I don’t recall exactly how they picked the place they go to now, I think I was in college at the time. But my parents have been Christmas tree shopping at the same location for more than 30 years. Every year, the company sends them a postcard, reminding them of the location – or letting them know they’ve moved. It’s a small cost – with a big revenue.

Think about it. While my parents only spend maybe $75-100 a year at that location, they’ve spent that amount for decades. That means they’ve spent– so far – around $2500-3000. For a postcard. And that’s not counting the fact that my sister and her family buy their tree from the same location and have for 15 years. Yes, I know there’s also the cost of growing the trees, cutting them, trucking them from Wisconsin to Southwest Florida. I don’t know those specific costs, but Bob Heath does.

He also knows the best way to encourage repeat business is to lean into his branding and marketing. Each customer also takes home a free jar of pickles from the Heath family farm with their tree.

A Measure Beyond Words

Welcome to the next step in building a truly strategic marketing system for your small business. Over the last five weeks, we’ve looked at several questions you need to answer for your company to determine the best, most effective marketing approach. Next week, we’ll tackle the hardest question most entrepreneurs must face, not only early on, but throughout the life of their business.

We got the customers to us. We looked at where they come from and how they find us. We examined how often a transaction resulted from finding us, and tracking where each yes happens that leads to the ultimate goal – a sale. Except that’s not always the ultimate goal.

We pivoted on the question of what types of solutions your potential clients need – long term, short term, or some hybrid of the two. The next step was counting the cost to acquire the customer. The expense of the solution, in basic terms, plus the overhead involved in marketing – online, in person, signs, cards, buildings.

But today, we’re going to take a deeper look at the long-term numbers to consider. Individual cost is one thing. But even businesses that rely almost exclusively on short-term solutions must consider the value over the life of a client. Especially when the statistics tell us it costs approximately five to seven times more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one.

So let’s dive in.  

A Tale of Two Clients

For starters, let’s unpack that new to existing customer cost ratio.

Every year, as everything gets noisier and our time and money are stretched further and further, it becomes that much harder to get people’s attention. You may have heard about the proverbial 5,000 ads a day Americans are exposed to. I’m sorry to say, it’s likely a LOT worse. The farthest back I can find that number quoted is in 2006. It’s in an article that points out that we’ve escalated from 50-100 ads a day in the 70’s to 5,000 a day today. But again, that was almost 15 years ago.

Now, what am about to do is by no means the proper way to make these calculations. Just letting you know up front, I’m using the same inaccurate causal relationship that the article posits. Using that math – 100 in the70’s to 5000 in 2005/6 to today… means that the average American sees between 10,000 and 20,000 ads in a day. But I’m exaggerating to make a point. A little.

Regardless of the actual number of ads the average person sees in a day, the numbers do show that costs to acquire new customers are significantly higher than to retain an existing customer. Yet studies show that nearly half of all businesses spend a more significant portion of their budget to bring in new customers. At the same time, spending pennies trying to reduce churn – and are more often successful in the latter than the former.

That’s, of course, for the few that actually track it.

A Matter of Perspective

Let me throw a few more numbers your way

• 60-70% – the probability of selling something to an existing customer
• 5-20% – the likelihood of selling to a new customer (it drops to zero if you don’t get at least get some contact info before they click away)
• Previous customers spend 5-10% more money on subsequent visits (real or online)
• Just retaining 25% of past customers can increase revenues 30-125%  
• In 2014, Neil Patel calculated that returning customers spend on average 67% more than first-time customers
• In 2016, only 40% of businesses of any size tracked customer retention and loyalty in detail.

But what does that all mean for your small business?

Running the Numbers

Customer Lifetime Value is a projection, based on past sales and experiences, that estimates the average customer’s monetary worth to a business. It’s that simple and that difficult.

The fact is, most companies that think about doing the math are confused in their approach. Here at Grow the Dream, we take a more holistic approach to marketing strategy. One that takes into account as many factors as possible – and filters them through your ideal customer profiles to create a specific, measurable, active marketing strategy. One that can be effectively implemented.

The ideal customer profiles are what makes these strategies so effective. I haven’t gone into much detail on them in these articles so far, in large part because they are proprietary. But they are key to our approach for several reasons.

It’s Only a Model…

Think of a ideal customer profile as a model. It’s a picture of the perfect consumer for your product or service. And I’m talking about a detailed model. If the strokes are too broad, the model is ineffective. You want to be as specific as possible about the demo- and psycho-graphics of the customer.

If you have existing customer data, this is extremely helpful. But the initial strategic work can be done with estimates and reasonable assumptions as well. Usually our clients who come to us in the very early stages of their business startup work hands-on with us for a longer period of time. That way the initial assumptions can be tested and refined by actual results.

One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to realize is that their customers don’t see the business the way the business owner does. You’re selling dog obedience training – they’re just looking to get Fido to stop barking when they’re not home. Ideal customer profiles allow the business owner to shift perspective appropriately.

The word cohort refers to the smaller Roman military subsets. Six people were in a cohort. Ten cohorts formed a Legion. Our current military framework of officers’ ranks is based on that approach. In the marketing world, we redefine cohort as a segmented group of customers. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to see how groups of people that are similar behave.

The ideal customer profiles take that data, allowing us to discover the best clients – the ones that your business serves best for the lowest outlay of resources.

Piece by Piece

The cohort approach is also valuable when defining the sales funnel. Remember, what we don’t measure, we cannot manage or improve. So we note, measure and track each stage as a typical customer goes through the sales funnel.

The idea is that at every stage of the buying process, you have a group of people – a cohort at that level. Because we’re tracking and measuring what’s happening to each of these groups of people, we can do several things.

We know what the customer is usually seeking at this point and we can offer a lead magnet or some similar small agreement to move them further down the funnel. The timing of each decision they’re making becomes clearer. We can figure out why there’s a logjam. We can even determine if an offer we’re making is too big or small for the level the potential client is at.

The ladder of yesses that guides potential customers down the sales funnel isn’t usually something that can be assigned a monetary value.  But it both reflects our larger model and gives us plenty of insight into the lifetime value of a customer. Even if the client is returning to buy again, they may need to be guided down the funnel again, although it’s usually a compressed time frame.

By knowing the steps and stops and needs of the clients at each stage, you can manage both expectations and their journey. And the more precisely you know each step and stage, the easier it is to automate some or most of the process, freeing up personnel resources for other tasks and projects.

Of course, we are going to refine that model as we get more data from our ideal customers.

Reaction Time is a Factor Here

Another way to look at the lifetime value of a customer is their total worth to the business over the whole period of their relationship. And that requires a relationship.

