As a business owner, it can be frustrating to decipher the different levels of interest between leads and how to get the best return on investment for your ad dollar. However, regardless of where your customers sit on the temperature scale, it’s important to stay top of mind.

Today I’ll introduce the cold, warm and hot audience funnels, and how you can implement this method into your social media strategy to personalise your approach and increase conversions.

Tapping into the three audience funnels

You can categorise your audience into three buckets:

  • The Cold Audience — those who haven’t seen or engaged with your content.
  • The Warm Audience — those who have engaged with your content, visited your page, or watched more than three seconds of your video.
  • The Hot Audience — a Custom Audience of people who have visited your website or supplied their contact details.

Cold Audiences

To reach your Cold Audience, you can target based on interests, demographics, or other online behaviours. If you want to go even further, you can create a Cold Audience of just those people who have, for example, already become a customer, visited your website or have even watched 95% of one of your videos. This process relates to Look-a-Like Audience, which we will take a deeper look into on another video.

What you want to be doing when you’re reaching the Cold Audience is giving before asking. You can do this through thoughtful Content Marketing. So, think about the problems your potential customers have and how you can give them free and useful information to educate, build the trust of your brand, and ultimately build a loyalty between yourself and the client. This way, when they become a Warm Audience, you’ve already gained their trust, and you’ve got some credibility.

Warm Audiences

The Warm Audience are people who have engaged with your page in some way or become a fan. In this case, they could have watched more than three seconds of a video (which can be a rarity), liked your page, or commented and engaged on a post or advertisement.

What you want to be doing with this specific audience is educating them more about your product or service that you offer. Once they visit your website or supply you with their contact details, you can now shift your focus on them and create your Hot Audience.

Hot Audiences

Finally, for your Hot Audience, you’ll want to try to overcome some common objections or challenges they might have before using your product or service. For example, if they’ve visited your website, or you had them as a potential lead (you have their contact details but they’re not yet a customer). Change your mindset to discover why they may not be converting from a lead to a customer. If it’s price, you could offer a promotion or a value-add for your services. You could also put a case study in front of them to highlight how you can better what they are looking for and overcome their objections.

Still feel out in the cold?

(Well, it is winter after all!) However, that doesn’t mean you can’t employ clever segmentation strategies to keep your warm and hot audiences indoors, so to speak. Stay tuned for more information on these three segments as we dive into how to create each one.

Have questions for me? Please be sure to leave them below — I may answer them in my upcoming videos.