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.
Alicia Eichmann