As much as automation can help, its real resource is handling the mundane, allowing the humans to focus on and serve each other. Even if your business is solely online, and you don’t ever physically meet or exchange tangible money, relationships are key.  

Poor handling of relationships is also the number one reason for customer attrition. Just because it’s easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer, doesn’t mean you should ignore them.

There are several approaches to help build and foster customer relationships, adding to their value to your business, and your business’ value to them.

Say “Thank You”

Gratitude goes a long way in business. Especially in today’s world. A simple thank you email after a purchase is an easy (and automatable) way to bolster an early relationship. You might also include a coupon code, or save it for a reconnecting email later.

It will cost a little more, but the added cache of an actual mailed thank you card or postcard may be worth it. With so few of these being sent today, it’s a very easy and real way to stand out.

Like & Share

There are two ways to do social media as a business. One is to post regularly, so that your brand and offers are always out there, easy to find. Even off-brand posts, or humorous memes, like the ones we post on Facebook and Instagram help build name awareness. Humor can also be part of humanizing your brand. The more on-brand you can do, the better, of course. And keep in mind social posts from business pages don’t travel as well as they used to.

The other aspect of business social media is using the platforms to communicate with your customers. Asking them to Like, Subscribe and Share is pretty standard these days. Most customers will at least “Like” your page and some posts. Subscribing is a bigger commitment. And sharing is the holy grail of social media. Posts shared by just one human account can catapult your material about ten to twenty times as far as your business post’s standard reach.

And the better quality and usefulness of the content, the more likely it is to be shared. Again, the ideal customer profiles are extremely helpful in selecting material to create or share. In a perfect world, a social media post will be useful to your clients, their friends and general social media users – and reinforce your brand, building business as well as relationship with a wider audience.

You can also use social media and Google ads to retarget existing and potential clients who have discovered you or shared your posts. Just try not to be too creepy about it.

Pledging Allegiance

Another fun tool that many businesses have implemented to drive repeat business is a loyalty program. Customers carry a card, or can access the program online, that rewards them for being faithful. Everyone from hotels and resorts to grocery stores and fast food restaurants now offer benefits for repeat customers.

And not just repeat customers – signing up for a loyalty rewards program can be a rung on the ladder of yesses to build a relationship even before the sale.

One thing to always keep in mind, though. The loyalty must run both ways. That means the incentives you offer cannot just be a way to encourage customers to put more money in your pocket. The offers and deals must legitimately be of benefit to the customer. Even better – try and tailor the offers to help clients self-select as ideal customers.

A Mouth is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Also take into account referrals … They are a non-monetary source of customer value, and often hard to calculate, but potentially invaluable. Numbers prove the age old anecdote – word of mouth is your most powerful marketing tool. And customers who fall inside your bullseye are more likely to have friends, colleagues and associates who are also in your ideal frame…or close to it.

Not taking advantage of referrals is leaving money on the table that is rightfully yours. Just be mindful of not being too aggressive or sales-y when encouraging existing customers to offer referrals or testimonials.

“Do what makes people feel good and they will continue to buy from you and to refer others to you who will also continue to buy from you.”

As you can imagine, the lifetime value of your ideal customer is going to chart higher than the outliers. Since lifetime customer value is such a crucial calculation for your business’ success, ideal client profiles can make or break your marketing strategy.

In some rare instances, your perfect bullseye client is going to look different from 10,000 feet than it does at ground level. That’s one reason for our focus on short term vs long term solutions. I don’t know what the answer is for you – it’s all dependent on what you are marketing. That’s why we do custom solutions for our clients.

If you’d like to learn more about how we construct our exclusive customized ideal customer profiles or want to jump in with building a strategic marketing program to help your business grow, please reach out. We love helping businesses build, and we can’t wait to get started on yours!

If you missed any of the other articles in this series, the links to them are included below.

7 Questions Your Small Business Should Ask to Focus & Track Key Performance Indicators in Your Marketing Strategy

Where Are Your Customers Coming From?

How Are Your Customers Finding You?

How Often Does Finding You Lead to a Transaction?

Are Your Customers Looking for Long Term Solutions or Quick Fixes?

What’s The Cost to Get a Customer?

Back in the old days, you had to offer valid, meaningful information, in the form of a white paper, eBook, infographic or other Lead Magnet in exchange for people’s emails. But about 10 years ago, something shifted. Emails became much easier to proliferate and manage.

From the 90’s to around 2006, the majority of Internet users had, at most, two emails – one for personal and one for business. But in 2004 Gmail was introduced. MySpace had launched the year before, but when Facebook opened its virtual doors to the public in September of 2006, social media began to explode.

While some of us had multiple emails for years, the rise of social media and Gmail made it more likely that lots of people would have multiple emails. Especially since they were now virtually free. For example, I pay $1 a year to 100GB of email storage. I use only about 40% of that for well over 1-million saved emails.

Kooky New Technology

Along the line, as emails exploded, the Internet demigods sought ways of still capturing pertinent data on the people who used them every day – even if they used different ID cards (emails). But they already had at least one powerful tool to exploit.

Back in 1994, Lou Montulli had “invented” a little packet of text for the Netscape Internet browser that saved a few essential preferences. This text packet was stored in a behind the scenes folder and accessed by the browser and many of the sites on the Internet. He called the packet a cookie, after the Unix packets “magic cookies.” In Unix, the magic is the encoding that governs how the info is seen and interpreted.

But over time, Netscape engineers realized that they could store more and more info in these cookies. Instead of just being a user-id, first they were tasked with retailer retention – tracking purchases loaded into online shopping carts – including after you’ve left the site, recording how many times a user has seen a certain banner advertisement, and things like that.

But once the, um, cookie jar was opened, the genie was out of the bottle, if you’ll excuse my mixed metaphors. Cookies now became a treasure trove of data – and not just for the site you’re visiting. I recently ran across a dedicated job site that had over 200 cookies, not for the job site, but for third party outside retailers to place advertising.

Of course, that info was also no longer restricted to Netscape. Google, Twitter, Bing, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Target, the US Postal Service – just about anyone with a website now tracks and collects mountains of data about you via cookies. That’s why the things you search for seem to follow you to other sites days and weeks after you’ve finished your research.

How the Cookie Crumbles

Of course, once it became public knowledge that this was happening, people started pointing to 1984 and similar story frameworks, demanding their privacy be defended. Right before they invested in always-listening speaker assistants. Alexa, play Alanis Morissette.

Government functionaries, not to be outdone when there’s a crisis they can profit from, rushed in and in the past couple of years, two laws were put into effect designed to limit the harvesting and use of user’s data. (Not counting medical data protected by HIPAA).

