Article Contributed by Gerardo Hyde

Online marketing in today’s world can take some serious time, effort, and money too. Engaging in online marketing is often a multifaceted approach, with the aim to target as many people as possible with advertisements for goods and services. However, such broad approaches to online marketing do often have their drawbacks, with a huge costs and low click rates being some of the biggest ones. Broad marketing campaigns usually do not do a great job at targeting specific custom audiences with the highest chance of being interested in what is being advertised. However, if you really want to create brand awareness, sell a service, or move a product, targeting custom audiences is exactly what you need to do. This is especially true when it comes to being efficient with your marketing dollars. Today we are here to talk about marketing with Facebook Ads and Google Adwords in relation to custom audiences.

Facebook Ads Custom Audiences

Facebook “target audiences” is a pretty neat tool to use when it comes to advertising your goods and services on Facebook. To be clear, Facebook custom audiences do not consist of new customers which you do not have yet. This is not like marketing to a whole group of people which you have never seen or met. These custom audiences are audiences which you can create from a list of already existing customers or followers of your Facebook page, your website, contacts, and your products being sold on Facebook. The real aim of these custom audiences is for you to be able to market specific goods or services to specific groups of people which already follow your page, brand, or who have already bought things from you previously.

Using Facebook Ads in combination with custom audiences is definitely a great way to engage in online social media marketing. Heck, there are over 1.5 billion regular users of Facebook, so it only makes sense to market your products on this huge social media platform. However, like we said before, a broad marketing campaign is not that ideal because your advertisements might inadvertently target people who have zero interest in you or your products. It ends up being a monumental waste of money, paying for ads which most of the broad audience won’t even look at. This is where custom audiences come into play. All you need to do is use the Facebook Ads manager to create a custom audience list from your pre-existing contacts.

There are actually different kinds of custom audiences that you can target with your advertisements. These custom audiences include the following.

• You can create a customer list or standard custom audiences where you upload customer emails, phone numbers, and Facebook user IDs.
• You can create website custom audiences where you target Facebook users who visited a specific page on your website.
• You can create custom audiences based on people who have used a specific app or service of yours.

What is really neat is that you can then create lookalike audiences, which is a type of audience that Facebook will create for you. This type of audience will include people with similar ages, styles, gender, interests, and so on as the people who are already in specific custom audiences of yours. In other words, these broader custom audiences are people who are not yet your customers, but have similar characteristics to already existing ones, thus increasing the chances of them buying your goods or services. Facebook will find these people based on your already existing custom audiences and their similarities to those people.

This is a really effective and efficient way to market your products and services to people. What is also pretty neat is that you can then use an automated marketing and customer retention tools to send emails, newsletters, and other such things to people in your Facebook custom audience. It’s a really good customer retention tool to use in combination with Facebook custom audiences.

Google Adwords Customer Match

Now, to be perfectly clear, this so called Google Adwords “customer match” is more or less the same feature as Facebook custom audiences, but with a different name and location. Customer match is designed to help you reach and target your highest valued customers on platforms like Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and other online entities that are a part of or related to Google. It is very similar to custom audiences in the sense that you upload a list of customer data, whether from a website, YouTube channel, and eCommerce site, or other such things, which will then be your customer match list, AKA your custom audience.

In fact, Google’s customer match was a response to Facebook’s custom audiences. Google saw how good this going for Facebook and decided to create a so called custom audience feature of its own, and simply renamed in customer match. You create your custom audience or customer match audience, as Google calls it, which will then be the targets for your advertisements. Once again, online advertising, whether on YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, and other such things, is very expensive, so being able to target pre-existing customers is a big deal. Customers who bought something from you the first time around are way more likely to buy goods or services from you the second time, much more so than people who have never bought a good or service from you.

Whether people are searching, looking at displayed search results, on YouTube, or in their email, when people look up or are known to have an interest in a certain product of yours, your advertisements will be displayed or sent to them thanks to this customer match application.

