News

Are your PPC ads relevant?

That’s not a rhetorical question, and the answer isn’t subjective. Relevance is something Google AdWords measures and quantifies for all ads, and your adrelevance could have a real impact on your ads’ effectiveness.

What do we mean when we talk about adrelevance? Basically, it’s the connection between the keywords and the ad copy; the more tightly these things are aligned, the higher your adrelevance will be.

In this post, we’ll explain what makes adrelevance so important—and also what steps you can take to improve your own adrelevance scores.

Why AdRelevance Matters

A good way to think about relevance is this: If someone conducts a Google search, and your ad is displayed, would the ad make sense according to their search terms? Would it fit in? Or would it seem off-topic? That’s really what adrelevance is about—so as you can imagine, adrelevance isn’t just about appealing to Google. It’s also about ensuring a connection with the consumer.

Google does provide ratings for your adrelevance, using one of three categories to assess how relevant your ad is—average, above average, or below average. Average or above average ratings mean your ad is just fine; below average means there’s a problem you’ll want to deal with.

You want high adrelevance because it means you’ll really be able to capitalize on your ad traffic; below average relevance means your ad is likely to be deemed low-quality, which may mean that Google displays it less frequently. A low-quality ad will also come with a higher cost per click, so relevance can make your campaign much more cost-effective.

Why Are Ads Not Relevant?

There are a couple of things that tend to derail adrelevance. One is that the ad in question was created by someone who simply doesn’t have PPC experience, and doesn’t understand that the copy employed needs to be closely aligned with keywords.

The other big culprit? Ads being copied from one ad group to another, without them being tailored to the new keywords. Remember that each new ad group needs to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb, and fully customized to address the keywords in question. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work.

Tips for Improving PPC AdRelevance

With that said, there are a few steps that you can take to step up the relevance of your ads—among them:

• First and foremost, make sure the keywords you’re targeting are in the ad copy itself. Ideally, you should have them in the headline, the body text, and even in the display URL.
• Develop ad groups that are tightly themed. If you have 15 or 20 ads within a group, they should all hinge on the same basic product, service, or offer.
• Remember that your landing page matters, too. Google wants to know that your ad is going to take the users to an external site that’s truly on-topic, so your landing page should also use the keywords in question.

Make the Most of PPC

Your PPC campaign can be a significant way to boost website traffic and improve conversions—but only when it’s handled properly. And that includes making ads with high relevance scores.

We can help you with that. Driven2020 is all about marketing endeavors that get real results and improve your bottom line; we’d love to develop PPC ad copy that helps you convert. To start that process, or simply to learn more about integrated digital marketing, we invite you to contact Driven2020 today.

News

Your business website is more than an online placeholder. It needs to draw in traffic, but it also needs to convert traffic into sales. Indeed, we like to say that a good business website is a 24/7 sales generator.

So how do you ensure that your website leads visitors closer to a purchase? A lot of it comes down to building trust. A new visitor may not know much about your company at all, so your website should convince them that your business is reputable and trustworthy; that you can deliver on your promises, and that you’ll treat them well.

Does your website accomplish this? Does it make it easy for visitors to trust you? As you think about this question, we’ll provide you with a few general pointers and considerations.

How to Build Trust Through Your Business Website

To instill trust, your website must be easy to use. If your website is difficult to navigate, or if people have a hard time locating the information they’re after, it makes your whole business come across as rather inept—or worse: like you’re trying to hide something. Conversely, a fluid and intuitive layout underscores that you are helpful and competent. By the way, having an intuitive and easy-to-use website demands that it be mobile optimized! Don’t forget this crucial step.

Be transparent about what your company stands for. An About Us page, a mission statement, clear descriptions of your products or services—these are all crucial elements of your written content. Be honest with people. Provide information that will help them to feel comfortable doing business with you. On a related note, we’ll say that team photos/bios can help humanize your company, making it seem relatable, not faceless or impersonal.

Offer trust signifiers. There are a lot of specific elements you can add to your website to help potential customers feel more confident in the products or services you provide. Some of the main ones to consider are:

• Links to your online reviews
• Testimonials/customer reviews
• Guarantee or warranty information
• Scores from the BBB or other pertinent organizations
• Awards and accolades your company has won

All of these elements make it easier for potential customers to trust you.

Develop thought leadership. Your website should be a platform for you to convey your knowledge and your professionalism—in short, to prove to your visitors that you know what you are doing. A blog is probably the best way to do so; provide regular industry updates, insights, tips, or how-tos that showcase your expertise. Show off a little bit!

