Business

Here are 10 steps to finding them instead of waiting for them to come to you.

• Pick three topics that target your optimal target audience.

These should be unique to your avatar, things that they identify closely with, and that are a part of your core content and offering. (Alternative approach: you can go with just one topic if you have one focus where you really want to find new people in your ideal audience interested in that specific topic, and are willing invest in that specific one.)

• Pick graphics strategically

Choose graphics or photos that appeal to your target audience, and that fit your brand. Find ones on your chosen topics that you’ll use in your blog posts, social media posts, ads, and pins.

• Create a Google Adwords account and set up audiences

Set up your account and add remarketing code to your website. Create an ‘audience’ that is all of your site visitors for the last 90 days.

• Write a blog post nailing the pain point/solution

Do this for each of your three topics, or tweak and improve existing posts if you’ve already written good ones. Finalize and publish your posts if you haven’t already. Promote them by sharing them on any social media sites you have followings on.

• Create a Facebook ad and use narrow targeting criteria (optional)

Look through all of the targeting options in the Facebook ad interface and pick age and gender, and then demographics and interests that specifically target your ideal audience. Make it narrow, not broad. When you run your Facebook ads, for each of them use this target criteria that you’ve identified. Make it narrow enough to target your ideal person and you probably will not run out of budget, if somehow you do then you can broaden it a bit. With a narrow target you won’t have to spend too much to capture some great traffic of new people in your ideal audience.

• Optimize, pin and promote on Pinterest

For each post look up what people are searching for related to that topic – by searching yourself and seeing what words Pinterest suggests in the search box and right below it – and use those keywords in your description. For your Promoted Pin target keywords that your audience will be searching for, and that match your topic.

Use the graphics and the title/ad text you’ve written to create nice pin images. After creating the pins, create a Promoted Pin for each topic, that links to the corresponding posts.

• Drive traffic

Run a Facebook ad and a Promoted Pin for each of the topics. Send emails to your list about these topics and link to the posts. Share the posts organically to any friends that are your avatar or might know your avatar and reshare it. Think creatively and tap all of your resources to drive traffic specifically on these topics, and to get in front of your ideal avatar. You can also consider running a contest, creating an additional ad for a related lead magnet, or promoting an additional post on one of these topics or a related topic.

• Create your Adwords Campaign

Take your ad text and graphics you’ve used for the steps above, and create image ads, text ads, and responsive ads in Adwords, creating an ad group for each topic. Set up the campaign as a remarketing campaign and target two audiences: the one of all site visitors that you created, and another one that Adwords automatically generates – ‘similar to site visitors’. Start running the campaign after you’ve driven traffic for at least a month or two.

This is where the magic happens.

Right now you have taken calculated steps to get traffic from Facebook and Pinterest who are people that pretty closely match your narrowly targeted audience/avatar. They fit the demographics you selected in Facebook or they are interested in the content and keywords you targeted in Pinterest.

The Google Adwords remarketing feature allows you to remarket to this traffic, which means you can put ads in front of them to remind them about your site.

That means that the people who have been to your site and likely bounced – often first time visitors read that one post they were interested in on Pinterest and then go back to Pinterest – they will see your Google remarketing ads when they check the weather, read the news, check out larger blogs, etc.

This is your chance to remind them of your site, and for a fraction of the cost of the Facebook and Pinterest ads. With google display remarketing campaigns you only pay for clicks which means you get thousands of impressions for minimal cost, and when they click you get a return visitor who is your target avatar.

And it gets even better.

Here is the real secret and this is where it gets really cool.

You can use the similar to site audiences remarketing list in Adwords to target people who are similar to your site visitors – who we’ve just determined are your target avatar because that is who you strategically drove to your site. So this means you can leverage the intelligence of Google to find your avatar that is your avatar but not as active on Facebook or Pinterest or social media in general, but does occasionally check the weather, shop online, etc.

And, when you find this avatar, they are more likely to not be a regular blog reader, which means their life is not saturated with bloggers and you have the opportunity to provide amazing content that relates to them – because your site is aimed at them, and win them over as a regular reader, and potential client/customer. Ta-da!

• Cycle your advertising costs

Take your Facebook and Pinterest ad budgets and run it heavy for a month or two to get in front of people and drive them to your site. Confirm along the way that the audience list is growing in Adwords. Finish your Adwords ads and campaign. Then turn your Facebook and Pinterest ads off or way down, and turn your Adwords remarketing campaign up – target recent site visitors and similar to site visitors.

Pay attention to your new vs. returning users ratio in Analytics along the way, and work on finding the best ways to capture this traffic as subscribers to your email list.