Google Customer Match vs Facebook Custom Audience

Google does have an advantage over Facebook here because the combined services of Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail together have a far higher amount of users than Facebook. Therefore, using Google customer match allows you to reach a far higher amount of people than Facebook allows for. This is even truer when you consider that Google also has something called “similar audiences”, which is just like Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

Google’s similar audiences feature has the ability to larger lists of people than Facebook, but there is also a drawback. Facebook is much more in tune with the age, gender, likes, dislikes, and other characteristics of the people on your list, as well as potential people for the lookalike lists. In other words, Facebook does a much better job here at creating lookalike custom audience lists where the people have a lot in common with each other, thus increasing the chances of people being interested in your advertisement.

Google’s similar audiences may be able to put together huge lists, but they lack a large and concise pool of customer data in terms of their defining characteristics and likes. Therefore, Google’s “similar lists” may not actually be all that similar to the Google customer match lists which you have created.

Below is a great illustration which captures the intricacies and everything you must consider when choosing between Facebook’s custom audiences and Google’s customer match.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that both Google and Facebook have developed great ways for you to target specific audiences based on pre-existing customer lists and contact details you have. Both customer match and custom audiences are great tools you can use to narrow the scope of a specific marketing campaign or even for a single advertisement. These tools can help you target already existing customers or visitors with the highest chances of being interested in what you are offering. The big takeaway here is that both are good ways to engage in online marketing with existing platforms while allowing you to save a whole lot of money.

Author’s Bio: Gerardo Hyde is a marketer and writer with 8 more years of experience in analytics customer marketing and SEO. His passion for powerful technologies is what always keeps his writing up-to-date. He currently works for StackTome, an advanced customer retention tool.

Article Contributed by Tim Eunice 

You’ve got that big trade show coming up, and it’s a must-win for your business.

Everybody who’s anybody will be there: clients, prospects, and (of course) Brand X, hoping to woo away all the business before you get a chance.

You have to stand out!  You have to “win” the trade show.

After all, it’s a once-a-year opportunity.  Fumble it now, and it’s a long wait until next year.

You probably know that the businesses with the best trade-show displays get the most traffic… and that means they have the greatest opportunity to grow their business and create new relationships with the most sought-after customers.

How is your trade show display?  Is it time to trade up, to get a better response at this year’s show?

Have You Considered These Cool Options? 

You’ll have a table, and maybe some “swag” to hand out, and (hopefully) a nice brochure or two to describe your business’ unique offerings.

What about these display choices?

• A table-top “throw.”  You could have any image, from a logo to a photo to a business card, reproduced by a quality large-format printer onto fabric or vinyl to throw on top of that table and catch the eye of passers-by.

• A retractable banner or two.  Whether it springs up from a floor or table-top stand, or hangs from your display, a retractable banner can really make a statement.  And there’s a wide variety of materials, including nearly-transparent stuff Brand X never heard of.

• An impressive island.  Remember those super-cool “island” displays you’ve seen at previous shows?  Creating something like that can be more affordable than you might think.
• Lights and TVs.  Nothing grabs attention faster than a unique lighting display, and nothing sells your message with more impact than a sharp video playing on the screen at your display.  If you’ve invested in video marketing, you’d be wise to take it with you to the show.

These are just some of the things people are using these days to win their trade shows.

Believe it or not, your large-format printer is probably on the leading edge of these options… and if he doesn’t provide all these solutions, he likely knows who does.

Choose A Display That’s Easy To Work With 

The best trade show displays are light in weight, but pack a heavyweight marketing punch.

When you’re choosing your display, make sure you get something that’s easy to pack, easy to ship, and easy to set up.  Nothing’s more frustrating than finding out there’s some little part missing, or some other reason you can’t use your new trade show display to its full potential.

The whole rig needs to be relatively easy to take down, too.  You don’t want to miss your flight because your trade show display is too hard to break down and pack for its own flight!

Again, your printer will be able to point you in the direction of a trade show display that’s going to be easy to work with, in addition to supremely effective.

Make those guys at Brand X green with envy.  Trade up to a great trade show display.  If your display gets you the most traffic at the show for the lowest investment, well, there’s a word for people like you: “winner!”

This is a guest post by Tim Eunice the owner of The Visual Edge Signs & Designs Inc

At first glance, it may seem easy enough to make a sale to a prospective customer. After all, you have something that they need or want, and you expect them to, therefore, make a purchase. You may think that you simply need to create a marketing campaign that shows off your product’s key features.

