The Three Audiences That Turn Digital Footprints Into Buyers

You Are the Algorithm

You are the algorithm. The content you see is being planted by you. That is what makes social media marketing so special.

Here's the thing about the marketing world. An audience is what allows a company to generate business. Without an audience, you cannot get attention. And without attention, you cannot get revenue. These platforms have a lot of audiences, and those audiences are enormously varied. Which means that if you don't know how to communicate to the right audiences, you're talking to no one. There's a saying that goes like this: if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

And here's one particular thing I've learned over the years. The best, most incredible, most aesthetic, most beautiful marketing campaigns with the best creatives and copy will not sell anything to the wrong audiences. But the worst creatives will sell to the correct audiences. So you've got to have audiences as a top priority. There are three types. Social media data. Your data. And the mix of both. Let me break down each one.

Audience #1: Their Data (The Core Audience)

The first type of audience is built on social media data. What does Facebook call this? They call it the core audience. Every single piece of information the platform has is the core audience. People engaging with pages, interactions, interests, participation on different types of content.

This is exactly what makes platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Snapchat so valuable. They have data that we don't have. And we use that data to find potentially new audiences to target with our products and services.

That way, instead of doing shotgun marketing, blasting messages and hoping somebody buys, we're doing targeted marketing to people who have already shown, through their engagement, interaction, and participation on the platform itself, that they have an interest in that subject.

Audience #2: Your Data (The Custom Audience)

The second type of audience is your data. If I'm the brand, it's my data. Meta calls it your custom audience. That includes your email list, your phone number list. People who watch your videos. Website visitors. People who have engaged with your content and interacted with your page somehow, whether it's on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. These are digital footprints based on people's interaction with you and your brand.

How cool is this: you can take your best customers, let's say a list of a thousand people who have purchased a thousand dollars or more of your products, and say, "Facebook, here are my customers." Then you can send them a campaign that says, "I want to thank you for being one of my top customers. In exchange for your support of my business, I want to give you more value." One of the most valuable things we've ever done is figure out how to effectively keep customers and clients buying from us. That's the most valuable thing.

And your data stays protected. There's a process called hashing. You upload your customer list, and Meta doesn't take that data for themselves. It goes to a middleman, a hashing computer, and then Meta matches it against their own data. They might tell you, "You gave me a thousand names, emails, and phone numbers. From those thousand, I matched 897." Now you have a list of 897 people who are also active on Facebook and Instagram, and you can talk to them knowing exactly who they are, what they bought, and why they matter to you.

This is one of the secrets in the social media marketing game that most people don't even understand how to capitalize on. You can build many categories in between. For example, somebody who hasn't bought from you in the last six months but bought a lot before. You want to bring them back. Using this data, you run what's called a win-back campaign.

Audience #3: The Mix (The Lookalike)

Last but not least, the third audience is a mix of both. Meta calls this a lookalike audience. To be as simple as possible, a lookalike is self-explanatory. It looks alike. Alike to what?

Here's what they do. You say, "Facebook, I'm going to give you my customer list. I want you to help me find, with your data, people who are similar to my top customers." And because they need to make money, they're going to say yes. They come back with something like, "Here's a list of a million people I found based on the similarities between the thousand people you gave me and the billions of people active on my platforms."

They can do this because of how much data they hold. Demographics, income levels, zip code data, interests, what people like and don't like, married or single, kids or no kids. They mix all of that with your customer list and spit out a new audience of potentially millions of people who are the most similar, in several ways, to your best customers. And why is this legit? Because Facebook is in the business of making money with advertisers. That's what they depend on. It's in their interest that the lookalike actually performs.

Turn Cold Into Warm, Forever

As you might have guessed, there are basically cold audiences and warm audiences. Your data is warm. They're easier to sell to because they know who you are. The platform's data is cold.

But when you use them in combination, you can consistently create warm audiences. You take some of the social media audiences and warm them up. You take some of the lookalike audiences and warm them up. And then you have ever-growing, never-ending audiences that keep expanding, audiences you can target to generate more sales and revenue.

That's the whole game. Master these three audiences, capture attention, and do the right thing on these platforms for long enough to outdo your competitors. The digital world has no limits. The only limit is whether you know how to talk to the right people.