At the time of this writing, there were two major legislative actions defining use of user privacy. One is technically only for European residents, although when it went into effect, websites and email servers across the globe took steps to comply. The other is for residents of the state of California, but similarly affects all of the United States and beyond.

What Unites Them

The two laws have their differences, but let’s look at the similarities first.

Both require compliance. Businesses that store information on consumers in either California or the EU, regardless of where in the world that business is physically located, must observe the restrictions and rights of the customers under the appropriate law, or face stiff fines.

Both laws also require any affected companies to give the consumers access to the data that has been collected about them. The consumer also has the right to request that the collected data is erased. Bear in mind that Facebook recently was forced by the courts to pay a $5-Billion fine for not imforming their customers about the existence of tracking data on their users and its security.

One thing that neither law defines well is saving and use of Pseudonymous or Deidentified data- information collated, typically for research, but not specific to a particular user or household. Technically, this data is not personal because it’s not explicitly tied to a user.

Now let’s detail the significant differences between the laws:

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created by the European Union and implemented on May 25, 2018 (The original EU Cookie Law was enacted 7 years earlier). The language of the GDPR is broad and applies to all organizations that might interact with data from EU residents.

The GDPR defines two categories of customer’s personal data – standard, such as names, mailing addresses, and IP addresses; and special categories, including religious views, sexual orientation, political opinions and the like. Basically, any information relating to an identified or identifiable data subject is covered.

Consumers under the GDPR can also correct or complete the information gathered by companies.

CCPA

California Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) into law shortly after GDPR went into effect. It became the law of the state on January 1, 2020. It has some interesting specifics – it only applies to for-profit companies that meet any of the following requirements:

1. Has over $25 million in annual gross revenue.
2. Has over 50,000 consumers’ personal information for commercial purposes.
3. Earns over 50% of annual revenue from the sale of consumers’ personal information.

The law also applies to a business that controls or is controlled by a business meeting the above three requirements, and/or shares common branding with a covered business, such as a shared name, service mark, or trademark.

The CCPA is also only applicable to personal data that is not available from governmental records.

Consumers under CCPA have the right to opt-out of the collection of anything outside the bare minimum needed to maintain customer experience on a site.

Be a Smart Cookie

Of course, there are more intricacies than can be easily covered by this summary. If you’d like a more explicit breakdown to check against, I recommend either this one from the Center for Democracy and Technology or this high-level comparison chart from Practical Law.

CCPA & GDPR are likely only the beginning. As awareness of the value of personal data grows, expect more states and countries to enact laws to protect their affected consumers.

Because even in the midst of these laws growing in effectiveness, the United States decennial Census, the 23^rd since 1790, is being delayed. All thanks to concerns over privacy of electronic data. This issue isn’t going away anytime soon, and being compliant now – even if you have no customers in the affected areas – will be to your advantage in the future.

If you’d like more info on how to connect with and find your customers organically, without harvesting their data, please reach out. Grow the Dream has been helping small businesses take a strategic approach to their marketing for over 10 years.

There was only one problem…

Okay, Make That Two

Considering most small business owners have been in this position, you’ve probably already guessed what that problem was. As we all know, the two most valuable resources for building your small business are almost always the ones that are in shortest supply: Time and Money.

Yes, you have the same number of hours in a day as everyone else, but when you’re just getting started, you lack the ability to leverage other hours. That means, even though you have your 24 hours, you have to divide that time between several very pressing priorities, including sleep and family relationships.

It will come as no surprise to you that I’m going to suggest that we apply some strategy to the situation. After all, our company is based on implementing and teaching Strategic Marketing Solutions.

We know there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘voices’ in your head, reminding you that you need to do this or that right away. But to really manage things, it would behoove you to take a few days to a week and map out how to best tackle all of those concerns.

After all, what good are free resources if you never have time to use or even look at them?

Think of it this way – time and money should be working FOR you, not the other way around. By strategizing and prioritizing, you’re able to eliminate to-do lists and focus on what is really important. You’ll also have a clear justification for ignoring (temporarily) minor problems that arise, instead of rushing to put out fires that may die down on their own.

Remember to schedule time for family, for critical tasks that must be completed each day, and for researching & learning new skills. Leave a little flexibility, but the more detailed and specific you make your schedule, the clearer and more focused you will be and the faster you can start to see your goals come to fruition.

This list, while extensive, is by no means comprehensive. There are countless other resources you’ll likely be able to find online for the various areas I’ve outlined, but I’ve tried to stick with the ones that we have used here at Grow the Dream and can recommend, and those I’ve seen clients use to some success.

Pre-Launch Business Planning

Typically, most small business owners will have already done this work prior to finding this article, but for those of you still in the planning stages, or looking to find financing for your business’s expansion, this will help to get you started.

• SBA.gov – The Small Business Administration is an invaluable government resource to get your business journey started and continued. They provide everything from loans, to free classes and training, to finding mentors to help you and your business succeed, and so much more. It’s the first stop I recommend all new business owners make, even when they’re still at their survival job.
• Bplans.com – This wonderful site provides sample business plans, representing nearly every industry—from caterers to construction companies and beyond. I recommend taking advantage of their examples to tailor the advice and pre-planning work you’ll do with the SBA.
• Enloop – Taking your cue from the above resources, Enloop allows you to easily create a professional looking business plan complete with 3-year financial forecast reporting. And they’ll score that plan for free as you work and develop it. Your first business plan is free, with affordable subscription rates for additional plans and added features.

Content Blog Publishing & Web Design:

One of the most powerful tools you can have in this day and age is a business website – one with a regularly updated content blog. And while there are lots of different ‘free’ (often ad supported) website builders out there, few are as powerful, optimized and easy to use as…

• WordPress.org – An open source blogging tool and so much more. 31% of all websites across the world utilize WordPress for their primary website design. It’s so popular that many hosting companies have it as an easy install in their back office infrastructure. It’s fast, easy to use and get started with and has an incredibly powerful behind the scenes algorithm that will literally launch your site into the top search engine results. If you download and install it yourself, make sure you’re using the .org version Yes, the .com doesn’t require you to provide hosting, but it lacks the bells and whistles you’re going to want to use. Which brings us to…
• WP Engine – Our top choice for your managed WordPress hosting. WP Engine’s basic plan starts at $35 a month, but it’s super fast, incredibly secure – with CDN and SSL included – and can handle up to 25,000 visits and 50 GB bandwidth use per month. It’s also easy to upgrade as you grow and expand and offers additional tools for marketing optimization. And there is a crucial benefit of WP Engine – DAILY website backups. And you can force an additional backup at any time. No more lost data!
• Namecheap Shared Hosting – This is a great solution if you’re on a tight budget or extremely risk averse when getting started. Namecheap can get you a domain name, WhoIs Guard, and hosting for as low as $3/month. Their top end is less than $10. They aren’t as integrated as WP Engine, and they only backup your site twice a week, but it’s a great deal for the beginner. And you can always port your site over to WP Engine or another hosting service with minor effort.

