Time To Get Cozy
What exactly is a cold audience versus warm audience?
First - these definitions are going to vary from marketer to marketer, as will the terms. Some call them warm or cold, others call it top of funnel and bottom of funnel. I like to keep it simple, warm and cold.
Someone is considered in your cold audience when they have no idea who you are. They’ve never engaged with your business, never purchased from you, never visited your Facebook page or Instagram. You are a stranger to them.
Someone in your warm audience might not exactly be familiar with you, but has engaged with you on some level. They may have purchased from you, visited your website, Facebook page or Instagram, watched your story, or even hovered one of your posts on their screen for more than 3 seconds.
Yes, the minimum it takes for something to be considered engagement, is a 3 second on screen appearance of your video or image.
The warm audience is hugely important because the more people who enter your warm audience, the more people Facebook can pull data points from to get an idea what type of person would like your content.
It will then search the vast cold audience of people who don’t know you to find more people with similar data points and push your content out to those people. (This is essentially the algorithm in a very small nutshell).
IF you are running paid ads, the person running your ads will likely tell Facebook to do this exact same thing on a more refined and aggressive scale.
For example, I tell Facebook to pull a list of:
A - people who have watched at least 15 seconds of videos on XYZs Facebook page in the past 6 months THEN use that list of people to find B - more people with similar data points.
Let me tell you - there’s a HUGE difference in the quality of similar people Facebook can find when the 15 second video views are 1,000 versus 1,000,000.
When you have a Facebook business page and/ or Instagram, the CONTENT you provide helps Facebook match up data points faster. If you post a picture of chocolate cake and in the caption you write about how much you love chocolate cake; then have 50 people engage with that post, Facebook uses the data point of chocolate cake to find more chocolate cake lovers. No, it’s not searching for the people who have liked or followed a page called “Chocolate Cake.” It’s looking for people who have searched for chocolate cake recipes, engaged with other chocolate cake type posts, bought chocolate cake at the store recently. Literally anyone who has done/ thought/ felt a certain way about chocolate cake recently.
Why is this all so important? It’s important because the amount of people in your cold audience is a little over 7 billion. Obviously, we can refine based on what you’re offering and to who (aka your ideal customer), but once you have someone in your warm audience, the easier it is to keep them there and move them to a repeat buyer. We are not trying to move mountains by getting someone from cold to purchase. We are trying to move a millimeter by getting someone to give us 3 seconds. That’s it.
So what can you do to GROW your warm audience organically? GIVE FACEBOOK CONTENT. Lemme repeat that for the people in the back. GIVE FACEBOOK CONTENT.
Here are ways to get organic engagement to grow your warm audience
Hashtags - use ones relevant to your ideal client with <500k impressions (#coffeedrinker vs #atxcoffee)
Reels - you don’t need Addison Rae level TikTok style videos here, keep it simple for YOU so you keep doing them
Shareable content - you don’t need to SELL SELL SELL all the time. Post memes and videos you think are funny, people will share them.
Personal content - you don’t need to give anyone the date of your last period, but are you playing Wordle and posting it on your personal page everyday or your business page where it matters? Did you ride your Peloton today? Snap a post workout pic, tell everyone who you rode with and that you’ve noticed Cody really bulked up on Dancing With The Stars. Do you have an unnatural obsession with Topo Chico mineral water? Snap a pic and tell your page that you’re rationing them to yourself because the supply chain has been making them IMPOSSIBLE to find.
You spend 18 waking hours doing things - things that are ALL RELATABLE because we all do things. Share those things.
Don’t worry about what time you post, as long as you ARE POSTING. For relatable/ personal/ funny/ shareable content, if you come up with something - post it. AND DO NOT SCHEDULE IT. I repeat - DO NOT SCHEDULE IT. Posting relatable/ personal/ funny/ shareable content is meant to drive organic engagement - scheduling something is not organic.