However, before you begin marketing for your business, you need to analyze the buying process for your specific target audience in greater detail. When you understand their specific motivation for considering your product and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly, you can expect great results.

The Buying Process

To build an effective marketing campaign, you need to highlight your product’s selling points and features. However, you also need to be aware of the consumer’s needs and desires. There are five stages of the decision-making process that most buyers will go through.

• Problem Recognition: The consumer determines that he or she has a specific problem that your product could help them with.
• Information Search: The consumer spends time learning as much as possible about your product to determine if it is an effective solution.
• Evaluation of Alternatives: Many consumers will not make a hasty buying decision without comparing your product against at least a couple of the alternatives.
• The Purchase: When the consumer makes a buying decision, he or she will usually act on it rather quickly. However, some will delay this step because they are waiting for a better price or are unsure about specific features or other factors related to your product.
• Post-Purchase Behavior: Consumers typically will analyze the product after they have used it for at least a short period of time. By doing so, a decision about how effective the product is will be made.

Deciding to Buy

There are two main types of buying decisions: short-term and long-term decisions. Both of these decision-making strategies depend on what you’re selling. Learning more about them and adapting them to the product or service you’re offering can help you attract more customers.

Short-term Decisions

A short-term decision is usually associated with smaller and often cheaper items. These are either impulse purchases or routine purchases.

• Impulse Purchase: Impulse purchases are usually for cheaper or smaller items, such as buying a candy bar at the checkout stand at the grocery store. Little or no thought is given to the purchase.

Even though impulse purchases mostly take place in store, you can tempt the customers to buy impulsively online, as well. For example, if you sell clothes, you can offer accessories that go well with the chosen outfit. The trick is to create a very straightforward and streamlined shopping experience. After all, if they have to jump through hoops to make the purchase, the urge to impulsively buy may be gone.

• Routine Purchase: There are many products that consumers buy regularly without thinking about them. These may be essential items, such as toothpaste or toilet paper, or they could be their favorite foods. In many cases, these are products that the consumer has used in the past and has had great experiences with and they stay loyal to the brand.

However, if your product is new, you can’t rely on loyalty: you first need to attract your competition’s customer. In order to do that, you once again need to understand the target audience, so you can approach marketing in different ways. For example, you can ask customers to review your product online and share the positive experiences on your social media profiles. People are more likely to buy something that others have tested and liked. You can also offer coupons or discounts to encourage an initial purchase. Once a customer tries your product, they may decide to continue using it.

Long-Term Decisions

If you offer more expensive products, like electronics or cars, or if you’re in the real estate industry, you shouldn’t expect your customers to make quick decisions. They may spend weeks or even months analyzing the market and exploring alternatives before making a purchase.

Long-term decisions are usually based on products that could potentially impact a person’s budget or lifestyle. Part of the research process includes reading reviews, looking at consumer ratings and even asking friends for recommendations.

Some consumers need a financial incentive to get off the fence and to make a buying decision. For example, they may need a great discount for a new TV. On the other hand, real estate agents will have more success if they research the demographics of their target audience.

For instance, if you want to attract millennials, you should be aware that they may have limited budgets in comparison to older real estate buyers. The millennial generation may also prefer homes that have more modern features or finishes, electronic or automated features and more. Remember that, for them, the visual factor plays a great role in the decision-making process: the house you’re showing needs to be well-decorated, from the inside as well as the outside.

To Conclude…

As you can see, regardless of what you are selling, effective marketing is about more than just highlighting your products’ features and benefits. Consumer behavior should also be a focal point when crafting a new marketing campaign. When you understand consumer behavior, you can more effectively craft an excellent marketing campaign that produces amazing results.

About the Author:

Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. She was rummaging through her grandma’s clothes before it was cool and she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, but delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88

Article Contributed by Anurag Gupta

If you’ve valuable, relevant and rewarding content on your website, it must reach the targeted beneficiaries. And what better than email as a channel to draw in the audience and subtly drop them to the doorsteps of what piques their interest. These days, the email marketing rules are fast adapting to complement content marketing campaigns and trends.