Once you have WordPress installed, you’ll see that there are literally thousands of plug-ins and add-ons you can take advantage of – many of them free – to customize your users experience. But there are three free ones right off the bat that you should activate as soon as you log in to your Admin page.

• Askimet – One thing you’ll run into as soon as you launch your blog are countless comments from hacker sites, trying to use your blog to propagate their spam and viruses. You likely won’t have time to deal with them, and this is the solution. Akismet is a comment spam filtering service. Akismet utilizes a learning algorithm to spot and isolate blog comment and pingback spam. Even though Akismet comes pre-installed, it is not activated by default. Once you activate it, though, all those spam comments and pseudo-links will be shuttled off your site into a virtual ‘holding area’ where you never have to look at them again.
• Jetpack – While Jetpack doesn’t come automatically installed, I highly recommend it. Jetpack is the ultimate toolkit for WordPress. It gives you everything you need to design, secure, and grow your site in one bundle. Jetpack adds secure logins and protection from brute force attacks, automatic social sharing, and can increase your site’s load times. It also comes with free themes, image tools, and rich content.
• Yoast SEO – Even though WordPress is already well-built for Search Engine Ranking, there is always room to improve, especially when humans are involved. The Yoast SEO plugin helps you to optimize your website for search engines in two ways.
  • If you insist on keyword SEO (we recommend long tail and strategically targeted blog posts), Yoast can make sure your posts have those keywords.
  • Yoast also evaluates and recommends tips to improve the readability of your posts and pages, such as making sure your page is broken up into readable chunks, you’re not using too much passive voice, utilizing transition words and writing at your users’ typical reading level.
• ConvertPlug – It used to be rather difficult to build an offer or “don’t go” pop-up within your WordPress install. You had to know a bit about coding and languages, etc., and it was frustrating for many business owners. That all changed with ConvertPlug. Now for only $21, you can build a fully functional popup for your website, all within WordPress. This isn’t as critical as the above plugins, but it is a good one to have.
• Grammarly – Grammarly automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in your writing. And not just your blog posts. Grammarly can be installed in most web browsers and works within Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, WordPress and Microsoft Office. No more spelling errors, typos or misused grammar.
• Co Schedule’s Headline Analyzer – This site does exactly what it promises, evaluating your headline to see what works or doesn’t. For example, this post has one of our more generic headlines. It earned a 58. Why is this important? Because the headline is the first thing everyone sees. When my sister worked in advertising, she would generate no less than 100 headlines for every ad she generated. It’s estimated that five times as many people read the headline as click through to the article. If you want people to read your article and visit your site, you need a great headline
• Hemingway App – The Hemingway App is similar to the readability score you’ll find in Yoast. But it goes a little further – identifying superfluous words (yes, I see the irony), hard-to-read sentences, and passive voice.

Email Marketing

Once you start getting customers – or even visitors – coming to your site, you’ll need a way to keep in contact with them. Of course, we recommend you use a laser-targeted Lead Magnet to offer in trade for their email, but even if they just sign up for your mailing list, that’s an important contact to keep track of and communicate with.

• MailChimp – MailChimp started as an email marketing service, and that’s still its best feature. Build custom emails from scratch or using a variety of pre-built templates to keep in contact with your clients, and potential clients. It’s free until you top 2000 subscribers or 12000 emails sent in a month. You can upload a CSV customer list, or import from a bunch of other platforms to build your list. MailChimp tracks each email, how many opens it got as well as click-throughs, invaluable information for evaluating your strategies. And you can also use MailChimp for remarketing. One client I worked for would periodically send special deals to their most active customers to bolster responses. Send an email right away, or schedule it for later. With a paid account, you can sync the email to the users’ time zone, send in batches, and reach out to customers who clicked away from your site with unbought stuff in their cart.
• Aweber – Aweber provides many of the same tools as MailChimp, for a small cost. But it also specializes in e-mail autoresponders. You can automatically send follow up messages to your subscribers after a set amount of days and at whatever day of the week and time you choose, and build and integrate signup forms as well. The sign up forms can also be coded into your website. And you can test drive it all for just $1.

“Virtual” Assistance

Just because you’re going it alone, or with a small team, you don’t have to settle. These apps and tools will help you appear larger and function more efficiently, providing lots of leverage for growth.

• Grasshopper – There’s not much more offputting for a client than trying to call your office and getting your cell phone or just a generic message – or worse, some random number comes up that they can’t call back. The Grasshopper Virtual Phone System fixes that. It can provide a local or toll free number, unlimited extensions, live call forwarding, on hold music, and name directory. And it shows your business name on caller ID when you’re calling out. Need to receive a fax? Give them the Grasshopper number and you’ll get an email with the document. You may be a solopreneur, but you’ll give off the impression of being a Fortune 500 company. Prices run from $30 to $90 a month. And they might even waive the $25 setup fee.
• Evernote – Evernote is a cloud-based software service designed for creating, organizing and storing various media files. Whether it’s a text document, a photo, a video, an audio file or even a web page, Evernote keeps all of your stuff stored up in the cloud – so you can add to your notes and access them from your computer, your tablet, or your phone, all synchronized.
• Slack – Slack is an all-in-one collaboration hub that allows you to connect your team(s), unify systems, and drive business forward through extensive communication tools. Slack stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge,” and it’s search feature is one of the best benefits, especially if your email inbox is as full and old as mine. While I personally prefer BaseCamp, it’s a little pricier for small business owners just starting out, and this is an article about free low-cost tools. Slack, on the other hand, provides ample tools for most small to medium sized businesses for free.
• Due – Due focuses on a complete payment solution that includes time tracking, online invoicing, digital wallet and credit card processing. It’s great for freelancers as well as small business, allowing them to track time spent on projects and port it into an integrated invoice and billing system.
• Google Tools – I could do a whole post (and I might someday!) just on the wide variety of tools that Google offers, mostly free of charge, to help you organize your life and business, grow your client base, utilize better advertising, etc., etc. If you haven’t already, check out Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Ad Words, Google Analytics, Google My Business, and of course, Gmail. For even more powerful tools, at a reasonable price, check out G Suite.
• Trello – Trello is basically the Pinterest for Business Planning and work tracking. Trello organizes your projects into boards for easier collaboration. This is great if you have a virtual office team, because everyone can see what’s being worked on at what stage on the ‘white boards’
• Airtable – Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. This tool helps you organize information in truly elegant ways. While it does boast a paid service, the free version is plenty powerful enough to be valuable.
• Dropbox – Before Google Drive, we all relied on Dropbox. It’s a cloud-based, virtual file cabinet for all sorts of media files that can be accessed, edited and shared, based on the permissions you set.