Provide clear contact information. We’d recommend having full contact information on every page of your website. When companies make their contact information hard to find, it can come across like they’re hiding—and that’s obviously not going to build trust. Your customers want to know that they can always reach you with questions or with problems.

Focus on value and benefits. More than anything else, we’d recommend positioning your brand as a solution to your customers’ problems. Remember the guiding question for creating benefit-focused, value-driven content: What’s in it for your readers?

Do You Have a Website That Cultivates Trust?

At Driven2020, we build websites that get results—and that means building the kind of trust that leads to sales. If you’re ready for a website that speaks to your professionalism and your reputability, we’ve got you covered. Reach out to our team at Driven2020 today. Start a conversation with us about how to position your company for success. It all starts with the business website.

News

Marketers no longer have the option of relying solely on the written word. In today’s marketing landscape, content must be dynamic and engaging—and video content is at the very top of the heap.

YouTube videos can be especially powerful ways to enhance your brand and connect with your audience. Just consider some of the stats: With a billion monthly users, YouTube is the second most popular of all social media platforms, eclipsed only by Facebook. Roughly 80 percent of individuals 18-49 watch YouTube videos at least monthly, while the average YouTube viewer spends an average of 40 minutes immersed in video content.

You can’t ignore the power of YouTube, but neither can you approach it haphazardly. In this post, we’re going to show you what all your YouTube videos are going to need in order to be truly effective. With this checklist, you’ll have a firm foundation for YouTube success.

Our Checklist for YouTube Success

Here are the components every effective YouTube video should have.

Branded intro footage. Even if it’s just a few seconds long, you need a way to tag each of your videos, allowing viewers to immediately know and recognize what they are seeing. This is crucial for making your videos truly feel unique to your brand.

A hook. Following that branded intro, you need to grab your viewers’ attention—and quick! Statistics find that it takes just 10 or 15 seconds for a viewer to turn off the video if it doesn’t strike their interest.

High-quality sound. Is the dialogue in your video intelligible? Is the music you play in the background enhancing, or distracting? A good video needs to look good, but it’s just as important for it to sound good. Clarity is key; if viewers have to strain to hear what you’re saying in your video, they’re likely to get frustrated and move on.

Brevity. Shorter is almost always better, especially since YouTube allows users to search for videos and filter their results by length. We’re not going to give you a specific timeframe here; we’ll just encourage you to keep things fairly straight to the point.

Actionable content. Your videos—like your blog posts and social media updates—should provide something of value to your viewers. They shouldn’t just be commercials; they should impart something meaningful, and allow the viewer to feel like he or she has learned something. Always ask yourself: What’s in it for your viewer?

A call to action. Calls to action aren’t just for written content. Your video, too, should exhort viewers to do something—whether that’s visiting your website, subscribing to your YouTube channel, calling your office, or purchasing a product.

Getting Started with YouTube Marketing

Now, you may notice one thing we didn’t say you needed—and that’s professional studio equipment. That’s because, generally speaking, it’s pretty easy to get a good-quality video from an iPhone. So long as you take the time to light the scene properly, and you record somewhere there won’t be sound interference, you shouldn’t need to invest a lot of money in Hollywood camera rigs.

With that said, you should invest in a sound strategy—beginning with the checklist offered here. Also consider how YouTube videos can be integrated to your broader marketing approach. That’s something Driven2020 can help you with.

Remember: We’re all about results. We don’t do things just to do them. We do things because we know they’ll improve your bottom line. We’d love to talk with you about a marketing plan that will actually move the sales needle for your brand. Contact us today!

News

Content marketing is an invaluable way to promote your brand, establish thought leadership, and cultivate trust. Ultimately, content marketing can help move buyers through the sales funnel, ending in conversions. But content marketing does not always work. In fact, it’s possible to put time and money into your content marketing initiative and be left with little to show for it.

That doesn’t mean content marketing should be abandoned. It just means it should be approached with care. Below are a few warning signs that your content marketing approach isn’t working—and that perhaps it’s time to pause, regroup, and talk things over with the experienced marketing pros at Driven2020.

How to Tell Your Content Marketing Needs Reimagining

You Don’t Have a Strategy in Place

If you’ve already put a lot of time and money into content marketing but haven’t taken the time to formalize and document your strategy, well, that’s probably because you don’t have one. A spur-of-the-moment approach to content marketing probably won’t get results, though, so take this as an opportunity to put content marketing on hold and go back to the drawing board. Get a plan in place, then implement it.

