You no doubt heard over the years that you should build your list and that usually refers to building an email list.
Having a good list of prospects and customers that you can email on a regular basis is one of the easiest, most affordable and most effective ways to increase sales and build your business.
You should absolutely build your list. Though email marketing has become less effective due to the volume of email that’s now being sent, it’s still a very effective and important strategy for all businesses to take advantage of.
However, as the title of this article suggests, audiences are now the new list.
Audiences: The New List
Here’s what we mean by audiences are the new list.
Audiences are a reference to the collection of people that you can build inside of an advertising platform like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ad Network, and LinkedIn that have interacted with your ads or your content or your videos or your website.
You can literally build a collection of people that you’ve had some sort of engagement. With your collection, you can then run ads to in the future.
This is, of course, an incredibly effective way of advertising because you are advertising to people that you know you. You already have some sort of relationship with the people you are advertising to.
That’s very similar to being able to send an email to somebody that is already subscribed to your list because they have some sort of relationship with you.
How to Build an Audience
Here’s how to build audiences.
Every ad network, or social media platform, comes with what’s called a pixel. A PIXEL is a small piece of code that you can put on your website that will then track any time a visitor comes to your website and notify the advertising networks that that’s somebody that you can advertise to again.
What you want to do is get pixels from all the various social platforms and ad networks, add them to every page of your site, start collecting people and building those audiences by their interest in topics, products, and actions taken.
Pixels give you the ability to get enough information about where that person has visited on your site to know things like whether or not they’re interested in a particular topic of a blog post, or if they viewed a particular category of product on your site, or they’ve watched a certain video.
You can get good detail from that pixel to give you more targeted advertising audiences.
Finally, you can promote your content and your offers to those audiences based on the audiences that they’re in.
Final Thoughts
Again to recap, audiences are the new list.
You, of course, still want to build your email list. That’s a very powerful marketing tool, but audiences are starting to prove to be just as effective, if not more effective.
Because you are not reaching somebody in their very, very crowded in box. You can instead reach them with a variety of content formats in the environments that they’re already spending time on, namely the social media platforms and websites that they visit.
Build your audiences, get started today.
