One of the best ways to get the most return for a product that you are promoting is to promote it to a custom audience that you know wants that particular product; in other words, promoting it to a custom audience. In this article, we are going to discuss the term and definition behind it, as well as go over some ways that you can build a custom audience and use it effectively.
What Is a Custom Audience?
Imagine that you own a restaurant and you are attempting to take orders from a large group of people attending a conference. You have created restaurant menus that are very fancy and were quite expensive to print. You are not the only restaurant providing lunch options to this group of business people. But since you don't know who will be ordering from your restaurant, you have to print one of these fancy menus for each and every person that is at the conference.
Now, suppose instead of handing out a menu to everyone, you were able to identify the people in the room that fit your criteria. First, they have to be hungry. While most people there are going to be hungry there may be others who simply are not interested in lunch. Maybe they want to do something else during the lunch break instead; like have a drink. You also have to know what kind of food these people like, or what would even be better is to know what kind of food they don't like. For example if you know that 10% of that group do not like Italian food and you have an Italian restaurant, then handing out your menus to them is going to do very little good.
So, if you were able to identify the people that are most likely to order from you then you would be able to save quite a bit of money on your marketing and advertising.
Much of this custom audience strategy is geared towards the World Wide Web. In fact, advertising can be targeted towards specific IP addresses. this is done through a third party service that collects data about each of those IP addresses and then tells companies which ones they need to target based upon what they are trying to sell. For example, if a company sells expensive virtual conference room services, they are going to need to market to a very different segment of the internet then the company that sells laundry detergent.
Facebook Custom Audiences
One of the most well-known custom audience services out there is Facebook. When you build a following on Facebook, you are building a list of people with very different needs, incomes and located in different parts of the world; from a marketing perspective, doing your advertising to those people maybe a waste of time. For example, if you are marketing worldwide to a worldwide Facebook audience a product that is only sold in the United States, you are wasting your advertising dollars.
That's why Facebook allows you to identify your audience by certain characteristics and then decide who you are going to market your products to.
This laser-targeting makes each advertising message sent out
- much more effective
- and increases your chances of getting a sale.
Search Engine Advertising and Custom Audiences
You can also make use of custom audiences when you use search engine advertising. For example the Google AdWords program allows you to have targeted ads for specific keywords listed in the Google search results on the sidebar. This eliminates the need for you to organically rank your website to be in the number one spot. The Google AdWords program works on a bidding system where you decide how much you are willing to pay for a click and the person that has been the highest is ranked at the top of these advertisement search results.
So you can see how a custom audience would be essential for this type of advertising. Another thing to keep in mind is that Google is not the only search engine that is offering this type of targeting, nor is Facebook the only social media profile social media site that is offering targeted advertising. Most advertising on the web can be targeted to some extent.
How to Use Custom Audiences Effectively
One of the things that you want to keep in mind Is that if you're going to use custom audiences than you need to know how to speak with them effectively. You are going to have very little success with a custom audience if you're advertising message does not show that you understand them and can sell to them. Of course this is the same in any types of marketing or advertising, but it is even more important when it comes to custom audiences.
Custom Audience Analytics
When it comes to building a custom audience, there are lots of tools out there that you can use. Each of the social media sites that are out there has their own custom audience or ad targeting capabilities. Some are more powerful than others and just a few of them include
- Pinterest,
- LinkedIn,
- Google AdWords,
- Facebook,
- Twitter and many more.
But analytics can be a great way to create a custom audience. The way that you do this is by figuring out what types of visitors are coming to your site and to which pages. For example, you may be able to divide your website visitors by region based upon the pages that they visit. Because search engines differ slightly from one region to another, you may have visitors from the UK coming to a certain page of your site more often while visitors from the United States come to a completely different page. This could be because of the way that the pages are ranked in the search engines or it could be because of the terminology being used by the searchers themselves. There can even be other reasons such as needs that differ from one region to another.
But a tool like Google analytics can help you
- identify what kind of visitors are coming to your website,
- where they are from
- and in many cases what they're looking for.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that you just simply need to be using custom audiences in all of your web marketing and advertising. Facebook definitely has been able to dominate the market and custom audiences because they have one of the most powerful tool sets out there for doing it and they have done a great job marketing the name as well. But there are many more ways to Target your advertising and create a custom audience for a specific product or message then just using Facebook. If you are in marketing or advertising, then you need to be able to use all the tools at your disposal to create the most effective communication between your company and the visitors to your website.