You’ve Not Developed a Diverse Content Portfolio

Having a bunch of blog posts to fall back on is definitely helpful, but content marketing doesn’t only mean blogging. You should also have strong visual content, including both still images and videos. If your content creation efforts have been one-sided, you may want to rethink things, and to take a broader approach.

 You’re Not Seeing Meaningful Metrics

 Content marketing is sometimes regarded as sort of a soft, fuzzy thing—but actually, you should have hard numbers to back it up. The metrics that matter to you might be website traffic, email list opt-ins, or phone calls to your sales representatives. Something like a positive Facebook comment, while certainly nice, isn’t really as significant.

Now, you’re not going to see bottom-line results over night. Content marketing is a long-term commitment. But if you’ve been at it for a few months and haven’t noticed any uptick in your key metrics, that spells trouble.

You Don’t Have a Budget

You’re simply not going to find content marketing success if you aren’t willing to spend a few bucks on it. You’re certainly welcome to start small and grow from there—in fact, that’s something we recommend—but if you have no budget at all, you’re not really serious about content marketing. Again, it’s time to go back to square one.

You’re Doing Nothing to Promote your Content

 You can create the best content in the world, but if you don’t hustle to get it in front of readers/viewers, it’s not going to do you a bit of good. Hopefully, you have a strong content promotion strategy in place—but if not, well, that’s another sign that maybe you’re getting ahead of yourself. Take some time to consider how you can get eyeballs on your content.

Ready for a Sound Content Marketing Strategy?

If you’re ready to talk to the pros about content marketing, we’re ready to help. Here’s our pitch: We don’t like fluff. We only care about results. We want to help you develop a robust, integrative digital marketing plan that will actually get you more sales, as cost-effectively as possible.

If that sounds like the kind of content marketing approach you’re after, we invite you to connect with Driven2020 today. Contact us and let us know you’re ready for marketing efforts that really accomplish something.

News

Your business blog may be many things, but above all else, it should be a way to move the needle on your company’s sales. If it’s not improving your bottom line, it’s not really worth having around. Paradoxically, though, this does not mean your blog should be over-the-top in its sales strategy. Indeed, an aggressively hard-selling blog is going to be counterproductive, turning off rather than engaging potential customers.

So here’s the tricky part: Establishing a company blog that sells without coming across as salesy; a blog that earns trust and displays thought leadership in such a way that it makes readers want to pick up the phone or come down to your store to buy something.

It’s not impossible to do, as we’ll illustrate through a few tips and guidelines.

How to Sell Without Being Salesy on Your Business Blog

Always write with a specific audience in mind. If you want to avoid coming across as salesy, you need to write in a way that conveys specific value to your audience—and to make that happen, you first have to know who your audience is. This is where buyer personas come in handy. Know who you’re writing for, and what value you hope them to glean from your blog. Always ask: What’s in it for them?

Avoid writing about yourself. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, of course. You can certainly use your company blog to share updates about your company, about new team members, or about product launches. Generally speaking, though, it’s better to make it about the reader, not about you. Share actionable insights. Provide valuable tips. Give them something they can use to improve their lives right now.

Refrain from mentioning your company in every sentence. We’re not opposed to branded references where appropriate, but you typically won’t need but one or two of them per blog. Include your brand name in a call to action at the end, but beyond that it’s usually not going to be relevant. Again, don’t make it all about you. Make it all about providing value to your readers.

Be conversational in your tone. For the most part, it’s best to avoid writing in a way that it stuffy or needlessly academic, just as it’s wise to go easy on the used car salesman shtick. Just write as if you were speaking to a friend, and be straightforward but approachable.

Include links where relevant. If you see an opportunity to include a link to one of your products, by all means do so. That can be genuinely helpful to your readers. Always keep them relevant, though; shoehorning in a bunch of off-topic links really comes across as shamelessly salesy.

Don’t forget your call to action! Every blog post you write should end with a clear and simple call to action—an invitation for readers to act on the post by connecting with you in some way. It doesn’t have to be much more elaborate than, “Call us today to learn more.” This is the part of the blog post where you can push that sale.

Write Blog Posts That Get Results

Your blog posts shouldn’t be fluff, and neither should they be entirely self-promotional. The goal of any blog post is to foster engagement, and ultimately to lead to a conversion. If your posts aren’t doing that, it’s time to rethink them—and we can help. Reach out to Driven2020 to learn more about our fluff-free, results-oriented approach to digital marketing, and ask how we can help you sell without being too salesy!

