10 Custom Audiences You Should Be Targeting With Facebook Advertising

Why does this matter to you, the Gilbert small business owner? Take a look at that list of demo targeting a bit closer…what do you notice? If you haven’t seen it yet, this article will be a great help to your Facebook Advertising efforts. There are ten Custom Facebook Audiences that you need to be targeting with Facebook Advertising, and here’s how they breakdown:

1. Current Fans – For one thing, I have already Liked about a dozen Disney related pages. Your Fans are your greatest resource on Facebook. They have already Liked your page, which easily translates to the fact that they are already interested in your services, product, or brand message. If they came to your page organically, and with intent, they absolutely want to know what’s happening with your company.

To target current fans effectively, you need to stick to your brand message and overall brand integrity. For example, Disney currently walks a fine line between what I like to call the Maleficent-Frozen paradox – promoting the darker side of Disney villains alongside the lighter side of Frozen. Disney must remain consistent to their overall brand integrity while appealing to an audience who wants to see more villains. Of course, they walk that fine line beautifully. 

You too must have a keen understanding of what your Fans, your target audience, wants to see as well as what you want them to see. Facebook Advertising to current Fans should include any promotions that you are currently running, any articles or blogs you want more eyes on, any partnerships or non-profit dealings your proud of, any announcements you need blown up, and/or any pertinent information your Fans need to know.

2. LookaLike Fans – Facebook offers us this amazing tool called Lookalike Audience, which is essentially exactly what it sounds like; an audience that looks extremely similar to the audience selected. For example, in this case my number two Custom Audience to highlight with Facebook Advertising is the current Fans Lookalike Audience, or an audience that is custom created by Facebook based on trends, patterns and similarities to your Fans. Lookalike Audiences is found under “Audiences” on the left hand side of your Advertising Platform.

Because your current Fans share certain interests, activities, Likes, and traditional demographics, Facebook can create a Custom Audience based off of these similarities. And because this Lookalike Audience is starkly similar to your current Fans, targeting them with Advertising should provide a great return on investment.

3. Newsletter Subscribers – I’m on the Disney Newsletter list.Targeting Facebook Advertising to your Newsletter connections is a great way to integrate your newsletter topics and conversation onto the Facebook platform. It’s also a great way to invite your Newsletter subscribers to Like your Facebook page and discuss those Newsletter topics with other Fans. Facebook allows you to import your subscribers list directly from MailChimp, or upload it as a CSV file.

 

Theoretically, since these individuals have already willingly subscribed to your email list, they will be more interested in Liking your Facebook Page and thus your return on investment in this type of Advertising should be very cost effective.

4. Lookalike Subscribers – Just as with the Lookalike Fans, we can create a Lookalike Audience for your Newsletter Subscribers, and it’s just as easy. This Custom Audience will be strikingly similar to your Newsletter Audience, and thus your Facebook Ads will run much smarter.

5. Custom Website Audience – I visit the Disney Store website at least once a week. One of my favorite new Audience Targeting options is the Custom Website Audience, which allows you to essentially retarget individuals who have already visited your website. You’ll find this option under the Create Audience button within the Audience dashboard.

You’ll be given a pixel that will need to be inserted into your website. If you run Wordpress, just place the pixel within the Header.php file just before the </head> tag. It’s extremely simple, and voila, Facebook will track those users who visit your website and offer you the amazing opportunity to retarget those users with advertising on Facebook.  

 

With this form of advertising I tend to act more personable – customizing the ad message to those who had already shown an interest in certain services or products.

6. Lookalike Website Audience – Obviously you’ll want to reach Facebook users who are similar to those who have visited your website, so you’ll absolutely want to run a Lookalike Website Audience. It’s important to remember that this Custom Audience has never actually visited your website, but are similar to those who have. So you can’t customize and personalize your ad message as much as you would for your Website Custom Audience, but you can still get pretty creative. 

7. Google Plus Contacts -- I just recently really discovered the power behind utilizing Google Plus contacts for situations outside of Google, such as Facebook Advertising. From within your Gmail account, you can export your Google Plus lists. If you’re anything like me, you have a Business List, along with many other potential networking lists. Export this list from Google Plus, and import it right into Facebook Custom Audience. The key is to go into the Excel sheet after your exported it from Google Plus and make sure it’s organized to Facebook requirements.

