistake that Megan sees product-based business owners making around marketing strategies
• When she started her jewelry line and how it lead to her starting her Designing an MBA program
• Her product photography & the importance of having high quality photos of your products
• Megan's tips on preparing for a photo shoot
• The editing software that Megan uses
• How she is leveraging her product photography and Pinterest for sales
• Some of Megan's struggles when she first got started on Pinterest
• How she measures conversions and the effectiveness of her Pinterest strategy
• Utilizing Pinterest scheduling apps to batch content
• Megan's experience with Pinterest ads
• The advice she would offer to someone just starting out in a product based business
• What's next for Megan

KEY TAKE-AWAYS:

"It's really easy to get sidetracked just by all the information online about running a business, and trying to know what applies to you and what doesn't." - Megan Auman

"You have to show your customers how it fits into their lives, otherwise they're not going to buy it." - Megan Auman

"Your life will be so much easier if you batch your photography, whether that's product photography or social media photography, it doesn't matter, the easiest thing is to batch." - Megan Auman

"Shoot like crazy and then pick your best ones and delete everything, because it's better to have a lot of options when you're editing." - Megan Auman

"Shoot from far away and then get in and shoot the detail, and shoot somewhere in the middle. Shoot from those different distances and you going to have a lot more options." - Megan Auman

"One of the reasons that people get frustrated with Pinterest, is sometimes they just pin their product photography directly from their online shop, which is good, but it's not ultimately the best way to use it, especially if your price point is higher." - Megan Auman

"If you're starting out and you're only putting your images with your images, and no one else is pinning your content, Pinterest isn't showing it to anybody." - Megan Auman

"As soon as you start putting your content across other boards with other people's pins, it greatly increases the chances that Pinterest is going to show them to other people." - Megan Auman

"More often than not, stuff doesn't go viral immediately, people call it the Pinterest lag." - Megan Auman

"The biggest challenge with Pinterest ads is that, they're better at keyword targeting than audience targeting." - Megan Auman

"You really cannot compete if you don't have that email list and you're not using it regularly." - Megan Auman

LINKS:

Afterlight: https://afterlight.co/

Snapseed: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapseed/id439438619?mt=8

Retouchup.com: https://www.retouchup.com/

Viraltag: https://www.viraltag.com/

Tailwind: https://www.tailwindapp.com/

CONNECT WITH MEGAN:

Website: http://designinganmba.com

Instagram: http://instagram.com/meganauman

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/meganauman

Twitter: http://twitter.com/meganauman

Market Your Selfie: http://www.marketyourselfie.com

Megan Auman's Pinterest for Makers class on CreativeLive

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ABOUT PROOF TO PRODUCT:

Proof to Product is brought to you by Tradeshow Bootcamp and hosted by Katie Hunt. Since 2011, TSBC has worked with hundreds of product based businesses to help them up level, scale, and build profitable sustainable companies. You can find our show notes and additional resources at ProofToProduct.com. If you like what you heard today, please head over to Apple Podcast to leave a five star review and subscribe. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode!