Expecting another AI marketing blog now? Sorry, not here. Let’s look at another type of evolution: from sales-led growth to product-led growth (PLG).

What Is Product-Led Growth?

Traditionally, SaaS and digital products required a robust sales team, generally supplemented by a healthy marketing budget, to produce growth at scale. Those expensive suites at the ballpark and rounds on the golf course moved the process along at a slow pace as salespeople tried to “reel in the big fish.”

As technology advanced, product-led growth entered the scene, offering scalability at a fraction of the cost. PLG allowed companies such as Facebook (which became Meta), Slack, Shopify, Zoom, and others to turn into unicorns, achieving billion-dollar valuations in a shorter period of time than their founders ever could have imagined.

PLG is an approach where the product itself serves as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Now that we’ve defined PLG, let’s look at the basics of a PLG-based growth strategy, how it works, why it matters, and how to build a product-led growth engine for your business.

What Is a Product-Led Growth Strategy?

PLG strategy puts the product in your customers’ hands with minimal friction, allowing them to grow into higher revenue generators as their usage expands. This builds both brand and product trust quickly by allowing users to experience real value early, rather than sitting through sales demos or needing to sign a contract before testing out the product. PLG functions as a test drive of sorts, only there’s no risk of the customer crashing the car while driving around the block.

In fact, this test drive enables users to spearhead lead gen for you by sharing the product and bringing other potential paying customers into the fold via word of mouth and your product’s built-in sharing options. This drives down customer acquisition costs, as you let users of all phases (free trial, freemium, premium, etc.) enjoy your product to the point that they can’t help but want more, at which point your more efficient, leaner sales team can jump in if necessary to drive incremental revenue.

Companies like Slack, Notion, and Dropbox serve as great examples. Users can start using these products with minimal friction, experience immediate value, and naturally progress to paid plans as their needs grow. The product serves as more than a tool—it’s the salesperson, the marketer, and the customer success rep all rolled into one.

By focusing on a seamless user experience and providing inherent value from the outset, these companies have not only attracted a broad user base, but also fostered strong communities that contribute to continual product improvement and further growth.

What Are the Three Pillars of Product-Led Growth?

So, how do you build a product-led growth strategy? PLG thrives on three fundamental pillars that make the model work. If one pillar fails, the whole structure will crumble, so make sure your entire business supports the mission.

1. Your Product’s User Experience

The most important currency in PLG is the user’s product experience. This goes beyond clean UI and page speed. The entire journey—from onboarding to habit-forming usage—must focus on making the user’s life better. Every moment should guide users toward value. Think of your user experience as a series of micro-wins that reinforce product value over time.

When users realize all the ways that a Slack conversation one-ups an email chain, they never want to go back. Then, as they learn more about integrations and fun features the app offers, they refuse to go back, serving as product advocates.

2. Understanding Product Usage to Measure Value

Qualifying leads can prove a taxing, though worthwhile, endeavor. Employing your product to lead the process over a salesperson can provide otherwise impossibly massive scale.

Enter the concept of product-qualified leads (PQLs). When users hit specific milestones in your product (e.g., completing onboarding or using a key product feature multiple times) they’ve signaled high intent. At this point, you can hit them with the right upsell to push them to the next tier in your account hierarchy.

Most businesses will show reticence to spend to the max tier before truly testing out a product, so qualifying the accounts that have a high likelihood of converting without initial sales involvement increases efficiency tremendously, dropping your costs.

Creating a killer piece of software that attracts users often requires large upfront investment. However, after that initial investment, the cost per additional user drops precipitously, approaching zero at scale. On the other hand, every sales lead requires time and nourishment, so adding users to your funnel without a salesperson serves as a major win.

What indicators suggest you’ve found a PQL? A PQL will have:

• Experienced product value, such as having:
  • Created a project or workspace
  • Uploaded a file
  • Connected a team member or integration
  • Reached the “aha!” moment (like sending a message in Slack or editing a doc in Notion)
• Actively, repeatedly, and meaningfully used the product through:
  • Multiple logins within a day or week
  • Returning after Day 1, 3, and 7
  • Engaging with core product features consistently
• Shown signs of scaling, like team use or feature depth:
  • Inviting multiple users from the same domain
  • Collaborating within shared workspaces
  • Assigning admin or decision-maker roles
• Interacted with upgrade flows or pricing content:
  • Ran out of credits, projects, or seats
  • Viewed pricing or settings pages
  • Tried to access premium features

3. Cross-Functional Alignment

PLG necessitates organizational alignment. If sales believes you plan to replace them with the product, you’ll have to literally replace them as they flee to other jobs. If the product team doesn’t think growth should be its North Star, PLG won’t work.

All departments must focus on growth through the product and share KPIs. The product is the centerpiece, and every team plays a role in improving it.

Without proper alignment, your organization will fail to:

• Understand which features drive engagement
• Prioritize the best roadmap decisions
• Identify bottlenecks in adoption and expansion

This unified analysis is the only way to find success with PLG.

PQLs often show intent outside of the product, as well as within, by clicking upgrade-related emails, interacting with help docs or pricing FAQs on the website, or exploring integration or API web pages.

Incorporating the data that comes from outside the product increases your likelihood of properly identifying PQLs. Without full-scale organizational alignment, this level of data input into your model won’t take place, resulting in a decrease in efficiency and a longer time to value.

What Are the Four Growth Strategies?

Every company, whether product-led or sales-led, grows in four primary ways:

1. Market Penetration

We can sum up market penetration as acquiring more users or customers in your existing market. In PLG, this often means driving more adoption within freemium tiers or expanding user accounts.

2. Market Development

If you’ve reached your original total addressable market and want to expand, you can try to reach new markets with your current product—presuming the fit makes sense. This could mean launching in new geographies or verticals, or targeting new personas.

3. Product Development

Perhaps your product has done outrageously well within its constraints, but lacks a key feature that competitors use to close deals or expand usage. At this point, introducing new features or add-ons that drive upsells and retention can push your user base up.

4. Diversification

If you’ve reached the product diversification phase, give yourself a pat on the back. While this step may require the most effort, it should mean you’ve already maxed out your market penetration, market development, or product development efforts.

This level of success can necessitate creating entirely new products for new audiences, but you’ll have the playbook for growth after navigating steps 1 through 3.

What Are the Stages of Product-Led Growth?

PLG strategy puts the product in your customers’ hands with minimal friction and allows them to grow into higher revenue generators as their usage expands.

Let’s take a look at the five stages of this PLG strategy:

1. Acquisition

Users discover your product through organic search, content, referrals, or social proof. You help by making sign-up easy and inviting.

2. Activation

The onboarding process helps users experience the product’s core value quickly. Your “aha!” moment—when users discover they need your product to solve a pain point—should sit front and center.

3. Retention

How sticky of a product do you have? Do users regularly come back to your product? Do they receive value that builds usage habits?

4. Monetization

Here, you push users experiencing great value from your product up a tier from a free trial or freemium plan to a paid plan. Make pricing clear, flexible, and tied to the value you provide your users.

5. Expansion

We’ve reached the best stage of PLG. As users invite teammates or expand usage, they generate more revenue with no additional acquisition cost.

Now, let’s move on to PLG best practices.

Best Practices for a Successful Product-Led Growth Strategy

Focus on these six areas of PLG and you may find yourself breezing through each phase of the four growth strategies that we examined above:

1. Make Sign-Up Frictionless

Ask only for what you need, when you need it. Offer SSO or Google login to avoid any drop-off at step one.

2. Personalize Onboarding

Introduce and showcase product features when they are most relevant, not in a big functionality dump right when the user tries your product for the first time.

3. Prioritize Core Feature Adoption

Focus on helping your users succeed with a few essential tools that you know deliver the “aha” moment ASAP. Think of when you learned to ride a bike—did you have to worry about switching gears or navigating rough terrain on day one?

For your sake, let’s hope not, and let’s make sure your users don’t need to wade through TMI before feeling the value your product provides.

4. Turn Data Into Action

Create behavioral cohorts and customize in-product messaging accordingly, so you give users only what they need when they need it—and nothing more.

5. Celebrate Wins

Use gamification, streaks, badges, or summaries to show users how they’ve progressed and provide encouragement to keep up their efforts.

6. Align Sales to PLG

Use product usage data to identify high-intent users and accounts with high-revenue possibilities to offer helpful human-led nudges at just the right time.

Product-Led Growth Strategy Examples

Now, let’s dive into some examples of product-led companies who’ve employed a successful PLG strategy, and the tactics behind their success.

SteelSeries: Merging Hardware & Software

SteelSeries has mastered PLG by connecting industry-leading physical products (headsets, mice, keyboards, etc.) with powerful gaming software. 

SteelSeries’ software suite offers users real, immediate value. Moments lets users capture, clip, and share their favorite gaming instances. Sonar allows gamers to improve their performance by tuning their devices to the point where they can hear sounds other gamers miss and one-up the competition. SteelSeries even offers a 3D Aim Trainer program that matches the user’s intended game settings and weapons.

These tools work to bring in new users and push them toward becoming “Steelheads,” SteelSeries’ most loyal customers, because:

• They’re free to use
• They create excellent reasons to return to the app
• They build community through shared content.

SteelSeries’ software increases brand stickiness and drives hardware loyalty.

Slack: The Viral Loop

Slack nailed the “invite loop.” Users join one workspace, love it, and spin up new ones elsewhere. This network effect, combined with their freemium model, fueled massive growth.

As anyone who has used the platform knows, the immediate positive experience in your initial workspace acts as a powerful endorsement and referral mechanism. Transitioning to Slack from email chains, where finding information proves nearly impossible, immediately triggers the desire to move all your work conversations to the more agile option.

Add integrations and tiered plans to push organizations along the funnel toward enterprise deals, and Slack’s sale for nearly $28B comes as no surprise.

Notion: Community & Simplicity

Notion’s growth engine stems from simplicity and a thriving community. Its clean interface, flexible and customizable blocks, and all-in-one workspace turned everyday users into evangelists.

The real magic? Templates. Early adopters didn’t just use Notion, they shared their workflows, building a thriving ecosystem of free resources that spread product adoption like wildfire. 

Whether for managing a startup roadmap or a reading list, Notion’s low-friction onboarding and powerful customization options hooked users fast. With a freemium model and organic word-of-mouth as its core strategy, Notion let its community enjoy simplicity and functionality as it scaled from niche tool to over 100M users.

Is Product-Led Growth Strategy Right for Your Business?

For PLG to work, your enterprise can’t deploy it as a tactic—you need to make it a company-wide mantra. You’ll require cross-functional commitment to using and aiding your product as a growth engine. But, before you take the leap to becoming a PLG organization, prepare your product for the role. Develop your product to the point that people can’t stop using it.

Reduce friction, provide immediate value with an “aha” moment, turn users into advocates, and watch your customer base soar.

Need help creating a PLG roadmap? Let’s talk.

The post A Complete Guide to Product-Led Growth Strategy appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Once they achieve sufficient growth, increasing margins or market share or efficiency often comes next. But, no matter where your business resides in its lifecycle, to reach the next step, you’ll likely need to increase brand awareness. Unfortunately, “brand awareness” often turns into a buzzword to throw out in meetings with the C-Suite that leads to wasted spend on PR fluff with no increase in the bottom line, and ultimately costs many marketing heads their jobs.

We don’t want that. So let’s answer one key question: Where is the line between building a foundation of brand awareness and throwing money away?

What Is Brand Awareness?

First, a definition of brand awareness from our friends at the Oxford Dictionary, who have established quite the brand themselves: The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services.

Brand awareness extends beyond a first impression to include every interaction with the consumer. Every touchpoint pours another drop into the brand’s custom cocktail. One bitter experience can turn that well-crafted drink into one a customer will pour down the drain – so any brand hoping to maintain and grow its customer base must aim to provide a positive experience in all customer touchpoints.

Brands develop their “personalities” through each interaction with a customer. Is it scholarly like the aforementioned Oxford Dictionary, tough like Harley-Davidson, energetic and quirky like Red Bull, or somewhat amusing like TaxAct with Adam Scott doing its voiceovers?

The Four Stages of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness starts with recognition, then moves to recall, takes another step toward reaching top of mind, and a last leap to preference.

1. Brand recognition requires a customer to have been exposed to the brand and understand what the brand offers.
2. Brand recall means that a potential customer can remember the brand, either when aided (“Whose logo is this?”) or unaided (“What are some good brands for sunglasses?”). Unaided brand recall for newer brands may hover in the low single digits, whereas aided brand recall for larger brands can easily top 60% or 70%.
3. Registering as a top-of-mind brand means consumers think of the brand first when considering a good or service.
4. Brand preference, the final step, comes when the brand has nurtured its relationship with consumers to the point that they would prefer it over any competitor – think of your favorite toilet paper or toothpaste, for example.

Only those that provide an exceptional experience to their customers reach that final stage, brand preference. This level of brand salience (the likelihood of a consumer thinking of a brand at purchase time) means customers will pay more for your product, even if a competitor technically offers more value for the price. Only top brands that nurture their customers along the brand awareness funnel reach this level of brand equity, where consumers equate value with the brand name more so than with the product or service (IKEA vs. Ethan Allen, rather than the comparable couch each business sells).

Apple has some of the world’s highest brand equity – it’s incredibly well recognized and trusted. So high, in fact, that people continue to shell out massive amounts of money for new versions of the iPhone that don’t always innovate. In fact, Android phones often serve as a testing ground for the iPhone, which simply reaches feature parity within a short enough sprint so as to leave no doubt in their customers’ eyes as to which product remains more valuable. For Apple, investing heavily in maintaining that brand equity continues to prove a no-brainer.

Is Your Business Right for a Brand Awareness Campaign?

Brand awareness is not a short-term investment like a conversion campaign on Google Ads. It’s a long-term investment that broadens the top of your funnel. You certainly want to target your Ideal Customer Profile, but you don’t necessarily want to exclude the junior associate who becomes the product buyer in two years, either.

So, how should you decide if – or how much – you should invest in brand awareness marketing?

1. Focus on Your Business Goals

If you need sales immediately or the power company will turn off the lights, investing a large amount of budget into broad brand awareness campaigns makes no sense.

On the other hand, a successful business in a saturated market with more runway may find that strong brand awareness provides a differentiator that increases sales in the long run.

The insurance industry serves as a good frame of reference. Other than the actual terms of your car or home insurance, do you care about the “product” you purchase? No. You care about the brand’s reputation. That’s why you can’t look at a screen without seeing Flo from Progressive, Jake from State Farm, the AFLAC Duck, or Martin, the GEICO Gecko.

2. Consider Your Industry and Competition

A large enterprise looking to launch a new product in a competitive market with budget to spare should use some of it on brand awareness, but a business in a niche market with no competition or selling brandless, inexpensive products needn’t do so.

When the Boston Beer Company (maker of Samuel Adams) launches a new beverage, it knows the brand identity it creates and promotes will do more selling than the taste of the drink. The limited-edition Derrick White Ale release showcases how brand awareness plays a key role in the business’s marketing efforts. Boston Beer Company aimed to further establish the brand in the hearts and minds of the New England region, where the business sprouted, by pairing with a beloved local athlete.

On the other hand, a business hawking cheap floss and toothbrushes exclusively on Amazon should rightly focus on keeping its prices low by avoiding unnecessary brand marketing campaigns.

3. Assess Your Target Audience

Does your target audience need your product or service but not know your business exists? If so, brand awareness can help connect you with your potential customers.

Or, do people know your brand but have a less-than-stellar perception of it? Investing in brand awareness campaigns can help by showing the brand’s personality and the good it does in the world – think of the commercials you see that tout a brand’s foundation.

4. Study Your Current Brand Recognition

Where does your business reside on the brand awareness funnel explained in The Four Stages of Brand Awareness above? How far are you from reaching the next step, and what type of expected increase in revenue would that next step produce?

You won’t be able to produce an algorithm that will generate the ROAS on that next step down to the cent, but you can create a framework with which to plan. For instance, create a hypothesis such as: an increase in sales of 5% would prove worthy of an investment of $X in brand awareness.

Then, set up a plan to run paid brand awareness campaigns on at least two marketing channels, and track brand searches, direct traffic, social media mentions, and other key brand awareness metrics (that we’ll discuss later on).

If your hypothesis proves correct, consider upping your brand marketing budget to see if success scales; conversely, if your test results in very little uptick in those key areas, go back to the drawing board and try different channels or return your focus to ROI until future revenue growth provides another opportunity to work on brand awareness.

How Paid Media Brand Awareness Campaigns Work

For our purposes, let’s discuss your brand awareness campaign strategy from a paid media perspective. While organic methods like SEO and content marketing remain essential for long-term growth, paid campaigns offer the advantage of immediate visibility and scalability. Most businesses will want to put their largest direct investment into paid advertising, rather than into sponsorship naming rights or PR, to avoid throwing away money on investments that sit more on the theoretical side of the scale than the practical, actionable side.

For a fraction of the cost, you can reach more potential customers on Meta or YouTube than you can in a Super Bowl ad on a primetime broadcast. Not only that, your target audience may even pay more attention to your ad than one running during the big game. Also, you can iterate on paid ads extremely quickly, as opposed to releasing one video in the middle of a massive cultural moment and hoping it goes well.

Businesses can test out their brand awareness campaign ideas and strategies on various paid platforms, including:

• Social media advertising (Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.)
• Programmatic advertising (Google, Adobe, Pubmatic, etc.)
• Paid search (PPC) campaigns (Google, Bing, Amazon, etc.)
• Sponsored content and influencer partnerships (Taboola, Meta, TikTok, etc.)
• In-game advertising (StackAdapt, AdMaven, InMobi, etc.)

How to Create a Brand Awareness Campaign

To build a successful brand awareness campaign, follow these steps:

1. Define Clear Objectives – Establish what you want to achieve, such as increased website traffic, higher brand recall, or boosted social media engagement.
2. Identify Target Audiences – Research the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your ideal customers, based on the data you already have from existing customers.
3. Choose the Right Platforms – Select the most effective channels to reach your audience, such as social media, programmatic, or influencer marketing.
4. Develop Engaging Content – Create compelling visuals, videos, and storytelling elements to capture attention. Remember, you want to bring your brand to life with your creatives.
5. Implement Paid Advertising – Run brand awareness campaigns on Meta and YouTube, programmatic platforms, PPC, and possibly in-game placements to expand your reach. Start off with one or two platforms at a time, depending on your experience, and then iterate on new platforms over time with the learnings you’ve gathered.
6. Measure Brand Awareness – Track key brand awareness campaign metrics, such as social engagement, website visits (direct traffic), and brand mentions. We’ll dive in further on this subject in the “How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns” section.
7. Optimize and Scale – Continuously analyze performance and refine your strategy based on insights and data. Don’t think you’ll set a brand awareness campaign and forget about it; it’ll require continual updates to improve results.

For many, Meta can serve as a good testing ground for your first awareness campaign.

Creating a Meta campaign for brand awareness doesn’t require a lot of time or effort. Just create a campaign, select “Awareness” as your objective, and go from there. You can choose from several options for your performance goal, including maximizing reach, impressions, or showing your ads to people likely to remember seeing them.

From there, choose your target audience, set your budget, make sure the Meta pixel works properly in your account, set up a variety of creatives to cycle through (Meta highly recommends video ads play a part), and let it rip.

You’ll also want to build similar brand awareness campaigns on other platforms to increase your reach. If you’re newer to paid campaigns, try out one or two platforms first, then take the learnings you gather and repurpose them on additional platforms. You can also try out incrementality testing by turning off one platform at a time to measure the effect on the brand awareness KPIs you designate as essential in advance.

What Are Some Examples of Brand Awareness Campaigns?

Let’s take a look at two examples of successful brand awareness campaigns from a pair of gigantic brands.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, where the company replaced its logo with people’s names, produced incredible results by encouraging consumers to find and share bottles with friends and family. The campaign helped spur over a million more teens in the US to try a Coke than had the year before. Coke used technological trends to its advantage, making the #ShareaCoke hashtag a key part of its effort to reach a younger audience on social media in the 2011-2014 range, as social media continued its ascent to cultural prevalence.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign provides us with another extremely well-known and successful brand awareness campaign. The initiative combined inspirational storytelling with endorsements from top athletes, reinforcing Nike’s brand identity while creating a powerful emotional connection with its audience. The concept has proved so integral to the brand’s identity that though it first popped up in 1987, the line still occupies key real estate in Nike’s current awareness efforts. 

The Importance of Brand Value Alignment

Not all brand awareness campaigns produce incredible results like the two referenced above. A number of factors influence whether a campaign works out or not, but some of the biggest failures stem from a lack of brand value alignment.

Brand value alignment constitutes the integration of a brand’s identity and principles with the messaging and values demonstrated in its marketing strategies, especially in terms of partnerships and endorsements. In a hyper-polarized political climate, leaning toward one side of the aisle or choosing the wrong brand or celebrity partner can prove disastrous.

Bud Light’s pairing with Dylan Mulvaney serves as an infamous example of brand alignment gone wrong.

In April 2023, Mulvaney posted to Instagram about a March Madness contest that offered a chance to win $15K. Mulvaney, a transgender social media star, delivered a light-hearted monologue about the contest and pretended not to know what March Madness meant. The backlash that ensued cost Bud Light dearly in sales, as anti-trans actors called for a boycott and negative responses flooded social media. 

The issue with the Mulvaney campaign had nothing to do with right and wrong or trans rights. Instead, it stemmed from Bud Light not recognizing its target audience’s cultural leanings. Bud Light surely aimed to reach a demographic outside of its traditional purview to increase long-term sales, but the effort actually diminished its standing within its core cohort.

Focus on Fit

Say you own an assisted living chain and want to attract seniors looking for a vibrant community with lots of activities and none of the headaches of home ownership. Your target audience will make the choice for themselves, rather than caregivers, so you need to reach people in their 50s and 60s directly.

Does it make sense to try in-game advertising?

No. There are likely over 3 BILLION video game users in the world, but this group consists generally of people under the age of 40.

This gamer cohort definitely wants to find gaming gear, though. If you sell premium video game headsets, like the top brands identified by ChatGPT below, running an in-game video or display ad campaign fits like a glove.

How to Measure the Success and Efficacy of Brand Awareness Campaigns

Brand awareness campaigns don’t focus on immediate conversions, and this can prove disorienting for marketers used to pointing to ROAS or CAC to determine whether their efforts bore fruit. But, just because you can’t attribute an immediate conversion to a campaign doesn’t mean it generates no value.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) can serve as an easy way to frame this concept. As internet users have begun seeing more and more AI Overviews from Google and Bing and have shifted their searches to answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, about 58% of all searches lead to no click.

We need different metrics to measure success for brand awareness campaigns. Check out our suggestions:

1. Brand Search Volume

An increase in branded searches on Google, Bing, and elsewhere indicates heightened brand recognition. Track your baseline number of searches before the start of a brand awareness campaign and measure the growth that comes after the campaign’s launch.

2. Social Media Engagement

Make sure to monitor:

• Followers gained
• Shares, video views, comments, and reactions
• Mentions and branded hashtag usage

Should all these metrics take leaps without other specific campaigns designed to boost them, you can attribute at least a portion of that success to your brand awareness campaigns.

3. Website Traffic and Referral Sources

Direct traffic, in particular, can serve as a proxy for the success or lack thereof of branded awareness campaigns. If your direct traffic soars after the implementation of your campaign, that’s a great sign. If you don’t see meaningful pick-up in that regard, the campaign may have missed the mark.

4. Customer Surveys and Brand Recall Tests

Compare your aided and unaided brand recall from surveys before and after the launch of your brand awareness campaign.

Brands Awareness Never Ends

Ever heard of Blue Ribbon Sports? Probably not, but you likely own some of its apparel, just under the company’s later name: Nike. Despite already boasting one of the most recognizable brands in the world, the company continues to invest heavily in brand awareness campaigns year after year.

Nike sponsors top athletes and franchises across the spectrum to stay top of mind when it comes time to make a purchase. From Michael Jordan to Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, and younger stars like Jayson Tatum and Caitlin Clark, Nike constantly invests in its brand. Nike has no plans to fade from memory any time soon, and remains willing to use its massive marketing budget to keep showing you its logo.

And it must, because just like in your industry, the competition remains fierce. While Nike partnered with baseball superstars Ken Griffey Jr. and Derek Jeter in the past, New Balance swooped in and signed Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest player of all time, currently playing in the massive market of Los Angeles in his prime years. Ohtani’s unparalleled impact (he serves as an unmatched icon in baseball-crazy Japan and a global icon) shows how efforts to improve or maintain brand awareness can never stop.

Investing in brand awareness marketing campaigns remains critical to long-term success, but only if done strategically. Align your brand awareness strategy with your company’s growth stage, industry landscape, and business objectives, and success will follow.

The post When to Invest in Brand Awareness Campaigns appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

The pace of change in sales and marketing, like the rest of life, continues to accelerate. The B2B sales cycle used to involve a lot of, well, salespeople. That’s no longer the case in many situations, and younger generations – Millennials and Gen Z make up roughly two-thirds of B2B buyers – prefer to learn from your website, not your people.

“Lack of understanding about Millennial and Gen Z buying behaviors can adversely affect providers’ ability to reach, engage, and ultimately win these buyers over,” explains Amy Hayes, Forrester’s vice president and research director.

New trends in SEO continue to unfold. As zero-click searches surge, the days of Googling a product or service and heading to a website may fall by the wayside. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) has emerged as a new frontier, so now more than ever, answering your potential customers’ questions clearly and efficiently will provide the key to your B2B success.

With all this change, one thing has stayed the same: If you’re not mapping your customer’s journey, you’re lost.

The B2B sales cycle can take years. While digital marketing remains essential, relationships, events, and other factors may weigh heavily. For continued success in the B2B space, you may need to add a new skill: customer cartologist.

Why Map the Customer Journey?

Mapping a B2B customer journey does more than refresh your understanding of customer touchpoints. It helps by showing you where friction exists. Once you know where the friction is, you can work to remove it wherever possible to drive increased conversion rates. Without quality B2B customer journey mapping, you’ll miss out on accurate data-driven optimization opportunities.

A Bad Map Leaves You Lost

Everyone has experienced it – you’re somewhere new, you need to get to your destination ASAP, and the map won’t load or your phone dies. You feel disoriented, which leads to desperate decisions, and often causes you to waste time turning one way, then backtracking after realizing you took the wrong turn.

The same truth applies to B2B marketing. With so many possible touchpoints, pretending your customer journey goes smoothly from A to B will have you focusing on the wrong problems and false solutions. Since B2B marketing often requires expensive initial outlays, a bad map wastes a significant amount of money.

The Buyer’s Journey vs. the Customer Journey

Bought a product recently? Was that the end of your interaction with the product or company? Probably (hopefully!) not, and that’s the difference between the buyer’s and customer journeys. The buyer’s journey ends with the purchase, whereas the customer journey continues on well after that point – think about the customer. Customer feedback, customer satisfaction, and customer service all play a pivotal role in the post-sale portion of the customer journey.

We recommend remapping your customer journey – not just the buyer’s journey – at least once a year. This doesn’t require an all-consuming process, but if you don’t rework the map after major changes, you’ll run your sales and marketing operations on bad data, so even data-driven decisions will miss the mark.

If your efforts conclude with the buyer’s journey, you miss out on learning how your customers turn into growth agents for your business, and how you might incentivize the acceleration of that process and scale results. Your relationship with your customer never ends with the sale.

What Are the 5 Stages of the B2B Customer Journey?

The B2B customer journey includes many touchpoints along the way, but we can break up the voyage into a handful of specific phases:

1. Awareness

Your potential customer runs into a problem that needs a solution. For example, an analytics provider stops offering integration with a major platform, and your potential customer needs either a patch or an entirely new provider. Your customer starts casually asking around, and hears your company’s name mentioned by a friend in the same industry or sees your video on LinkedIn. They may follow that up with an online search and read a blog post about the topic, but they’re not ready to sign a deal yet, and will dive in deeper in the next phase.

2. Consideration

The potential customer now begins investigating in detail, perusing your website and those of your competitors to find the best value. This phase will include zero-click searches, conversations with industry allies, focused pricing and product comparisons, and more, so it’s time for your marketing team to shine. Make sure your marketing efforts, including SEO, AEO, U/X, and social media, match the moment.

3. Purchase

You did it! The potential customer has become a buyer, and you’ve reeled in the big fish. Don’t throw the fish back into the ocean – continue the relationship to the next stage.

4. Retention

The contract nears its completion and you negotiate another term, right? No! Oftentimes, the B2B customer journey includes multiple decision makers and different end users; this means you need to foster at least one advocate on the client side at various levels of the organization.

Earn loyal customers through excellent service and a great product. Then, track sales data on the retention phase so you can optimize when and how you approach re-upping, as well as what upsell opportunities make sense for different types of clients. Transform customer retention from a hope into a plan.

5. Advocacy

Thanks to a great experience, your customer becomes a brand advocate, helping you drive even more revenue. Include a referral program to convert this word-of-mouth boost into a, well, conversion machine. Consider double-sided incentives, where the referrer and referred both benefit.

How to Map the Customer Journey

Since the B2B customer journey generally involves multiple stakeholders, you’ll need to create buyer personas: characters who represent your B2B customers, based on your customer data. Perfect personas don’t exist, but they’ll help you tell your customer’s story. Depending on your offering, you’ll need to work on several personas, including users, managers, directors, and C-Suite executives.

Before you start mapping, gather your customer data. This includes customer touchpoints across a variety of channels: marketing, sales, customer service, and beyond. With more and more touchpoints popping up over time (think of how many social media and marketing channels you operate, let alone physical touchpoints), customer journeys swerve and follow anything but a linear path. Did your CEO speak at a conference where one of your buyer personas attended? That’s a touchpoint. Did you run an ad in a trade publication? Touchpoint.

Take that data and lay it on top of the five stages you just read about above. This will be a visual exercise, so you may want to draw on a whiteboard, or use a digital space like Miro.

It won’t be possible to track some touchpoints, which means they reside in the dark funnel – the realm of contact with potential buyers or existing customers not attached to a pixel or tag for easy attribution. From a conversation with a cousin in the same field to a Facebook group discussion or a group text, these steps don’t fit neatly into a typical sales funnel.

Don’t let this distract you. Plot customer touchpoints on your board and insert data wherever possible. From surveys and digital tracking, do you know that 50% of your conversions include organic social media posts? Can you say that half of potential buyers who download your white paper convert? Use whatever data you have, and aim to include more as you gather it over time, filling in the gaps.

Take these points on the map and connect them, with details about pain points and emotions your buyer personas encounter from step to step. Use as much detail as you can along the way. For example, you might note that when users hit your landing page, they run into a redirect, degrading their experience and causing a drop-off in users who would likely move toward the next touchpoint, and ultimately convert.

Uncovering friction your team had no idea existed creates optimization opportunities to push potential customers toward the bottom of your funnel and beyond.

Invest in Mapping Your Customer Journey

If you haven’t taken a hard look at your customer journey in the past year, start the process now. The investment of time and energy will prove well worth it. Mapping your customer journey may seem daunting, but it helps identify friction, soothe customer pain points, improve conversion rates, and lead to fulfilling your ultimate goal: increasing revenue.

B2B Customer Journey FAQs

The post How to Create a B2B Customer Journey: Tips, Mapping & Strategies appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Smart businesses avoid this cycle by “warming up traffic” ahead of time. This approach filters out users with no purchase intent, attracting only those who have a potential interest in your product to your website. While some businesses do great by increasing their total traffic, most need to segment to produce the best results. 

What’s an eCommerce Funnel?

eCommerce funnels help facilitate segmenting and priming your website visitors. They act as bridges from the referral source to the website, filtering out traffic with no purchase intent. These eCommerce funnels, while common and widely used, have one purpose: warm up traffic for conversion.

Below, we’ll explore some eCommerce funnel models that you may not have in place today, but that could make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Let’s get started!

Advertorial Funnel

Businesses have utilized the advertorial funnel for a long, long time. However, modern marketers may have overlooked this option thanks to the “easy” advertising approach that companies like Meta and Google have been providing over the past decade or so. That luxury, as everyone has come to realize, no longer exists.

With the changes and irregularities in performance caused by iOS14 and later, marketers need to find solutions outside of just driving traffic to home pages or product pages. This massive-scale traffic approach no longer converts the way it used to, but a business can’t stop marketing—especially while in growth mode.

Enter the advertorial funnel. You’ve probably seen it before.