News

Email marketing is one of the most reliably effective marketing channels there is—but that doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. Many small businesses invest in email and are unsatisfied with the return they get. This isn’t because email marketing is deficient; it’s because it requires a certain level of strategy in order for it to get results.

If your email marketing efforts aren’t working, that’s no reason to throw in the towel. Rather, it’s simply an indication that you need some fine-tuning to your approach. Here are a few potential reasons why your email marketing may not be working, and some recommended fixes.

Your Subject Lines Are Lackluster

The subject line is arguably the most important part of any email you send. It creates the first impression, and determines whether or not the rest of the message is opened. A bad subject line means your message falls on deaf ears, so here’s how to write a good one:

• Be brief—seven words or less
• Focus on value—what’s in it for your readers?
• Avoid spammy-sounding words, like sale, free, percent off, etc.

You Haven’t Segmented Your Email List

Good marketing messages feel personalized. That’s hard to achieve when you’re sending a general e-blast to a massive, unsegmented email list. Instead, what we recommend is breaking your list of contacts into different groups, allowing you to find-tune your messaging to reach different members of your audience base. Use buyer personas to help determine how best you can break down your audience and individualize your messaging.

You Aren’t Offering Value

When considering a marketing email, always ask yourself this question: What value are you offering your readers? There should be some takeaway in each message—some benefit the reader gets just from opening the email. Discounts and sales promos can work, but so can actionable tips and insights. Just avoid sending emails that are entirely fluff.

Your Email Messages Are Too Long

Imagine that you received a 1,000-word email in your inbox—just a big, rambling block of text. Would you read it? Unless it was from a friend or family member, probably not. People just don’t have time for epic emails, so keep yours succinct and readable. A few short sentences, formatted with plenty of white space, is usually the way to go. Sometimes, 100 words or less will suffice.

You’re Selling Too Much

People don’t like to feel like they are being advertised to all the time. They don’t like to constantly be on the receiving end of a sales pitch. Your emails can sometimes be salesy in their nature, but you should also send emails that are simply informative or educational. Let your readers know what’s going on with your company or with your industry.

Your Goals Are Poorly Defined

Here’s a big one: You won’t achieve email marketing success if you don’t first define what success looks like. Are you trying to sell products directly? Generate website traffic? Or simply build customer loyalty? Make sure you know what you’re tying to do with your email marketing, and which metrics you’ll use to measure and quantify your success.

Take the Next Step with Email Marketing

As you endeavor to get better results from your email marketing, don’t hesitate to enlist a professional guide. That’s where Driven2020 comes into play. We know how important email can be, and also how to integrate it into the big picture of digital marketing. We’d love to help you develop an action plan for your brand. Reach out to Driven2020 today to learn about our growth-focused marketing services!

News

When it comes to optimizing your website for maximum search engine visibility, it’s important to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way—no matter how small it might seem. Case in point: The meta description. This is an easily-overlooked section of online real estate, but it also happens to be a crucial way of communicating to readers—and to search engine algorithms—what your content is about and how it should be categorized. Knowing what meta descriptions are, and how to write good ones, is a key SEO skill that anyone can learn.

What is the Meta Description?

You’ve seen meta descriptions before, even if you didn’t know what to call them. Do a quick Google search for something—anything. You should see a list of roughly 10 blue links—the search results—and under each link, you’ll notice a short blurb of text. That blurb is the meta description. Essentially, it’s a preview of what the website content is about—a way for you to determine whether you should click on the link to have your search query answered.

How Does Google Determine the Meta Description?

When you perform a search for a given term, Google will first try to find a snippet of each search result that includes that term—and if possible, it will use that snippet of text as the meta description. Often, though, there’s not necessarily a good, succinct snippet of text that the algorithms can obtain, so they default to the manual meta description that the author of the content has (hopefully) written. In other words, your meta description may not always be displayed to search engine users, but a lot of the time it will be—so you definitely don’t want to neglect writing one. (If you do, Google may just use the first 150 characters or so of the page, which may not be particularly enticing to readers.)

Why Do Meta Descriptions Matter?

You can probably guess some of the reasons why meta descriptions matter. One is that it’s a great place for you to embed some keywords and phrases—signaling to Google’s algorithms what the main topic of the content is. Additionally, meta descriptions can convey value to readers, and encourage them to click on the link and read more. In a way, meta descriptions are almost as important as headlines when it comes to making a strong, persuasive first impression.