Be sure to be using tags in your email marketing tool as you capture this traffic through forms and landing pages. After a full cycle you have several options. You could start the cycle again with new topics, potentially targeted at a different subgroup of your avatar.

You could also switch gears and pick a product to promote that is related to one or all of your three topics, and create a new Adwords campaign and new Facebook ads and try running those to your same Facebook criteria as well as to your Adwords recent site visitors to see how much traction you get in your sales funnel.

One of my favorite things about google analytics and looking at traffic reports is that it can help us so much with our content strategy. And one concept that has been helpful for several of my clients is the idea of becoming an advocate.

One summer I had the pleasure of working with Katie Nohl of Mission Springs Resort. Her family owns this small group of cottages that has been in the family for nearly a century and has been rented out to individuals for recreational purposes for decades. It’s like their own personal mini-Airbnb in northern Wisconsin.

She considers local hotels to be her main competition, and her primary goal is to drive more of her traffic directly in order to pay less money to referring portal websites. So we talked quite a bit about content strategy, and topics for her blog, Facebook, and Instagram.

And I loved the way that she didn’t see herself in competition with other local property owners, but rather as part of the same movement. In brainstorming her marketing strategy, we gained momentum and clarity when we started talking about how she could see herself as an advocate for this movement and the other larger circles that she was a part of.

A large draw of the cottages is that they are within walking distance of Lake Superior, and the area is popular with families, as well as hunters and fisherman. She is located in northern Wisconsin, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, near several large cities but not in any of them.

Her target audience is people who are interested in recreational activities in northern Wisconsin, and are interested in staying at a cabin or personal property.

So if she sees herself as an advocate of these larger trends, she can rock some content on topics like:

• How awesome northern Wisconsin is
• How awesome cabins and family owned bed-and-breakfast locations are
• Family vacations in Wisconsin
• Hunting and fishing
• Visiting Lake Superior
• Getting out of the city for a weekend

Promoting any of those things helps build an interest in the activity that drives reservations at their cottages. She wants Lake Superior to be the lake to visit (it’s more beautiful and remote than that other one closer to Chicago), hunting and fishing to be the thing to do (along with family vacations), and family-owned properties to be the place to stay (hotels are so last year).

As we talked about typical strategies such as building an email list, Katie and I  both had to acknowledge it as the classic advice you can’t really argue with, but it didn’t seem to resonate with her. But then she told me about this idea she had had to start a Facebook page about having fun in the area, and then she could get people in the area to follow, and also get other similar local businesses involved.

I love this idea, it fits all of her business’ goals and values, and will provide value to the whole community. Now she is part of a movement, with others who have the same interest in promoting recreation and family businesses in Northern Wisconsin, and increasing interest in travel to the whole area.

So as you are thinking about your content strategy, what should you be an advocate for?

For me, I believe that data and reports always hold useful information that can help guide us, if we simply take the time to look at it. So I am an advocate for analytics reports, but also for content creation, having independent websites (instead of just social profiles), and making decisions based on data instead of emotions.

I have a friend who is a craft blogger, so she is an advocate for moms taking time to be creative and crafty, using pinterest to get ideas, and buying materials at the store to try their own diy projects.

I know a photographer who takes pictures of people’s pets. Well she is clearly an advocate for owning pets. It would be totally on-brand and on-topic for her to write some content about how awesome it is to have a pet, and then of course get its picture taken, why not?

To get started on this, ask yourself what things need to be true for someone to be your ideal client.

What do they need to think, know, feel or believe? What do they need to be ready to do, or ask?

How can you make any or all of those things more true, appealing, or attainable?

When you feel a bit stuck with your content strategy, think outside the box a bit and ask yourself what trends you are in line with, that you could promote to build the bigger picture that your business or blog is a part of.

I hope this is helpful! If you’re curious about how analytics can help you nail down your content and marketing strategy, get started by signing up below for the custom dashboard and email series. If you’re interested in working with me, schedule a Discovery Call, I’d love to chat with you about your business goals, marketing activities, and maybe even how you are becoming an advocate with your content strategy.

Fun fact: when I met Katie online, I was at that moment on the northern shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, visiting family and staying at a place we found on Airbnb.

Ok, I’m just going to be honest, and give you my thoughts, and challenge you to give this some thought, and think about what is best for you, and what you want to do in your business.

Here are three ways that we can use the power of email, and be both authentic and effective.