Social Media Management

There’s almost no cheaper way to spread the word about your business and build a following than through the popular social media platforms. But that can easily get overwhelming without help and, again, you only have so much time in your day. These tools can help:

• Buffer – Buffer allows you to schedule social media posts across a variety of social media platforms, without having to pay a penny – although there are more features if you upgrade. You can add one profile from each social media channel, and schedule posts across all of them at once. If you’re only managing a few social profiles and want to stick to a small budget, Buffer might be right for you. Once you’ve really started to expand, you can upgrade to…
• Hootsuite – If you’re working with a large team or multiple client companies and websites, HootSuite is probably your best option. While it started primarily as a Twitter scheduling app, it has expanded far beyond that now. Just like Buffer, you can schedule posts across many social media platforms, as well as many profiles. Hootsuite also provides analytical tools so you can see how your posts are being received and spread – an essential metric to track. It also starts free with options to upgrade for as low as $19/month.

Building Graphics:

Images are what makes your content and website stand out among the crowd. But if you can’t afford to have a graphic designer on retainer or absorb the cost and learning curve of the Adobe Creative Suite, these tools can definitely assist.

• Canva – Canva is a tool that makes it possible to design anything and publish anywhere. It utilizes a user-friendly drag and drop tool and thousands of customizable templates to create everything from blog graphics to business card, resume and letterhead designs. And you can even get feedback and collaboration from other Canva users.
• Pablo – Pablo was built by Buffer to help people create and share more dynamic, visual social media posts. You pick an image, a font, type in your post and voila! In under 30 seconds, you’ve got a pretty post that you can download or connect right into Buffer to schedule or post.
• GIMP – GIMP is an open source, open access graphics manipulation program that’s free and purports to be similar in style and scope to Adobe’s Photoshop. Honestly, as a long-term Photoshop user, I’ve found GIMP to be much less intuitive and a lot more of a learning tool to use. To be honest, neither one is easy to use, so tread carefully before jumping into this particular rabbit hole. Also, Adobe now offers limited access on their Creative Cloud subscription service, starting at $13/month.
• HongKiat.com – In addition to providing several free vectors and templates to build infographics, HongKiat also has lots of inspiration, tutorials and guides. If you want to use these valuable visual information slides, this is the place to start.
• Visme.co – For $20/month, Visme gives you tools to build and download infographics, more detailed PowerPoint or Keynote presentation slides, web banners, demos and even animations.
• Visual.ly – Their service is not free, but their portfolio is – if you can’t afford to have them build your graphics and infographics, they’re still a great source of inspiration for the ones you’ll build yourself.

Free Images:

So where do you get all the wonderful pictures for blog posts, quote backgrounds and banners? You may be tempted to just do a Google Image Search, but that’s a good way to ‘accidentally’ use someone’s image without permission and find yourself on the wrong end of a cease and desist case. Try these instead:

• FreeImages – Once known as Stock.XCHNG, Free Images is the free site that runs parallel to GettyImages – the largest provider of official images in the world. Free Images boasts over 2-million users that contribute their images for free use with permission and/or attribution. Just pay attention to the details on any photo you’re interested in.
• Scx.hu – Now in partnership with Adobe, this is the other side of Stock Exchange. This site specializes in more stock photography while Free Images is more broad.
• Wikimedia Commons – with proper attribution, you can download and use any of the 48-Million images made available through Wikipedia’s creative commons use license.
• Flickr – This user generated photo sharing site has a huge array of images available for free with or without attribution. Check out the creative commons section of Flickr and read the usage terms to make sure your photo usage is on the up and up.
• Pixabay – If you’re feeling bored by the typical line up of free stock images online, Pixabay is a great resource to shake things up. The images here have a slightly more more indie feel compared to the more generic vibe of traditional stock images.
•  Unsplash – Unsplash boasts stock images that don’t feel like stock images. They’re updated every 10 days. Their collection of free to use, no attribution images may establish a personal connection with your audience that typical stock images can’t quite reach.

Video Editing Tools

Video used to cost a considerable amount of money and needed to be planned out well in advance. Not so anymore. Check out our series of Best Practices for Shooting Video, then use these resources to edit and shape.

• Blender – The Blender Project is a free, open source 3D and video editing creation suite. Be warned, this one comes with a bit of a learning curve. But if you want to create 3D images or even experiment with simple CGI, it has all the toys – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking.
• Wideo – This online video creation tool enables you to create, edit, and share compelling videos at no cost. Create animated videos with images, objects, movement, shapes, text, and audio.Perfect for simple and short video clips.
• Wirewax – For a simpler approach to video editing, check out Wirewax. The free version allows you to work on videos up to 10 minutes in length.

Marketing & Analysis

In addition to GoogleAnalytics and Facebook Audience Insights, there are a few stand alone tools that can help you analyze your marketing efforts as well as hone your ideal customer profile.

• SurveyMonkey – SurveyMonkey provides free, customizable surveys to help you drill down on anything. Plus, you can upgrade to get more extensive data analysis, sample selection, bias elimination, and data representation tools. It’s a great way to not only see if you’re on track with your content, but if there are aspects of your perfect client you’ve missed.
• BuzzSumo – Among its many uses, BuzzSumo can help you find blogging or social media influencers in your niche. You can use it to expand your list of content blog post topics. But you can also find potential guest bloggers or marketing partners you can work with to expand both of your businesses.

While you may be the only person working at your small business at the moment, there’s no need for despair or panic. Utilize these tools to look and act like a bigger fish in your pond. There are always creative ways to expand your business and reach. Take these suggestions and create your own success, on your terms.

Of course, it was much harder back then to do the strategic work of gathering all of the available data on your targeted customer, considering the most popular site online was MySpace and Google’s AdWords was barely out of beta.

Today, however, it’s almost too easy to gather a huge wealth of information about almost everybody – as evidenced by the recent Congressional hearings. Then there’s the site PleaseRobMe.com that serves to warn average social media users that they probably share way too much.