How Do You Write a Good Meta Description?

So what should you know about writing a good meta description? Here are a few tips:

• Keep it to roughly 150 characters; if you go much longer than that, Google will cut off the end of it. 150 characters is the ideal length for ensuring the whole thing is displayed on all
• Include some keywords and phrases in the meta description, but try to incorporate them organically. The meta description should make sense, not just be a jumble of search terms.
• Include a branded keyword in the meta description, too—like the name of your business or product.
• End your meta description with a call to action if you can!
• Above all, convey value. Show your reader why he or she should click the link to read your content.

Mastering All the SEO Essentials

A good meta description is an SEO must. To learn more about what makes an SEO campaign successful, we invite you to contact the Driven2020 team. We’d love to provide you with a full SEO and integrated marketing consultation. Reach out to us today!

News

There’s a familiar saying in online marketing—content is king. There’s a lot of truth to that statement; when it comes to enhancing your brand, there’s simply no substitute for engaging, value-adding content. With that said, there’s more to content than the messaging itself. For the best results, it’s important to create content that engages readers, but also fulfills all the prerequisites for high Google search placement. This ensures that your content receives the visibility it needs to connect with its audience.

But what does it really mean to optimize your written content? There are many considerations to make here, and in this post we’re going to run through some of the basics.

Optimizing Your Written Content

Start with the title. It’s important that your content have a headline that grabs attention—but also that complies with SEO best practices. For one thing, we’d recommend using at least one focus keyword in your title, as naturally and organically as possible. We also recommend keeping your title to 60 characters or less. The reason for this is simple: It ensures that Google can fit the entire title into the SERP, without needing to truncate it.

Have a relevant URL. So-called “vanity” URLs aren’t mere vanities at all; they are SEO essentials. A URL that’s just a random string of numbers isn’t going to do you any favors, so instead make the URL something relevant to your title and keywords.

Structure your page. Your written content should lead readers (and search algorithms) from top to the bottom, using a series of H1, H2, H3, and possible H4 headings that divide the content naturally into different sections. Each heading is also a great place to include another keyword!

Be judicious with keywords. Speaking of which, what are the best strategies for keyword optimization? Rather than try to hit a magic number, we’d advise employing keywords as naturally as possible. Remember that titles and headings are the best places to position keywords. And remember, too, that keyword stuffing—that is, throwing in so many keywords that the content is hard to read—is a big SEO faux pas.

Be readable. Optimizing for the search algorithms means making it easy for people to read—period. Your headings help with that, as we mentioned above, but we’d also encourage you to use shorter sentences and concise paragraphs. Bullets and numbered lists are helpful. Passive voice is not.

Don’t forget your meta description! Providing Google with a meta description—150 characters or less, including a clear summary of the content, a keyword or two, and a call to action—is a critical SEO activity.

Remember to optimize for mobile users. Your content should be easy to read on any and all devices. Check your page for mobile optimization on a number of different devices—and if you don’t like what you see, call your Web developer. Alternatively, note that the most common content management systems, including WordPress, provides an easy way to switch on mobile optimization.

Include links. Both internal and external linking can help you with optimization, just so long as you keep them genuinely helpful and relevant. Random or paid-for links, meanwhile, will do more harm than good.

Make Your Content Shine

For your content to pack a punch, you need it to be original, compelling, and actionable. You also need it to be well formatted, structured, and keyword-rich. That’s a lot to think about, but our team can help. Talk with us about what it takes to truly optimize your content. Reach out to the Driven2020 team sooner rather than later!

News

Small business owners feel a constant pressure to produce more content on their brand’s behalf; you probably feel that way yourself, and so does your competition. What this means is that there is simply an incomprehensibly large amount of digital content out there—far too much for any one person to take stock of, let alone digest. The irony is that as the volume of available content increases, the average attention span is just getting shorter. This poses a problem to online marketers: How can you keep making content that generates engagement, even as readers have less and less patience for content consumption?

It is tricky, but not entirely impossible, to develop written content that caters to short attention spans—and in this post, we’ll offer you a few specific strategies.

Writing Content with Short Attention Spans in Mind

Know Your Audience. It’s always important to know who you’re writing for. Consult with a buyer persona or do demographic research so that you can have a good sense of your audience, and tailor content that feels like it’s written directly for them. When you can write to someone with specificity, rather than in generalizations, they’re more inclined to pay attention.

