One pin can change your business! I can’t wait to share this powerful Pinterest marketing story with you today!

I am so excited to introduce you to my guest and fellow Pinterest marketer, Cara Chace. We met up for lunch recently and her story was so powerful that I knew I had to share it with all of you. The great part about this story is that it’s not a get rich quick type of story.

You can put her strategies into action and achieve similar results, depending on the goals of your business.

Like me, Cara has a Pinterest management and marketing company, but she didn’t start out there. She was recruited as a special agent for the government right out of college (the opposite of being an entrepreneur in a creative industry). She spent ten years in law enforcement, but she knew that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in that career.

She began learning everything she could about social media marketing, and quickly became a huge asset to the band. Eventually, she became their official social media manager, juggling 17 social media account and 13 million fans!

She started her own business, doing all the things – building websites, blogging, email marketing, and social media strategy. She spent a few of years figuring out what she really liked doing and what type of clients she enjoyed working with.

About a year and a half ago, she realized that she really wanted to focus on Pinterest. She saw that, not only for herself but also for her clients, Pinterest had the biggest ROI on for their business. It was a no-brainer, especially because she personally loved using Pinterest.

How One Pin Can Change Your Business Forever

We live in an instant gratification kind of world. We want immediate results. We want to get rich quick. And that’s just not how Pinterest works. I’ve talked about the slow-burn of Pinterest over and over. Cara’s story is a reflection of that.

The first part of the story is Cara’s realization of how Pinterest could serve as a marketing funnel for her business. When she started her business, she knew she needed to establish herself as the expert in her niche. She created a blog post called 9 Things Your Social Media Manager Should Be Doing.

Nine months into her business, she decided to look at her Google Analytics to see what posts were getting the best traffic. This is when her her “aha!” moment happened regarding the power of Pinterest. She discovered that 80% of her traffic was coming from Pinterest, and about 75% was coming from that specific post.

She knew that this was important information that she needed to leverage somehow. The blog post was more like a long article. So she decided to turn the post into a free e-book that you could get through an email opt-in. She made this change in 2015 and still gets email sign-ups for the e-book every single day.

Cara doesn’t know exactly when this pin “made it big” but it wasn’t overnight. She didn’t even look at her analytics until nine months after pinning it. This result totally changed her frame of mind about Pinterest marketing. She evolved from just pinning a post and moving on, to actually putting forth significant effort on the Pinterest platform to leverage her traffic and build her business.

How Pinterest Is Supposed to Work

Last summer, right before Cara was about to have baby number 2, she received an email from someone she had never met before. The woman asked her if she was interested in a speaking engagement. Cara had been doing guest training and webinars online, and a few local events, but had never spoken about Pinterest in a conference setting.

The woman invited Cara to come to Bermuda last December and teach her audience of wedd...