Why custom audiences? Why not market to everybody?
Let's be real for a second.
We at the FitMedia Department of Words have never had much time for people who, when faced with a bag of skittles, spend their time intently picking out their favourite flavours and leaving the rest behind.
When it comes to advertising your business, however, this is exactly the approach you need.
Each successful lead – each ‘good skittle’ – might cost you ££’s in advertising but has the capacity to generate ££££’s in profits. But you need to sort the wheat from the chaff, the seeds from the sand, the good skittles from the bad. Depending on just how niche your offer is, finding the right client can really be like finding a needle in a haystack at times.
This is why finding a custom audience is a crucial first step in any paid ad campaign. The custom audience is a population of people defined by parameters upon which you decide – specifically, parameters that Facebook doesn’t ordinarily have like website traffic or page views. This custom audience can be as convoluted as you like (as long as it makes sense).
A standard audience could be ‘males aged between 25-35 and living in Greater Manchester, UK’. A more complex (and, perhaps, more intelligent) custom audience might be ‘males aged between 25-35 and living in Greater Manchester, UK, who have visited your website / social media in the last 30 days and watched at least 60 seconds of the promo video on your landing page’.
We think you will agree that the second group are far more likely to be interested in whatever you have to say than the first. This makes your advertising significantly more relevant and therefore effective relative to the time, money and effort your pour into it.
What could be better than that?
Too much of a good thing?
Let’s caveat that for a second. Can your audience be customised and specified too much?
Well, absolutely, yes it can.
Let’s say that only one Mancunian guy in his twenties or thirties visited your webpage and watched 60 seconds of your promo video. Are you going to blow your entire budget marketing to him?
Probably not, right?
That’s because such audiences only work when they’re sufficiently large. Creating a designer custom audience is therefore sometimes less of a science and more of an art. You need to ask yourself the questions: why males? Why 25-35? Why Manchester? Why should they have visited only my website or social media? Are there any other parameters we can use as proxies (rough indicators) for high susceptibility to this particular marketing campaign?
One way to generate an effective and useful custom audience is to start big and then narrow down. Drive traffic to your page by advertising to a very broad demographic – say, all 25- to 35-year-old Mancunian males. Then hone in on the most interested 10% of that population – those that stick around for the longest, engage the most – and specify them as your campaign’s custom audience.
Across any given 30 day period, we recommend your custom audience be at least 1000 people, if not more.
If you want to learn how to grow traffic to your webpage and how FitMedia’s data-driven approach can make your advertising spend as successful as it can possibly be, consider booking a call with us at www.fitmedia.net/apply.
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