How do you get around the gatekeepers of social media without having to pay the high price of trying to reach their users?

It used to be easier, and a lot cheaper, to reach the audience you needed to reach using websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google to get to your target audience.

With Behemoths like P&G moving to digital to get more reach, things have changed for the worse in terms of ad costs.

These companies don't even try to segment their audience. Instead, anyone is fair game, and this has its consequences.

The market is flooded with ads and prices have gone up to ridiculous levels.So, back to cold calling?

Well, we had the same problem.It takes a while to get to the big spenders. Sure, small leads are everywhere, but the small percentage of leads that are actually worth it don’t come falling out of the sky.

With higher costs, getting to those leads was becoming impossible to pay for.Remember, you’re spending before you’re getting something out of it.

So, we needed a different approach, and this is what we did.

Some people are into corgi butts.

How do I know?

Because you could target them on Facebook, and it’s not a small audience either. In fact, it was a very big niche at the time.

But how did they know?

Well, it surely wasn’t a checkbox anywhere on Facebook that you had to check when you signed up.

No. The reason Facebook knew was because they listened.

They gave their users something of value, (posts, images) and people simply reacted to them, and Facebook took note.

And before you knew it, people were getting ads of corgi butt t-shirts and handbags.

The targeting Facebook offers at this scale is marvelous and something you can learn from. But most importantly, it’s perfect for marketers.

However, ads today are a lot more expensive to run.

So, for a lot of companies, running ads on social is becoming less and less attractive.

This was no different for us, but as ads were becoming more costly by the week, we were not about to give all that up.

Not to sell corgi accessories, of course.

Instead we were in a highly competitive niche, where the stakes were a lot higher and we needed to be able to keep marketing.

To do that, we needed three very obvious elements:

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook’s targeting is awesome.

But if we had everything under our control, we would’ve watched for far more specific things than Facebook ever would.

And that’s exactly what we decided to do.

Here’s the idea: Just like you do with normal marketing, you provide value and capture people’s attention. But, instead of just making great content and providing it to people, you do it in a way that identifies them as they interact.

Let me clarify that with an extreme example.

Both may lead to the same article and the first could get more clicks, but we all know that traffic to the second will likely be more relevant to a certain product or service.

That means that the audience clicking on the second will be of a higher quality.

Now this is nothing new. Normally, the next step is try to capture the lead and then nurture them.

But what if, just like Facebook, this was part of the nurturing process?

The traffic to the page has value. But the click itself is just as valuable in terms of information.

So is the click after that, and the one after that.

You see, depending on what an audience member does, you can find out who is ready for a new product push.

Or, you can see who should be put in touch with the sales team.

And finally, you can even find out which angle to use to get them to agree to a meeting.

Facebook knows what it does because it is able to tie activity to each of its users. It then combines all that data and pre-defines groups so you can target better.

Of course, these groups are just supposed to be a one-size-fits-all solution.

In this case though, you’re building your own custom targeting system.

And that means you can be as specific as you want to be.

So while your audience probably has some qualification attached to it already, be it based on their profiles or how they left their details with you, there’s far more information to be had.

If you’ve ever explored sales theory, you know that lead qualification is a big topic.The first thing a good salesperson does is ask questions.

Why?

To find out what their needs are, how urgent a solution is, and what their intent may be.

So now, you can start scaling that whole process.

Of course, you’re not asking questions. Instead you’re presenting them with options and information. All you need to do is listen, and that’s where tracking comes in.

The premise is very simple: Add a unique tracking code to whatever you’re sending to people and link that code to each individual lead.

Make sure to send people to a closed environment which you control and have that code follow them around with cookies or url variables.

After every send out, you can collect your beautiful data and use it to your advantage.

Now, you’re done and you have all the information you need.

But, by now, you’re probably wondering how this would work for getting you NEW leads?

That’s what the next part is about.

You’ll have noticed that the approach from above is a very soft approach. We’re not asking a lot from people, we’re only giving, and that’s by design.

You see, while your own audience of people who know you already may be fairly qualified and might not require an approach like this to make money off of them (although any cooperation with sales this way is always a good idea), a “new” audience may not.

So if you can get access to an audience that doesn’t know you yet, you can now use these techniques to filter out those who are most relevant without upsetting them.

Because this system allows you to reach people in a non-intrusive way, you can use cold audiences instead.

This strategy is now a customer-centered way of reaching out.But imagine being able to do this with a dream 100 style audience. This is an audience, specifically targeted to be your ideal clients.

So instead of waiting for the right customer to come along among the interested, you do it the other way around.

You start with the right leads and see who’s interested.

This is exactly like Facebook does, only now, it's tailored to you.

All you need is access to a targeted audience.

How to get access to one, we'll cover in the next article.