Are you marketing to the audiences most likely to convert into revenue for your business? If not, you are missing out on a powerful way to ensure that your message gets to the right people at the best ROI possible. In this post, we’re going to look at 12 custom audiences you should include in your advertising strategy and the platforms to use them with.
1. Visitors to your website.
Google AdWords, Facebook Custom Audiences, and Twitter Tailored Audiences allow you to target ads to visitors on your website. This will ensure that they are reminded of your business, products, and services after their first visit, giving you a second chance to make a sale or conversion. The first step to remarketing is to get the tracking code on your website early. Twitter will store website visitor data for up to 90 days. Facebook and Google AdWords will store website visitor data for up to 180 days. Therefore, if you want to reach your visitors for the last 90 to 180 days (depending on the platform you advertise upon), you need to have the remarketing tags and pixels on your website that many days prior to creating your first remarketing ad. From here, you will want to fine tune your ads based on the specific pages your website visitors viewed. If your entire website is about one product or service, this isn’t an issue. If you sell multiple products or services, then you will want to have multiple ads so that your website visitors will see an ad that matches the product or service they were interested in. The same strategy can be applied to your webinar marketing. For example, if you have blog posts that cover three different topics, and automated webinars for each of those topics, you should create remarketing ads that match website visitors from specific posts to relevant webinars. Because your website visitors are familiar with you and your business, there is no need to treat them as cold leads for your products and services. Use visitors to your website to increase conversions to your products, services, and webinars. Also note that you can use your website visitors as exclusions in your advertising on these platforms. That way, you ensure that ads with the goal of introducing new people to you or your business are only going to people who are not familiar with you.
2. Active customers.
Want to reach your current customers with new products, new services, or upgrades to the products and services they have recently purchased? Use their email addresses and phone numbers to create Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences for remarketing ads. Mobile phone numbers are your best option for both Facebook and Twitter as most people will link their one mobile number to their account, whereas the email address they use for purchases versus their social media accounts may differ based on work / personal use. If mobile phone numbers are not a part of your customer database, then email will be the next best thing. As active customers, you can skip the introductions and go straight into product or service marketing. The only exception is if you are introducing a new product or service, in which case you may want to introduce it as a standalone from what they have already purchased from you. You can also use lists of your active customers as exclusions in your advertising to ensure that your product promotion ads are not being viewed by people who have already purchased them. This is especially important if you are paying for impressions, as there is no need to show your ad to someone who is not going to make a second purchase.
3. Inactive customers.
Inactive customers can be a tricky audience, depending on the reasons why they are not buying from you anymore. But they can and should be remarketed to separately using email addresses and phone numbers to create Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. For inactive customers, you have the option of slowly rebuilding your relationship with them, starting with valuable new content and information about new products and services you have to offer. You also have the option to simply regain their trust if the issue that led them away had to do with the instability of a previous product or service you had to offer. You also have the option to introduce new products and services to your inactive customers, introduce new features of your past products and services, or remind them of the benefits of the product or service the customer previously used. If there were no negative reasons why your customer left you in the first place, delivery of valuable content and reminders should help bring them back to the fold.
4. Your leads.
If you have a service-based business and you are collecting email addresses and phone numbers from your website, anyone who does not convert into a customer should be added to custom advertising audiences with Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. This will allow you to keep reminding your leads about the service they inquired about until they hopefully take you up on it.
5. Active email list subscribers.
No matter how active your email list is, it never hurts to make sure they see your message across multiple platforms. Therefore, remarket to them using their email addresses with Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. By reaching your email subscribers on multiple platforms, especially during a promotion, you will ensure that they don’t forget your message or miss out on a deadline. After all, they may have read your email when they woke up on their mobile, but may be more likely to register for a webinar or make a purchase later in the day at their office when they see your Facebook ad. The fact that they are already familiar with your promotion will make it much more likely that they will take action on it.
6. Inactive email list subscribers and unsubscribers.
If you’ve been deleting your inactive email list subscribers and unsubscribers from your mailing list without saving them, then you are missing out on an opportunity to reconnect with people who have been interested in your messaging in the past. Instead of deleting your inactives and unsubscribers, export their email addresses and use them with Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. This will allow you to reach those people again on Facebook and Twitter. And unless you specifically say something in your ad that lets them know how they were targeted (which you shouldn’t, especially in this case), they will not be any wiser. For this group of custom and tailored audiences, you have a few options. You can target ads to them to try to get them back on your mailing list using new lead magnets or webinars. Or, you may want to start anew with them by promoting blog content that will eventually lead them to new lead magnets or webinars.
