Who Is My Audience?
As a business person, your audience is the reason why you have a business. These people could fall into any of the following categories:
- Fits your customer profile
- Could connect you with potential customers
- Can add credibility to your business
These people could be past or current customers, sales leads, personal contacts, or anonymous visitors of your website or social media. Once you find out all the things you could do with this audience, your imagination will run wild with how you’ll identify these people.
Segmenting Is The Key To Relevance
When a marketer says “Segmenting”, they mean categorizing or labeling. If I have a list of email addresses or a tracking code on my site cookying users, I can segment that list based on any identifying information I can think of. Here are some ideas:
- Source (where you got the information)
- Lead Status (lead, qualified, disqualified, lost, closed, etc)
- Age
- Gender
- Parental Status
- Income
- Geographic Location
- Product Interest (what they might want from you)
- Pages Viewed (cookied visitors only)
Any information you have on these people is useful, so start a spreadsheet for your email addresses and a column for every segment you can identify.
But What Do I Do With It?
Opt-In’s
If they’ve opted-in, it’s time to send them targeting marketing emails. Use an email marketing tool for this, not your email inbox since you could get flagged as spam (which would be terrible).
There are tools that let you build a series of emails based on that user’s information and interaction with your brand. When you automate this process instead of writing one-off’s, it allows you to focus more on making each email high quality since you’ll make it once and send it out automatically.
Other
If they haven’t opted-in, blasting them with emails is no good. It’s not legal in the EU anymore, so be careful. There are still some very cool things you can do here if they’ve opted-in or not.
Upload Them
You can take your lists, segment them so that when you send them an ad, it will be relevant to everyone in the set, then upload that group to Facebook and Google Ads. There are a few benefits in doing this. Firstly, you can run ads targeting these users with messaging exactly relevant to them. Secondly, Google and Facebook will look at the data they have on those people and come up with an expanded audience of all their users that look like the group you uploaded. Google calls this a Similar Audience and Facebook calls it a Lookalike Audience. It’s the same idea. At this point, you have an expanded audience to send ads to! The bigger the original group is, the more accurate the audience expansion will be. This process is easy and could be the most relevant way to deliver paid ads to potential customers.
Retargeting
We’ve all heard of it and it’s important to bring it up. There are several ways to install tags on your site that make a list of the users who visit it, what they did there, and where they came from. Facebook does this, Google does it, and so do several other Retargeting companies.
Some Examples
Now that you’re up to speed on the idea, I hope your mind is racing with how you’ll identify your audience and what messages you’ll send them. Here are a few good examples that you can steal.
- Subscribers: Send them helpful information that they can use immediately. Ask them about their needs and collect that information with forms like Typeform.
- Your Customers: Tell them about other products you offer that complement what they’ve already used. Incentivize them to advocate your brand with people they know user a referral program or the feeling that they’ve referred a great company to their personal contacts.
- Shopping Cart Abandonment: If someone visited your site, but didn’t complete the purchase, send them ads with the products they seemed most interested in or your seasonal offers.
- Customer Lookalikes: Gather the emails of all your customers, past and present. Combine them with all those qualified leads you didn’t close. Upload those to Google or Facebook and send them ads showcasing your most popular offering.
- Potential Customers: Send them an offer and tell them it’s exclusive to them.
How Do I Get An Audience
Your audience will either be an Email List or an anonymous list of website visitors. There are a few ways to grow these lists:
- Contact Form & Subscribe Pop-up on your website.
- Install a tracking code on your site and enable retargeting. ie.
- Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, AdRoll, Fetchback, SimpliFi, etc.
- Push surveys that collect person information to your social media audience.
- Promote a giveaway in an ad or to your social media audience, collecting their information.
- Get out there and network. Ask people about themselves and ask for their business cards. Look up professional networking events in your area.
- Buy ads on Google and Facebook, getting users to your site. Facebook as a lead capture ad format that collects their information without them going to your site at all.
- Provide wifi to your local customers and require their email addresses to log in.
- Buy the list from a prospecting tool like Growbots or Bark.