 

 Target this Custom Audience with personalized advertising, perhaps even mentioning your connection on Google Plus. 

8. Lookalike Google Plus Audience – Well of course you have to!

9. Email Contacts – Much like your Google Plus contacts, you should have your email contacts categorized and organized. These are great resources for broadening your Facebook Advertising Audience – target those who you’re already connected with but who have yet to network with you on Facebook.

10. Lookalike Email Audience – Duh!

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Creating a Social Engagement Plan in 4 Steps

There’s no doubt that almost every business is (or at least trying to be) active on social media. But more often than not, you’ll find companies trying to engage with their audience on social channels with no plan or strategy. This post will walk you through a simple four-step social engagement plan to get you started.

Before diving into the plan, it’s important to take a step back and define the purpose of engagement. The purpose of engaging in social media is to create a genuine and meaningful two-way conversation. Once that’s established, other business goals such as brand awareness and lead generation will follow naturally.

Now, onto the fun stuff. The four steps of this social engagement plan are listening, engaging, measuring, and learning. You’ll want to think of this plan as being continuous or cyclical, so you can repeat it once you’re done with the fourth step.

1. Listen

Ever heard the saying “think twice before you speak?” Well, I say “listen twice before you tweet!”. When you start your listening exercise, you’ll want to identify things like:

• What are my audience’s main pain points?
• What type of content does my audience find appealing?
• What format of content is best consumed, engaged with, and shared by my audience?

Remember that listening doesn’t have to be passive. Feel free to engage in active listening by soliciting the information you’re looking for through testing different content formats and lengths, using online listening tools like surveys, or even researching what people are interested in or looking for on forums, etc.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a company providing PPC management services. You can look through the AdWords community to identify the most popular topics or issues people are discussing, then create content around how you can address or solve it.

2. Engage

Engaging consists of not only creating specific content based on the areas or topics of interest identified in the listening phase, but being available to engage back as well.

In the initial engagement phase, you might want to explore as many channels as possible to get a sense of where your audience spends the most time and consumes your content.

3. Measure

In this step, you’ll want to start by defining what your success metrics are. It’s important to take the time to set this measuring framework first, so you can easily determine success, failure, or areas of improvement.

Take a look at Angie Schottmuller’s post for great insights about how to set up goals to measure your social media ROI.

4. Learn

Measuring is useless if we don’t learn from it. The goal of measurement is not just to understand what happened in the past, but to determine our future actions as well.

So when you’re analyzing your success metrics, you might find, for example, that you have a low level of engagement on Twitter.

But a much higher one on YouTube

But take that a step further, and you might find that what this really means is that you have a high viewership but low engagement on that channel.

Use this type of insight to revise your next iteration. If you have the views but little to no engagement, solicit it.

Google’s Web Analytics TV gets a lot of engagement not only because Avinash is kind of cute, but because they clearly and specifically ask their audience to ask and rate questions.

Analyzing your metrics this way turns them into more actionable insights, allowing you to repeat the process again, knowing specific things like:

• The need to deliver more quality content.
• Understanding different content consumption levels across channels.
• Segmenting your your target audience to cater to them differently.
• How to coordinate similar efforts across your social media team.
• Uncovering opportunities to convert prospects.

With this simple four-step plan to listen, engage, measure, and learn, what’s keeping you from getting started today?

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6 Ways To Integrate Your On-Site & Social Efforts

Since search and social have had more of a convergence, the idea of the “hub” has become stronger, providing one main place to drive your existing audience and capture their attention. Most marketers or brands make the mistake of having social media be their “go to” place and they neglect any semblance of a strong blog or website strategy.

This results in is a lost “segment” of users – those who engage on social networks but never actually make it to your site and truly show interest in your brand.

Social leads to the sharing of content, but conversions and revenue are harder to quantify when following social channels. Driving users back to the end goal (your website) can often help you understand user behavior when they come from social, and what helps to convert them.

There should be a fine spiderweb existing between your on-site/blog strategy and your social strategy so that they’re synced up and integrated. Ideally, your blog/website should act as your homebase, and social should be a strategy that supplements your already existing on-site one.

Social media and blogging are also a long-term audience growing strategies which will allow brand and content to have longer legs, which is exactly why they need to work in tandem with each other.

The following are some tactical/strategic tips to make sure you’re leveraging both sides of the fence in your strategy.

