How to reach anyone Online 👩‍💻

Hey friends,

When it comes to getting to your customers online, there are two main methods that you can use to reach them through advertising: Audiences and Content. Let's go into how they work.

1) Audiences

Audience targeting is the way in which you can target users online as people. This is done by figuring out where they congregate online and then using tools like ad platforms (such as Google and social media sites like Instagram etc.) to reach them.

There are three main ways to use audience targeting.

1. Demographic Data: This is by forming a persona of your potential audience first, by looking at things like where they live, what gender they are, what their interests are, what companies they work for, what their job titles are etc. This is often also referred to as behavioral targeting.

2. Matched Audiences: This is done by uploading information like emails, phone numbers, company names, etc. (from an excel file) and then the platform (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) matches it with profiles of people on the platform. This can be a very powerful way and simple to directly reach your audience (for user privacy reasons, in most cases it only works if you get at least 200 matches).

3. Lookalike Audiences: Did you know you can use machine learning automation when creating your audiences? Lookalike audiences use machine learning to find people that are similar to the ones that you matched with. For example, if you input a list of your customers (for example by using a matched audience you upload), it might find things in common with your customers that you would have never thought of on your own, and then use that data to get you even more customers. This might be as simple as looking for common traits between them, but it could also be used to expand your audience in ways that you could never think of on your own. For example, it might find out that most of your customers like golf and are left-handed, and then use that as a data point to expand your audience to even more people.

2) Content

Content targeting is the way in which you can target users online based on the content they consume. This is also known as contextual targeting, and there are 2 main ways to reach your audience through this targeting method.

1. Placements: Target the content they consume online directly. This can be in the form of articles, blogs, or videos. The difference between this and audience targeting is it doesn't care who sees the ad but rather it focuses on where they see the ad.

2. Search: Target what they search for on search engines. For example, when your customers do a Google search, you can show them content related to what they are searching for either as an ad or organically rank on the search engine (through SEO)

Your Next Steps

Think about whether your product makes more sense to target audiences or content. Usually, if your customers are at a more unaware stage, audiences work better (using platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook). If they're at a more aware stage, then content usually works better (using platforms like Google Search ads, and Google Display Network ads) , since by it's nature it's further down the funnel.

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Until next time!