While we value personal privacy and would never advocate illicit means of gathering data on your ideal customer, Facebook’s Audience Insights tool gives us an incredible birds-eye view of the people who are interested in a product or service – and it’s perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Look Before You Leap

There are two main ways to utilize the data you’ll discover in Facebook Audience Insights. Its central purpose, and the reason it was designed, is to use the information people provide, along with third-party data (like buying and banking trends) to make it easier to target your Facebook Ads, making them more valuable. The secondary purpose many marketers have grasped is that they can use that data to create Buyer Personas within Facebook that can be utilized to locate your ideal customer.

Bear in mind that Facebook Audience Insights is NOT a replacement for good old fashioned strategic work. You still need to do your due diligence. Target your ideal customer. Know what questions they’re asking. Know how you can help them/heal their pain and build a profile of your perfect buyer.

Once you have that done, though, Facebook Audience Insights allows you to turbo-charge that work – like a rocket booster, or like adding NOS to your classic muscle car, if you’re more of a Vin Diesel type.

Also, to spare your needing to read a really long, repetitive article, I’m not going to explain how to get to or open Facebook Audience Insights. If you’re already familiar with the platform, you’ll get bored. If you aren’t yet, there are hundreds of places online that explain it fully and succinctly, including Facebook business tools itself. Do you need to go look? It’s okay, I’ll wait. No, seriously.

Okay, got it? Good. Now let’s talk about the strategies to use within Facebook Audience Insights.

Use Who You Know

There are three ways to construct an audience in Facebook Insights. You can start with Everyone on Facebook, People who have already Connected to your Page, or a Custom Audience.

While we can – and will – use your existing strategic work to build an audience from Everyone on Facebook, if you already have an existing mailing list and customer base, we’re going to start there.

So choose “A Custom Audience” in the first pop up you see. (Or click Create New at the top left side, if it doesn’t automatically pop). If you have not already uploaded your mailing list, etc. into the Assets, Facebook will prompt you to do so. Create 2 lists – customers who have bought, and your mailing list. You can add a third if you’d like of people already in your sales funnel, but presumably they got there by exchanging their email for a Lead Magnet, so they should already be in the email list. Don’t worry that your existing customers are also in your mailing list, we’re using this first step to learn about them, not try and post ads in their feed.

By the way, the Custom Audience can be built from email addresses, phone numbers, App ID’s, purchase events, visitors to your website – or even a specific page – and Facebook pixels. You can even download the data from your GoogleAdWords account and use it as a starting place.

As you might imagine, your existing client list is going to be the best indicator of what an actual buyer is. There will be outliers, of course, but that’s okay. What you want to see is a snapshot of the most relevant people to your business, and that’s the folks who have paid you money.

Custom Audiences will always outperform regular Facebook ad targeting, because the people you’re targeting have already shown an interest in what you have to offer.

Once you’ve inputted this list into Facebook Audience Insights, you’ll begin to see a wealth of, well, insights into what defines your customer. You’ll want to make sure you save this, because we’ll be going back to it, and the other lists you do.

You’ll want to create or generate the Custom Audience Insights for your mailing list as well. Then you can compare the two and see where the greatest synchronicity lies. This information can be used to hone and tighten the scope of your strategic work – further segmenting and targeting your ideal customer. Update that profile and keep it handy.

The hierarchy of results goes like this: Custom Audience, Connected to your Facebook Page, and then Everyone on Facebook. Our first priority is people who are just like your existing buyers, like aiming at the bullseye on a target. We’ll shoot for the outer rings after we’ve narrowed our aim considerably.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but narrowing your focus to the very smallest common denominator of the people who have purchased your product or service is going to lead to fewer, but much more qualified leads that will cost you less to develop and will much more efficiently travel down the sales funnel to purchase. Then you can start to widen your search and spend a little more per lead, because you’ve already primed the pump, so to speak, with your ideal potential customers.

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty

Just like with your laser-targeted Lead Magnets, to best use Facebook Audience Insights you want to add layers of elimination – or in Facebook terminology, going granular – the more focused your target is, the cheaper your ad clicks are going to be, and you’ll have to deal with fewer unqualified leads.

The more layers you use, the smaller your audience gets, and that’s a good thing.

This not only saves you money, but time and effort – no more broadcasting hoping to bring in hundreds of leads to pan through looking for gold, just 99% interested buyers, even if they don’t quite know it yet.

That’s also why we don’t generally recommend wasting time and money on “LIKE” contests or click bait.

Use What You Know

Our next step is going to be creating an Audience based on People Connected to your page.

This time, you’ll scroll down the left side of the Audience Insights page and tweak the location, age and interests to match your ideal customer profile. Remember, not everyone who likes your page is a potential buyer – they might even be a competitor keeping their eyes on you. You want to take the people who have expressed enough of an interest or friendship to like your page. But you want to narrow it again to the people who are square in the cross-hairs.

Your fourth set of potential people will be drawn from All of Facebook.

First, you’ll have Facebook prepare a couple of Lookalike Audiences for you, based on your buyer list and your mailing list. Facebook will generate these based on the profile and insights gathered from the lists you’ve uploaded to it. You can target anywhere from 1% to 10% of the match rate of your current list – 1% of course being the most accurate. It takes 6-24 hours for Facebook to do the initial curation of the list.

Meanwhile, you’ll create your own similar list, starting with “All of Facebook.” Just like the your Page Likes list, you’ll whittle the field down to the customers who match exactly your ideal customer. You can always go broader when you’re developing the Facebook ads you pay for – or maybe you won’t want to.

Another group you might want to target?  Your competitors’ customers.

Open either your mailing list or one of the Lookalike Audiences.

Click on the second top tab: “Page Likes.” You’ll see a section titled “Top Categories.” You’ll likely see some company names you know – and some that you were never aware of. A lot of these could be direct competitors, or they could just like the content on that company’s page. Regardless, this is a snapshot of who is already interacting with your target client.

Click on the link in the dashboard to go directly to their Facebook page. If they do engage with your ideal customer as a competitor, you can get additional insight on which of their posts are the most engaged and how. From this, you can get ideas on what to post, advertise and use to raise your customer’s engagement, contingent on your own strategic work, of course.

You can also create an Audience Insights list based on popping your various competitors’ names into the “Interests” tab as you scroll down on the left. By narrowing Facebook’s population even further by someone’s affinity for a competitor’s page, you might garner a few more people to add to your Facebook Ad target list.

Can’t Make Bricks Without Clay

So just what kinds of data does Facebook Audience Insights provide? As I mentioned in the preamble, sometimes we share too much especially in our quest for connection that more than half the United States now seeks through Facebook associations.