Traditional email marketing, which focused heavily on sales pitch, has evolved to a subtler variant that pays greater attention towards engaging the audience and building a relationship by taking them to value added content. It is a permission-based communication with subscribers that have already shown interest in what you offer.

Here’s a rundown of actionable tips on how you can use email campaigns to improve your content marketing.

Choose Relevant Content to Promote

Here’s a path – your subscriber opens the email, gives a cursory look to your message and then decides whether to pull back or head to the content you are offering. All this happens virtually in a flash, so you have just a second or two to give a compelling, direct reason why they should go to the content. If you handpick and promote valuable, relevant and rewarding content in your email, chances are strong you would be helping your content marketing immensely.

Engage in Dialogue with Email Campaigns

Bombarding the audience with a batch of emails, an approach widely adopted by marketers, is flawed. Although, your email lands the inbox it barely initiates a dialogue. Design your email campaigns to launch a conversation and draw in the prospects to “talk it out” with you. Encourage them to participate and include social share tabs in your emails, prompting the audience to build up the dialogue on social networks.

Plant Crisp & Inviting Call to Actions in Email Newsletters

Once you have figured out the content to be promoted and the manner in which it will be done, you need to find inviting ways of including links to pages on your site. This can be achieved by planting crisp, appealing and strategic calls to action. Keep the language simple and straightforward with an aesthetically appealing design to draw in the audience to the target page.  For example, a clearly identifiable “Read More” call to action, directing subscribers to a weekly roundup of popular articles, could be a good way to drive traffic to content.

Let Stats Tailor Your Email

As part of your content marketing strategy, you might be creating dozens of articles, blog updates, social media feeds and other sharable content. But not all of it fits the bill for your subscriber list. Instead of serving whatever you create, focus on key statistics such as where on website prospects spent most of their time, how many visits a particular genre of content received, degree of engagement, etc. This insight is vital for subscriber segmentation and eventually tailoring of emails to propel them towards the content.

Segment Your Audience

If you combine the prospects’ behavioral data with traditional segmentation, you can customize the emails and offers to fit their needs. For example, knowledge of who opened the email, what they downloaded on the site, etc. provides you with a clear line about what kind of content you should drive them to. This specificity boosts your content marketing efforts.

Employ “Mix & Match” Strategy

If you have a high frequency of email campaigns, you run the risk of getting monotonous in styles and methods. To avoid putting off the prospects with recurrent patterns, maintain a big basket of email components such as content angles, surveys, offers, delivery days and others, and mix and match them as need be. The novelty factor makes it easier to keep your audience engaged.

Tap the Potential of Automated Emails                  

Automated emails such as welcome messages, invoice, notifications and receipts often go without any glimpse to your content. Sticking to the context of the communication, you can slip in links to your best posts or other useful content in these emails. It will be a handy addition particularly for new subscribers while you can expect higher traffic.

Set Up an RSS Email Feed

By setting up an RSS email feed, you can send automated updates to blog visitors whenever a new piece of content is published. This is no-effort method to drive traffic to your latest content. To the advantage of your prospects, they only need to check their inbox to stay abreast with your content offerings.

The above-mentioned steps lay down a roadmap for integrating your email and content marketing efforts. When someone is signing up for your email, make sure you reach out to them from time to time, informing them how your new content could be a good read. If you stick to the tips discussed here, you can expect more visitors, more leads and more new customers.

Author Bio

Anurag Gupta is a budding entrepreneur with stakes in WeblinkIndia.net an acclaimed Web Designing & Development Company, headquartered in India. He also happens to be a keen writer, sharing insights, tips, and tutorials on subjects related to the ever evolving landscape of Web Designing and Development.

Article Contributed by Usman Raza

Reaching potential customers is very important if you want your product or set of services to be successful. For effective and successful marketing, it is highly important that you have a high standard marketing plan in place. Along with that, it is also important that you have a well-defined budget to promote your services.  A lot of companies go over their budget and do not realize it. Here are 11 of the countless tips which can be used to reduce your marketing plan budget.