Be Smart About Structure. The way you organize your written content is imperative. You want to structure content that can be easily skimmed, and key sections read more thoroughly. What this means is that you should always write in short paragraphs and concise sentences. Additionally:

• Use subject headings to divide your content into distinct sections.
• Use bulleted or numbered lists whenever possible.
• Make sure your opening paragraph makes it clear what the content is all about.
• Make sure your closing paragraph recaps the main point of the piece, and offers an actionable takeaway.

Enrich Your Text. In addition to strong written content, we’d advise incorporating some compelling visuals. Images, infographics, and even embedded video can make content more exciting—for lack of a better term, more attention-grabbing. Meanwhile, a page that’s 100 percent black-and-white text simply isn’t going to engage anyone but the most studious reader.

Be Bold. Sometimes, it can be effective to bold key parts of your text—so long as you use this strategy judiciously. When everything is bolded, the effect is lost!

Offer Value. This may almost go without saying, but your written content should offer something actionable and meaningful to the reader. Always ask yourself: What’s in it for them? And again, make that value proposition something that’s clearly stated at the very beginning and very end of your text.

Be as Concrete as Possible. People like to see specific examples, facts, figures, studies—things that take your abstract ideas and make them feel more tangible. Try to include these concrete particulars whenever you can.

Don’t Sweat the Length. A lot of content writers get hung up on word count. To keep things engaging, we’d honestly recommend just writing as much or as little as you need to make your point and to deliver on that value. Longer content is preferable—and if you follow the rest of these tips, it won’t compromise engagement—but sometimes, a quickie blog post can also be okay.

Engagement is Always the Goal

It really doesn’t mean anything just to produce content to support your digital marketing efforts; you also need that content to be read. Engagement is always the goal, and that means grabbing people’s attention span. We’d love to show you more about what that looks like, and to help you implement a comprehensive marketing plan that truly gets results. Connect with Driven2020 to start that conversation.

News

Facebook boasts an unsurpassed audience, but what makes the platform valuable to marketers isn’t how many users there are—it’s how narrowly you can segment that audience, targeting the people who see your ads and your content. When done correctly, audience targeting allows you to ensure that your ads are displayed only to the customers you’re specifically trying to reach; this effectively removes the risk of “wasted” ad dollars and provides immense benefits for your digital marketing campaign.

The Facebook Ads platform offers a lot of useful targeting functions—too many for us to get into in a single blog post. Today, we want to look at what Facebook calls Custom Audiences—a handy way for you to control how your ads are displayed.

About Custom Audiences

A Custom Audience is exactly what its name suggests—a grouping of Facebook users that you can select and customize. Once you create a Custom Audience, you can ensure that the ads you pay for are only displayed to the users in that group. This allows for incredible control in your own marketing endeavors.

There are different ways to build a custom audience, too. Here are some of the primary ones to consider.

Custom Audiences from an Existing List

If you already have a list of customers you wish to target, you can upload it directly to Facebook and trust the Facebook algorithms to handle everything else for you. This might be a list of email addresses, phone numbers, or Facebook user identities, and it can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet or a MailChimp contact list. Facebook is not always able to locate and match 100 percent of the people on your list—and obviously, it won’t be able to find any of your customers who don’t have Facebook—but it’s usually pretty accurate and pretty thorough.

Website Lists

Another useful option is to create an audience based on your website traffic. You can choose to have your ads displayed only to people who have previously visited your site, and you can even limit it to recent site visits—within the last week or the last month, for example. Facebook will also allow you to target users who visited certain pages of your site—so, for example, you can show ads to people who have already browsed certain products or services. A website-based audience will require you to create a Facebook Pixel code and install it on your website, but this is a fairly quick and easy process.

Lookalike Audiences

Here’s one more option for us to note. Say you have already created a target audience on Facebook, and the people in your audience have responded well to the ads you’ve run. Using the Lookalike Audience function, you can task Facebook with locating more people who mirror the demographics of your existing audience. This can be an invaluable way to expand on your previous advertising success.

Learning Your Way Around Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook Ads provides a number of deep, rich features, which is very much a positive thing, but it does come with a downside: It may take some time to become comfortable with some of the more sophisticated features, like Custom Audiences. Remember that you can always make small bids while you feel your way around these new features, then scale up once you become more knowledgeable.

Also remember that you do not have to navigate these waters alone. Driven2020 has Facebook Ads expertise, and we’d love to talk with you about how Facebook Ads—and Custom Audiences—can benefit your integrated marketing approach. Contact us today to start this important conversation.