We talk a lot about lists and how every business owner needs to be continually building an email list of customers and prospects.

Having a good list that you can email on a regular basis is one of the easiest, most affordable and most effective ways to increase sales and build your business.

Even though email marketing has become less effective in recent years due to the volume of email that’s now being sent, it’s still a very effective and important strategy.

However, your email list isn’t the only one you should be building, audiences are now the new list.

Audiences: The New List

Here’s what we mean by audiences are the new list.

“Audiences” are the collection of people you can build inside of an advertising platform like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ad Network, and LinkedIn that have interacted with your ads or your content or your videos or your website.

You can also create a “Lookalike” audience of people who haven’t interacted with your content yet but share some of the same traits of those who have…people who “look like” the people who engage with you.

If that isn’t enough, you can create audiences based on interests or any of the other targeting options the platform provides and save them for future ads.

This is, of course, an incredibly effective way of advertising because you are able to connect with people who engage with you now or have a strong likelihood of engaging with you once they see your content because of a shared interest.

That’s very similar to being able to send an email to somebody who is either already subscribed to your list or who would be very likely to subscribe.

How to build an Audience

Here’s how to build audiences.

Every ad network, or social media platform, comes with what’s called a pixel.

A PIXEL is a small piece of code that you can put on your website that will then track a visitor who comes to your website.  Your pixel will notify the advertising networks that the person visited your site and took a particular action. The network or platform will then add that person to a specific audience so you can target an ad directly to them at a later date.

You can install pixels from each platform to every page of your site to start collecting people and building those audiences by their interest in topics, products, and actions taken.

Pixels give you the ability to get enough information about where that person has visited on your site to know things like whether or not they’re interested in a particular topic of a blog post, or if they viewed a particular category of product on your site, or they’ve watched a certain video.

You can get good detail from that pixel to give you more targeted advertising audiences.

Finally, you can promote your content and your offers to those audiences based on the audiences that they’re in.

Final Thoughts

To recap, audiences are the new list.

You, of course, still want to build your email list. That’s a very powerful marketing tool, but audiences are starting to prove to be just as effective, if not more effective.

Because you are not reaching somebody in their very, very crowded in box. You can instead reach them with a variety of content formats in the environments that they’re already spending time on, namely the social media platforms and websites that they visit.

Build your audiences, get started today.