1. Have a clearly defined budget

A marketing plan comprises of several tasks and each one of them needs to have a clear financial limit. Do not be hasty with spending money. Every product requires time to create an impression in the mind of the potential customer. Thus, spending more money than your financial range for promotional purposes and expecting the product to be an instant thinking is not the correct way to go about it. If you have a financial limit for each marketing activity, the chances of overspending are quite less

1. Rely more on social media marketing

There is no doubt that social media is the best form of marketing in the technology dominated time. Although the conventional marketing methods including above the line marketing (ATL) below the line marketing (BTL) marketing are still used but social media marketing certainly has a stronger impact. A high percentage of people all around the world use free social media marketing platforms including Facebook and Instagram. Thus, you can use them to promote your product or services.

1. Avoid the provision of too much information

Providing lengthy descriptions or too much information about the product simply creates a negative impression instead of a positive one. Various companies market their products through commercials where there are lengthy descriptions delivered in such a rush that people even fail to understand them. This practice simply creates a cluttered impression in front of the customer. Thus, to market your product in the most effective manner, ensure that the presented information is short, crisp and to the point.

1. Correct Search Engine Optimization techniques

There is no doubt that search engine optimization is a very productive and cost effective marketing method if it is followed with the correct guidelines. By using few easy techniques, you can get your website among the top online search results. One of these techniques is content marketing. For quality SEO content, it is important that the most result oriented keywords are used in the correct density. There are various SEO plugs as well which help you in optimizing your content including Word press. These plugs provide suitable suggestions for meta descriptions and headings so that the pages can be ranked highly. As compared to conventional marketing methods including television and print media, SEO costs a much smaller sum.

1. Getting an expert opinion

If you are new to marketing methods and product promotion planning, it is very important to get a professional advice from an expert. Marketing experts can help you in cutting down on your budget and choosing product specific promotion methods. Thus, before you make a marketing plan, sit down with an expert and share your thoughts. Certain marketing experts do not charge anything for a piece of advice. Having a professional opinion can help you in starting positively.

1. Hiring an expert is better than the “Do It Yourself” option

There is nothing bad about doing the marketing work yourself particularly if you want to work with a higher level of creativity. However, on a comparative scale, an expert would produce faster and better results because product marketing would be his domain. On the other, you as a business owner would have to go through a lengthy learning process. Marketing your own product is not only about reading books and digging deep into theoretical principles. Hence, if you want your product or set of services to start on a flying note, there is nothing bad about spending money on a marketing expert.

1. Cut down on the number of pages

There is no point in turning your website into a thesis paper because this practice does not work. Today, most visitors do not even go beyond the home page. Hence, try to keep the number of website pages to a minimum. This would help the customer in grasping the presented information in a better way.

1. Do not initiate multiple campaigns together

As a business owner, if you are running multiple campaigns at a time or focusing on more than one product, there is every chance that things would get messed up. Thus, plan the marketing activities and ensure that you are using techniques that would help the product grow and get recognized. These days, it is not necessary to spend large sums of money to get your product known. Through social media, you can use the correct techniques and get your product known in an easy manner.

1. Initial planning and risk management

Starting a marketing campaign without any prior planning can be a big problem. In other words, there is every chance that you would lose your investment without any results. Before you invest any money, ensure that you have done your homework. Distribute your marketing strategy into smaller tasks and identify the potential risks that each one of them has. You can also get a free expert advice and see where you are going wrong.

1. Get involved

You can never achieve the best results from your marketing campaign until you are heavily involved. Whether you are doing things yourself or hiring a professional consultant, you should be sure about each stage of the marketing process. Leaving everything on the marketing consultant without getting involved can result in not achieving any positive results after spending your hard earned money.

1. Consider in-house professionals for product marketing

There is no doubt that outsourcing the entire marketing campaign and getting the plan developed by an expert saves a lot of time and energy. On the other hand, this also expands your financial budget. Thus, it is better to accomplish the tasks yourself and hire an in house team for this purpose.

Author bio: Usman Raza is a marketing specialist at Zen Sleep and Keeva Organics. Aside from doing digital marketing and helping clients get new customers, when not working there is a 95% chance he is praying with his family. Follow him on Facebook @usmanraza40 and Twitter @usmanintrotech