And yes, you might have noticed all this when you looked at where to log in to Facebook Audience Insights, but in case you didn’t, here’s a summary of everything you can learn about someone with an email or a phone number – just through Facebook:

• Age and Gender
• Lifestyle
• Relationship Status
• Education Level
• Job Title & Industry
• Pages Liked
• Languages
• Devices Used to Access Facebook – Mobile or desktop, when and where.
• Household Income
• Home Ownership
• Household Size
• Home Market Value
• Spending Methods
• Purchase Behavior
• Type of Car You Drive
• Politics – both what you claim on your page and what the things you share and discuss imply
• Location – where you are, where you’ve been and where you might be going
• Some predictive information based on your activity on Facebook
• How active and consistent are you on Facebook – and when?
• Interests – TV shows, celebrities, books, causes, websites, products, and brands you like – even if you didn’t click “LIKE.”

A little scary, right?

Affinity Vs Relevance

While these terms may seem practically synonymous, Facebook has a very specific way of viewing each one.

Facebook defines “relevance” as Pages that are the most likely to be relevant to your audiences based on affinity, Page size, and the number of people in your audience who already like that Page.

Whereas “affinity” they define as the likelihood of your audience LIKEing any given page compared to everyone on Facebook.

The takeaway being that the more of your ideal customers you target, the better their affinity for your page, and therefore the higher relevance you gain on Facebook.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Through Facebook Audience Insights, you’ll be able to better track how your posts and Ads are doing on Facebook and if they’re hitting your target audience.

You can turn that around and do a Facebook remarketing ad toward your custom audience. Not only will you have a better chance of engaging the audience at a higher rate, but should also generate more sales conversions.

The more data you accumulate, the more tests you do, the more detail you can add to your perfect customer profile. Facebook Audience Insights also lets you do highly specific split tests, so you can see how to further narrow your focus, or divide and conquer two distinct audiences.

Yes, you’re doing a LOT of work up front, but trust me, it will pay huge dividends in the long run when you’ve got everything automated and running even when you’re not touching it every day.

How About Some Bonuses, Chuck?

I thought I’d throw in a few more tidbits to help you as you explore deeper into the Facebook infrastructure and use it to help build your small business:

Where Did You Come From?

If you’re a locally-focused business, you can add high level location targeting to your Facebook Ads.

Choose from:

• Everyone in this location (the default targeting option):The most current location of the actual Facebook user.
• People who live in this location:Based on what the user reported on their Facebook profile, confirmed by IP address.
• People recently in this location:Tracked by mobile device usage.
• People traveling to this location: Users who indicated they were had recently been in a location that’s at least 100 miles away from their home.

Leverage Facebook Audience Insights for Instagram

If you’re a small business owner that has done the math and determined that Instagram should be part of your social media marketing, Facebook Audience Insights can make finding businesses and influencers to partner with much easier.

This is a variation on finding your competitors’ engaged audience.

Set up a New Audience, made up of All of Facebook and this time, sort by local, by Instagram’s target demo (18-35) and by one or more related Interest(s).

Once again, we click to the Page Likes tab and right there are other businesses that connect with your ideal client. Ignore competitors and look for companies or fan pages that you could connect with to create a win-win situation, and reach out!

Divide and Conquer

I’d advise not to put all your eggs in one basket, but use all of the tools at your disposal to make all of your marketing better.

Facebook has incredible insights, but no search engine, so their ads tend to be more passive, while Google delivers your ads to people actively searching for the questions you can answer and help you can offer.

So take advantage of Google’s Adwords tools and add that data onto your Facebook Audience Insights. Similarly, use your enhanced strategic work from Facebook Audience Insights to better target your Google Pay Per Clicks.

You’ll see better results across the board.

In that same vein, because of the nature of Facebook ads, you’ll want to have multiple ads running, and filtered so that you’re not bombarding someone at a later decision point with an earlier offer – it makes you look amateurish and like you’re just trolling, instead of going for specific users.

Additionally, you’ll want to avoid two of the biggest Facebook Ad traps:

Facebook Ad Fatigue: Since the same people see the same ad over multiple days, their engagement with that ad is likely to drop.

Facebook Audience Decay: If you’re not careful when targeting, you hit the same people over and over. You’ve probably seen it yourself when every ad on a page is one retargeted ad that appears 5 or 6 times  on a page for something you searched for.  If they’re constantly seeing repeated ads, inevitably people’s interest will decline, no matter how excited they were at first.

Having multiple, targeted ad campaigns can take care of that. It might cost a little more up front, but the advantage of not annoying your prospective clients halfway through their sales funnel journey is worth it.

Honestly, we’ve just scratched the tip of the iceberg for Facebook Audience Insights. I’m sure there are countless ways you can come up with to use the data that I haven’t even imagined. Even with the looming threat of running out of Facebook ad space, the insights and targeting are a must for any small business that wants to build its presence and sales online.

At that time the founders, all former PayPal employees, had two concerns.  They wanted to share a video file that was too large for their email servers to handle, and they couldn’t find footage of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction from the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

So many technology innovations have been launched for puerile or superficial motivations. But while the terms “Wardrobe Malfunction” and “Super Bowl” still give some videos plenty of attention on the YouTube platform, there is far more to it than that, and YouTube is certainly aware of it.

YouTube already has a larger reach than any of the cable magnates. 6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV and experts predict that within the next 6 years half of the viewers under 32 won’t subscribe to any traditional paid cable TV service. Of course, that might be accelerated by the platforms own YouTubeTV, which is less than half the cost of cable.

What Does That Mean For Small Business?

First and foremost, it means that access is easier and cheaper than ever.

Since the popular invention and rapid growth of the television in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, TV ads rapidly became the most effective and far-reaching form of advertising, on both a local and national level. But that also meant it quickly became one of the most expensive way to get your word out unless you settled for “Run Of Station” rates – the most affordable prices, most often airing in the worst time slots.

There’s nothing that said desperate and cheap more than seeing your local business airing its commercial between two different infomercial blocks at 3am in the morning. Right before the National Anthem and sign off! Or seeing the plumbing company that’s been using the same ad for almost 50 years (true story) in the middle of the night.

But unless you’ve been living under a literal rock, you’ve noticed that  traditional TV viewership is plummeting. It’s not just the ratings on the networks, where a smash hit today would have been cancelled 10 years ago or vice versa, but TV in general is fighting a losing battle for eyeballs.

And those eyeballs have largely gone to YouTube. Every day, one BILLION hours of videos are watched on YouTube — in 76 native languages, in more than 88 countries.

That’s a lot of potential customers if you’re a global business. But even if you’re not, it speaks to the power and proliferation of the YouTube platform, which you can leverage on a local level as well.

