Last week inside of the Strong Brand Social‘s private Facebook group, we presented a seminar on social media audiences. We talked about the most important audiences to set up in the backend of Facebook in order to systematically grow your business, how to prioritize if you’re starting from zero, and exactly how to build them.

The strongest marketing teams in the world obsess over audiences: Targeting, testing, segmenting.

But audiences are incredibly important no matter your size — as soon as you set up a Facebook or Instagram business profile, you should be thinking about your audience strategy.

Here are the basics of where to start.

There are two types of audience: Cold and warm.

• A cold audience is comprised of people that have never heard of you.
• A warm audience is made up of people who know you. You have many warm audience segments, including prospects that you want to convert to customers, and customers that you want to convert again in order to increase their overall value to your business.

You can start building warm audiences immediately, and you can use these warm audiences to lower your customer acquisition costs among cold audiences.

When you set things up in the back of Facebook Business Manager, you can tell Facebook to add users to an audience based on specific actions that they take (such as engaging with your content, visiting your website, or buying). Facebook will continuously add people to these audiences over time so that you can retarget your warm audiences based on actions they’ve taken in the past year.

Here’s the priority order for your first five audiences, starting at beginner:

Warm:

• Facebook and Instagram followers who have engaged with you over the past 3, 6 or 12 months
• Your customer email list (you can upload this into Facebook’s Business Manager)
• Your website traffic (if you don’t have a Facebook pixel on your website please do this ASAP)

Cold:

• A cold audience built around your target segment using demographics like age, location, and interests
• Your lookalike (LAL) audiences — where you take your warm audiences (the best would be customer list) — and create an audience that looks like them with Facebook’s help

Great targeting on your cold audiences means that you are able to generate demand for your products at an efficient cost, which is key to both your short and long-term success in online business.

If you’re thinking to yourself, okay, I get it, but HOW DO I DO THIS?! Check out Strong Brand Social’s PAID SOCIAL BOOTCAMP ASAP! We walk you through the how-to of every single step.

In your corner,

Katie

PS My two favorite comments from last week were: “This program is like a gift from heaven! SO SO useful to me right now!” and “I’m loving this program. You guys weren’t kidding when you said you pack in a lot of knowledge! I’m through the videos and working on the workbook entries right now. Just the content prompts alone are worth it!”