1.  Authorship & Open Graph

Authorship and Open Graph are two things that can help immensely on the search and sharing side. Authorship is a fairly quick integration – if you’re the only author that’s contributing to your blog, a simple email verification via your domain email, and addition to contributions on the G+ profile side, will allow for authorship.

If you have multiple authors on your blog, integration takes slightly longer with a few more steps for integration. You’ll be able to check for authorship markup completion using the structured data testing tool.

Open Graph (OG) markup is something that’s fairly easy to integrate thanks to plugins that simplify the process. Sharing and social click throughs can be affected in a positive way by making sure that content or products are easily shareable with minimal modification by the end users.

The debugger is fairly straight forward and helps you identify loose ends or mistakes in your OG tags.

2.  Queue Up Old Posts For Promotion

Content has 9 lives – there’s been times that we’ve been working on content and given reports on how it has performed, what channels and communities it’s reached, and how many unique views it’s received, only to find out that months down the line there’s another huge spike in traffic.

This could be for many reasons – sometimes it’s seasonal, sometimes it’s because of the news, or sometimes it’s industry related. Other times, the right influencer picks up the content at a later date and it travels quickly through its new audience.

Instead of leaving the resurgence up to chance, take some time to identify old content that performed well in its hey-day, and slip it into your social calendar. By now, you have new members in your audience that will appreciate the content who may not have viewed it previously on site or through your social channels.

Ideal pieces for this:

• Evergreen content
• “How-to” style content

3.  Improve On Said Content

Likewise, when you’re planning on promoting an old piece of content again, also check to see if there’s any new information or examples that can be integrated into it.

One issue with promoting content that isn’t necessarily evergreen and has performed well in the past, is that the information could be outdated. You’ll want to make sure anything that you’re promoting again is sharing the latest information possible.

Also look for ways to change the content medium – can the updates be put in video or podcast form?

Content that can be improved upon:

• Seasonal content
• Holiday content
• Industry specific content around special events

4.  Reach Out When You Update Content

If you plan on updating older content to promote it again and help it reach a newer, broader audience, pull some backlinks and identify where the content was originally shared. Take the time to reach back out and notify them that you have updated your original post on the chance that they’re able to work it into their own editorial calendar.

5.  Identify Topical Twitter Chats

This is a strategy we have implemented in the past to help drive some users from social to on-site content. If you’re looking to expand your brand reach and generate relevant inbound links and social signals, publish an authoritative and unique piece of content prior to joining a Twitter chat that revolves around that particular subject. There are tons of Twitter chats out there and curated, constantly updated lists like this one.

Prior to participating in the chat, reach out and let others know the piece of content has been shared (especially with those who run blogs/websites of their own) since this can be a great way to drive awareness back to your blog and also encourage sharing of the content that contributed to the conversation.

6.  Identify Influencers & Add Value

There are plenty of influencers in the social space that also have curated content performing in their space. If you’re able to add value by aggregating your own proprietary data, reach out to that particular influencer and suggest a collaboration. You’ll be able to take advantage of their existing social base, add value to yours, and also help older content grow legs.

As social becomes a stronger and more integrated part of an overall organic SEO strategy, we’ll need to make sure that we’re not neglecting the traditional and basic means of promoting and sharing content on-site.

These are just some basic tactics that can be used to help weave the Web of social and on-site content in order to create an “audience hub” which all channels can leverage. Social media is an integral part of any large brand’s strategy, but there’s also something to be said for moving it back to basics and understanding what keeps a user on your actual site.

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9 of 10 Online Marketers Make the Same Silly Mistake

Knock knock.

 Who’s there?

Prospect. Prospect who?

Prospect who’s looking to solve a problem.

Prospect who’s looking to…

Ehnnn, that’s enough of that. There’s no punchline. In fact, if there’s a joke of any sort here, it may be on you.

 

Who will visit your site?

If I ask you this question, will you balk? It almost seems ridiculous to think you may not have an insightful and specific answer. But you may not—and it wouldn’t make you the least bit unique. So forgive me for saying so, but we’re not talking about a silly mistake. We’re talking about a serious one.

Without trivializing the conversation to a bad knock-knock joke, I have some form of this conversation nearly every day. My clients and new business prospects come a-calling on me to plan and write new websites for their businesses daily. The first questions I ask: “Who will be visiting your site?” 9 of 10 times I don’t get a specific answer. Ug.