And I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.

Some Startling YouTube Statistics

The numbers are changing – almost entirely in an upward direction every day, but as of June 2019:

• 1,500,000,000 people watch YouTube every month
• 3-400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
• Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day.
• YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day.
• YouTube could be considered the world’s second largest search engine.
• In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube.
• There are 10,000+ videos on YouTube that have each garnered over 1 billion views.
• 38% of YouTube viewers are female users, and 62% male.
• Almost 50% of the users on YouTube are in the key demographic age group of 25-44.
• More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
• YouTube’s mobile revenue is up to 2x y/y.
• YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
• The number of hours people spend watching videos (aka watch time) on YouTube is up 60% year-over-year.
• The average mobile viewing session lasts more than 40 minutes.
• The time people spend watching YouTube on their TV has more than doubled in the last year.
• 80% of YouTube’s views are from outside of the U.S.
• According to Google, people who watch YouTube ads to completion are 23 times more likely to visit or subscribe to a brand channel, share a brand video, or watch more by the brand.
• Even those who don’t watch to the end are 10 times more likely to do one of those things.

And yet…

ONLY 9% of Small Businesses use YouTube for ANY reason
And even fewer advertise on it.

But is YOUR Target Audience on YouTube?

The simple answer is probably. However, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee. Not good coffee, but, yeah, coffee. As small business owners, we don’t rely on guesses and probably’s.

You know what the key is. That’s right. Strategic work. You may be sensing a pattern here. None of your marketing efforts should be started or considered without knowing who your ideal customer is, what questions they’re looking for answers to, and how you can heal their pain.

So yes, while it’s highly likely, given all the numbers I just threw at you, that your potential and existing customers are on YouTube, you need to make sure. Plus, that information will help with the next steps.

Counting the Costs

While professional videos are always going to look and likely sell better, as long as your own videos rise to a reasonable standard, they’ll work on YouTube, both as ads and as informational videos.

I’ll address it in another post, but creating longer-form videos that appeal to your existing and prospective customers and posting them on YouTube as well as your own site is a great way to build brand awareness, customer loyalty and enhance any marketing, especially YouTube Ads.

So while you can spend quite a bit of cash hiring a production company to produce your YouTube videos (and why not partner with another local small business?) you can also utilize much more affordable cameras and editing software to get comparable results. And no, you don’t have to be on camera, either.

A quick caveat, though: on average, 20% of the people who start your video will leave after the first 10 seconds. You’ve got to grab them with something compelling QUICKLY. For inspiration, consider these “unskippable” Ads from Geico. Or these clever ones from German automaker Opel Mokka.

YouTube is more cost effective than either Google or Facebook Pay-Per-Click ads. Not only do you have better engagement – you don’t pay until a viewer watches 30 seconds or more of your video (unless it’s shorter) or engages in other video interactions, such as clicks on the call-to-action overlays, cards, and companion banners.

And those YouTube views cost an average of just $0.06 per click. That’s a whole lot cheaper than any of the search engine options.

You should also be aware that YouTube can be huge for audience engagement. It’s not just about watching videos – YouTube is practically its own society and community that provides a hub for sharing,  as well as just for video access. Plus, we know psychologically that sight, sound, and motion can elicit emotional involvement with content that you don’t get with other forms of media. It’s one of the reasons TV is so effective.

A Productive Partnership

As you may be aware, YouTube was bought by Google in 2006. And that’s a VERY good thing. While corporate synergy doesn’t always work with large, sprawling businesses, in this respect, it helps you out.

Not only can you target your YouTube ads based on people’s viewing history, you can also target them with their Google search history. And that’s not all. Just like GoogleAnalytics and Facebook Audience Insights can help you narrow your focus, YouTube has similar tools to precisely aim your ads at the most likely candidates:

• Target by Demographics: age, gender, or parental status.
• Target by Topic Interests: Reach people based on certain topics or life events.
• Keyword Contextual Targeting: Your Target Keywords are matched to web content.
• Target Affinity Audiences: Use the information you have from existing marketing efforts to aim at building brand awareness through interest-based groups.
• Custom Affinity Audiences: Dig even deeper into your ideal customers and tailor everything to what they need or want. No need to go broad.
• In-market Audiences: Find customers who are researching products or services and actively considering buying something like what you offer.
• Remarketing: Reach viewers based on their past interactions with your videos or YouTube channel. If you link your AdWords account with YouTube, they’ll automatically begin the process so you don’t miss anyone.
• Tighten Your Focus: YouTube Analytics provides audience demographics, levels of engagement, and performance, not only for your videos and Ads, but also generates a comparison with similar videos.

Finding Your True View

YouTube offers two types of ads you can utilize:

• Video Discovery Ads (Previously Named In-Display Ads)

These are the ones that are most like the ads on other platforms, like Google. Video Discovery Ads show up on the YouTube home page, as well as the search results pages, and as related videos on the right side of video watch pages. Just like on Google,  these are identified by the yellow AD box that sits next to them.

• In-Stream True View Ads

These are what people generally think of when you say YouTube Ads. They are scheduled to play before the video you’ve selected. In the past, they were all skippable. Now, you have two options.

“Skippable” TrueView ads must run between 12 seconds and 6 minutes in length, and obviously are skippable after 5 to 7 seconds. And while popular opinion seems to be that people skip them as soon as they can, recent studies have found that in reality people watch longer, especially if it’s something compelling like a movie trailer. These can also be translated to any site within the Google Display Network or on sites that have purchased Google video ad space.

“Non-skippable” TrueView ads – where you’re ‘stuck’ consuming the whole video – need to be no more than 15-20 seconds in length.

Both types of True View Ads can utilize custom videos with overlay text that offers a call to action before the video is finished.

YouTube has also added an option to run a non-skippable mid-roll ad in videos that last 10 minutes or more. These appear similar to standard TV commercials, breaking up the long form video, usually at an appropriate moment near the middle of the video (YouTube is MUCH better at this than Facebook is so far).

Like standard search PPC ads, you can set up campaigns in YouTube to limit the number of impressions, set deadlines and start and stop times on any of your ads.

While YouTube Advertisements may not be for everyone, given that they air on one of the most visited websites in the world, can be targeted extremely precisely to reach exactly your target audience, and cost pennies on the dollar compared to standard PPC, there would have to be very compelling reasons to not consider YouTube Ads as part of your overall marketing strategy for your small business.

The largest hurdle most small businesses will face is generating video content. But, properly executed, even that is an investment that can pay off quickly. If you’re not looking at YouTube, it’s time to start.