7. Webinar attendees.
For those using Stealth Seminar, you can create highly effective ads for webinar attendees using Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. In particular, using Stealth Seminar’s advanced segmenting options, you can create ads that cater to webinar attendees who registered for a webinar but didn’t attend, webinar attendees who did not finish the webinar, and webinar attendees that finished a webinar but didn’t get moved to your customer list. Using each of these unique segments from your automated webinars, you can advertise second chance webinars, webinar replays, and the main pitch for your product or service to the right audiences. It will prevent you from advertising a webinar replay to someone who fully attended the original webinar, or from advertising your product or service to someone who didn’t attend the original webinar and would be more likely to convert with a second chance webinar.
8. Your email address book.
Have you thought about advertising to your email contacts? Not the people who are on your mailing list or in your customer database, but simply the people you email on a regular basis for your business? You can export your contacts from Gmail, Outlook, and most other email service providers and platforms to use with Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. This allows you to create advertising directed to people who are familiar with you and your business, but have not made the jump from a connection to a mailing list subscriber, lead, or customer. When creating ads for this group of people, use custom audiences and tailored audiences for your mailing list subscribers, leads, and customers as exclusions so that you only reach your email contacts who are not already seeing your ads.
9. Your LinkedIn contacts.
Do you have a strong LinkedIn network? If you have a network of 1st degree connections on LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn’s export feature to get their email addresses to use with Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. This will allow you to create advertising targeted towards people familiar with you and your business, but not yet on your mailing list, leads list, or customer list. Advertising to your LinkedIn connections will be especially useful for those marketing B2B, as LinkedIn is used mostly by professionals for professional networking.
10. Your Twitter followers.
Building followers on Twitter can be easier than growing your mailing list. And fortunately, now you can utilize your Twitter followers the same way by advertising to them with Twitter Tailored Audiences. All you need is to use a platform like SocialBro to export your Twitter followers to a CVS file and upload their usernames as a tailored audience in Twitter ads. Once you have done this, you can ensure that they don’t miss out on your most important tweets by promoting them to your followers specifically. You can also use SocialBro to export the Twitter usernames of people following your competitors, people following influencers in your industry, and other audiences that you would want to advertise to. This allows you to bypass general targeting options on Twitter and focus on the people who are more likely to be your desired audience.
11. The media.
Getting press and media attention for your newest offerings can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to approach journalists, writers, and bloggers beyond the standard press release, and that is through custom audience advertising using Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. Specifically, here’s what you will need to do. To create custom audiences on Facebook and Twitter, you will need either the email addresses of important media influencers who are most likely to write about your business. Tools like ContentMarketer.io can help. For example, let’s say that you want a list of the most influential tech bloggers. Chances are, someone has compiled this in a blog post. When you find that blog post, enter it on ContentMarketer.io. This tool will search the web for information about these people and allow you to export it into a CSV file. This will give you the email addresses you need to create a Facebook Custom Audience. In addition., you will also get most of the bloggers usernames on Twitter to use as a Twitter Tailored Audience. You can also use this tool to extract emails and Twitter usernames from about pages for online publications where you would like to have your offering mentioned. Mashable’s team page, for example, has the names of their top writers that can easily be extracted. When advertising to the media, the goal is to get them so excited about your offering that they will want to write about it. This means that your ad is not intended to sell them on the offering, but rather to sell them on how great the offering would be to their audience so they write about it.
12. Purchased email lists.
Most marketers will suggest that you never email a purchased list, and most mailing list services will not allow it because those people have not opted-in to your mailing list. But what you can do with a bought email list is advertise to it using Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences. This allows you to purchase email lists for your target audience base and reach them without breaking your email reputation. The key is to not let Facebook or Twitter in on the fact that the email list is bought. Hence, don’t name it something that references it is a paid list and especially don’t mention anything in the ad that would identify it as such. Using this approach, you will be able to reach more of your intended customer base with specific advertising to help new people get to know you and your business, and ultimately lead them through your funnel with valuable introductory content.
In Conclusion
As you can see, there are a multitude of different customer audiences you can use to increase your advertising success through Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads. Do a thorough check of all of these sources to ensure that you are reaching as many of the right people with your offerings as possible! Got one I don’t list above? I would love to learn about it below.