What I’m compelled to say next sometimes costs me business. I say, “We’re not ready to create an effective site.”

How will we engage your audience?

As a website copywriter, I’m called on to engage the folks that have clicked into your site. So imagine my frustration when I learn you can’t help me because you don’t know who they are, what they want, and what they’re doing here.

We absolutely HAVE TO know who they are and what they want. How else could we possibly engage them?

 

It starts with site-centric demographics

In this article, we won’t get into the process of defining the objectives of your website, so we’ll make the assumption you want your visitor to connect with your company in some meaningful way. With this in mind, you’ll want to do your best to determine the demographic make-up of your users with specifics regarding: 

• Education
• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Occupation
• Ethnicity
• Location

Of course, you’ll want to identify different types or sets of users. In the process of creating your site, you'll want to provide different content and click paths to accommodate differing needs. In some cases, when identifying demographics, you may need to be broad, however, you’ll benefit from identifying the real deal power users (or at least your best prospects) and creating detailed personas to help establish exactly who you’re talking to. Pixsym does an excellent job unraveling the mysteries of persona building in this article.  

As simple as it may sound, whatever you write, or any kind of content you create and publish needs to be informed by demographics. This is critical to the connection you hope to make. On the flip side, to create a single, generic voice aimed at addressing anybody, anywhere is to miss the opportunity to connect.

Next you need to get in their heads.

Knowing who’s there is huge, but it’s not enough. The key to persuading your audience to do something lies in understanding what motivates them. We’re talking about psychographics now.

Psychographically speaking (I always wanted to say that), you want to uncover the values, beliefs, attitudes and motivations of your customers. Ever notice how the products a person buys reveals so much about his or her personality?

Yup. Psychographics is the key to discovering what inspires your website visitors to spend their money.

And now, meet the term “socialgraphics.”

It was inevitable us marketing types would coin a term to define how an individual behaves—and by that I mean, online. Socialgraphics. It’s not poetry, but it’ll have to do. With socialgraphics, you want to know who’s doing what in the complex digital world of social media, email, and all things Internet. These behaviors include: 

• Content consumption and sharing
• Preferred media and communication channels
• Propensity to comment, review, and post content
• Participation in online communities
• Time of day actions
• Choice of platforms (devices, software, browsers, etc.)
• Mobile use

You get the picture. Socialgraphics helps you complete the picture. We’ll boil it down and review. You know who’s visiting, what they think, and how they behave online. Now you have a pretty good chance of supplying what they demand.

Tactics to help you get the insights you need.

Understanding the prospects that come to your site takes some effort. Here are some of the things you should do—before you set up shop and start creating all kinds of content. 

• Run surveys—If you have a site and sufficient traffic, you can use it to conduct surveys. Email lists are idea for surveying your audience with tools such as SurveyMonkey. You can try social media, question sites, and LinkedIn Answers. In some cases, picking up the phone may work.
• Examine site analytics—Google Analytics and an ever-expanding array of analytics tools will help you uncover a vast amount of information about who is visiting your site, where they are from, where they came from, and what keywords brought them there. You’ll tap into your site’s vital signs such as bounce rate (a number that indicates how many people quickly left). Examine pages viewed to help get a grasp on the needs and wants of your visitors. You can customize analytical tools to reveal all kinds of data that will help you understand your customers. 
• Blog—Over time, the consumption of the articles and content you publish will reveal much-needed insights about your customers. And, of course, the comments you collect will provide even greater insights. You’re likely to learn what questions prospects have for you. You’ll pick up on their vibe. You’ll get a sense of what keeps them up at night.
• Follow the market—Put in the time to comb through what’s going on in and around your niche and you’ll see trends emerge and get a good sense of useful psychographics.
• Gather advertising results—Advertisers should measure and analyze the results generated (or not) by their ads. A host of “who, what, when, and where” revelations should come from advertising data and suggest how well you are or aren’t pressing the right buttons. 
• Uncover keyword questions—Look into Wordtracker’s free keywords question tool, a supremely handy tool for discovering the questions the people you want to visit your site are asking in search strings.

Don’t ask strangers for money.

You won’t get much out of it if you do. The time and effort you invest in understanding your audience is going to pay huge dividends. Knowing who your visitor is and what they need will allow you to create a far more effective site and continue populating it with the sticky stuff you need to engage visitors.

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