1. Rethink Your Opening – When you open your email to your list, do you insert their first name, and then write as if you are writing just to them? Most people do, and this is a decision every business person has to make at some point. But I want you to think about it, instead of just copying what everyone else does.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. Last year I had recently started my blog, and I had run a few facebook ads. So I had a combination of a handful of good friends and then a handful of strangers on my list. Only a couple of my friends every commented on my posts and replied to my emails. I was feeling really contemplative and wanting to get a response, so I wrote a passionate email to my list about how I needed them to need me, and I was ready to serve and wanted input on what to teach them next. And one of my good friends replied apologetically with something along the lines of, “I’m sorry I just can’t do this right now.” She was busy working, and was pregnant and wasn’t actually even who my target audience was shifting to be. And I felt so bad. I quickly sent some email about don’t worry, never mind, hope you’re feeling alright, I’m here for you as a friend.

And that exchange has stuck with me. Then months later I heard Gary Vaynerchuk talk about email automation; and he was pretty critical of the common practice in the industry of using first names and automation to create what appeared to be a personal email when it was not in fact personally written by him and sent to that person. He has built his personal brand on social, although he used email in the beginning to sell wine.

I heard him talk about this, it brought back to mind that exchange with my friend, and I made a risky decision earlier this year that I’m sticking with.

When I email my list I don’t insert their first name even if I have it. I say ‘hey there’ or ‘hey friend’, something like that. I was slow to build my list and I started it with people I was connecting with professionally in some way or another. It was months before I started getting people on my list I hadn’t met. And my goal is to sell many of them into my membership or 1on1 services, in which case I will eventually meet them.

I want to be a real person to many on my list, and since I have emailed so many of them, I realized it was important to me for them to know when an email was directly from me to them, and when it was a broadcast to everyone. This is a reflection of my values and becomes part of my brand. I hope this helps you think about what is important to you. You may get a slightly higher engagement by using their name, but I think we should be wary of blindly using every small tactic that statistically gets ‘higher engagement’.

I believe we’re heading into a time where authenticity and being real is going to become more and more important. Besides, what really matters is building all of the pieces in a way that makes you love your business. You should be proud of the way you do business, and this really comes from the small details. So here is a second detail that matters:

2. Rethink Your Subject – This is closely related to #1. I will concede that you need to think of catchy subjects in order to get people’s attention, and intrigue them enough to get them to open it and give your email a chance to be read. However I want to challenge you to establish your own mental rules for how your subject line for emails to your entire list will be distinguished from emails to individuals.

One way I do this is to capitalize most of the words when I am writing to my list, and use larger more keyword-type of words. And then to individuals I use all lower case and use smaller words, which usually helps imply that there is context they already know, it sounds personalized and as if the conversation is already ongoing, which of course it is. What this means is that I don’t write misleading emails to my list that make it sound like we were already having a personal conversation. My challenge to you is to give some thought to your subjects and consider establishing a line of personal integrity, and then holding the line there.

3. Use Tags – Ok, this is a big one. Every email service provider has upgraded in the last few years to include the use of tags. If you respect the people on your list, you must take the time to learn and use tags. It is your responsibility to understand the journey you intend to take your readers through in your email sequences (and funnels), and utilize tags to make sure they get the appropriate emails.

This is a big one because their are consequences for not doing it, and rewards for investing time in it. Right now I’m in a membership that I signed up for a couple of months ago during the launch window. The person running the membership recently reopened it and I got the entire sales sequence about joining. I sent them one email about how I’m already in it, and ignored the rest of the emails as I still got them. But then I got the ‘you’re going to miss out’ and ‘why didn’t you sign up’ emails. And there were addressed to me with my name at the top, from her. And then I had another email from a few weeks ago where she and I had chatted about something. 

I know and like this person enough that I will persist in helping point out this so they can address it, instead of being turned off and going away, but think about the dissonance, the weird feeling that experience creates.

Email is powerful but it’s also dangerous. It’s easy to follow a template, set up a sequence, and then forget it. And then add another. Or a product. Or a new customer experience. And not pay attention to how things connect. Tagging allows you to identify everyone who subscribes to a sequence, or purchases a product, and then exclude them from any further emails intended to get them to subscribe to that information, or purchase that thing.

But because email is powerful, it’s also full of incredible potential. You can do things like add tags to identify people who frequently open or click on your emails, and then send them something special. Nurturing your best customers is always worth the time invested. And then you can also identify those who have not opened any emails for awhile and send them an email along the lines of ‘do you still want these emails’. If they don’t answer or click to stay, you can save money and mental space by removing these people from your list.

We’re entering an interesting time in the history of email marketing. Automation and funnels hold incredible promise and opportunity to help small businesses grow, but we must approach this endeavor with a commitment to our values or we will lose some of that which makes the endeavor noble and worthwhile.

Why build our own businesses, only to yield consistently to the demands of convenience and short term thinking? Let’s blaze a path on higher ground, and commit ourselves to approaching our email funnels with an attitude of service or gratitude for space in those inboxes.