Have you ever clicked on an ad or a link about an interesting topic? Then, after clicking, you’re redirected to a page that basically looks like an article, or maybe just a page full of content, maybe even in the style of a news article?

If you pay close attention, you may notice that the page is linking to a product or products. The purpose of the page is to serve as a bridge between the ad and the product page. The ad grabs the attention of the user by promising interesting content. The advertorial delivers on such promise by providing interesting content and, within it, promotes some type of clickable product or offer.

This works great with Meta Ads traffic, which has suffered a sizable performance hit due to its impacted targeting features. This is a good point to make, as the majority of growing eCommerce businesses are currently using Facebook for, likely, the majority of their paid traffic.

If any of the above applies to your business, give the advertorial funnel a try—you may be surprised by the results.

Keep in mind that in order to have a successful advertorial funnel, you’ll need a few things:

• First and foremost, you need a quality copywriter. We cannot emphasize this enough. The content ultimately makes or breaks the advertorial. It’s the most important element, so you should not cut any corners here. Advertorials can prove to be expensive pieces of content to put out, but have the potential to open up an entirely new stream of traffic.
  • You have the option to take advantage of advanced LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to help with initial content production, but always require human editing and direction to assure you don’t produce AI slop that hurts rather than converts.
• Second, you need to design the actual page. The design doesn’t need months of planning. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen extremely simple article pages perform well. As long as you have a landing page builder and someone who feels comfortable with the software, you can move on to production.
• Finally, and this is the obvious part, you need a traffic source. The good news is, because the goal of the advertorial is to entertain first and promote second, it can work well with any type of traffic source: organic, social, etc.

Lead Gen Funnel

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably heard the term “first-party data” a lot lately. While first-party data has always had a key role, it has turned into table stakes in the marketing world. The lead gen funnel, like the advertorial funnel, has a long history of success. However, it shines now more than ever with the very real need to capture first-party data.

You want to get the most value out of every visit to your eCommerce website. This funnel helps you get closer to achieving that goal. Let’s break it down so you see its simplicity and power.

The lead gen funnel consists of a landing page with a form and some type of offer, which, upon completion, redirects the user to the final destination: (usually) the eCommerce website. The landing page acts as a door, where the only way to gain admission is to complete the form, which usually asks for an email address or a phone number. That’s it. It’s that simple.

But…why does this deserve its own highlight? Mainly because of what it means to now hold that user’s email address, or phone number…or data…or first-party data!

Let’s use an example. The landing page says “Get Early Access & Unlock 40% Off NOW”. Below that line sits a two-step form asking for an email and phone number. The user fills it out, gets the 40% off discount and heads to the website. Great! But now what?

Well, you have two data points on this user. You can put them on an automated email flow, you can send them SMS messages, or you can add them to your retargeting audiences. You’ve now created at least three more opportunities to communicate with this user that you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t generate any first-party data.

There are many efforts you can undertake beyond those three steps, but the main takeaway is that you’re maximizing how much juice you get out of every visitor—a necessary step, as traffic comes at a cost.

Let’s say you’re spending $2 for every visit you generate via ads. Without collecting any data, all you get for your $2 is a visit. But with the lead gen funnel, you now acquire an email address and a phone number for some of those visits, which allows you to remarket to them in the future, thus stretching your dollar longer.

Quiz Funnel

Quiz funnels became extremely popular on Meta Ads in the past few years. Want to know why? Because they work.

Quiz funnels provide a take on the lead gen funnel with a fun twist. They gamify the concept by asking the user to take a quiz, answer a few questions, and to enter their email (or some other data point) in order to get access to the quiz result.

You may have seen those “Which Italian brainrot character are you?” type of links on Meta. These are quiz funnels, with the ultimate goal of warming up a lead, collecting data, and generating a conversion.

The answers each user selects generate data points that get collected and can help you in multiple ways. First, the data helps you pick the most appropriate quiz result, which can increase your overall conversion rate. Second, this data allows you to create segments of users based on their direct responses. You can then analyze which quiz result (which is based on answer combinations) produces the highest value user or lead.If you want to see examples of types of quiz funnels, you can see 7 proposed ones here by Sleeknote.

Zero-Party Data Funnel

Another buzzword in the marketing world you have probably heard a million times: zero-party data!

So, what is it? Zero-party data is data that your customers intentionally share with you. This can include purchase intentions, personal context, communication preferences, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize them. It goes beyond just a phone number or an email address.

You may be wondering: how is this a funnel you can use for eCommerce? In the following example, we’ll look at how a pop-up serves as a great way to experiment with a zero-party data funnel.

Consider the following scenario: a user sees a pop-up on your site. It offers a free $5 gift card. It has a form asking for an email address. However, once they enter their email and click submit, instead of just giving away the gift card, a multi-step display proceeds, each screen with a unique question that gives you an insight into the type of customer the user can be.

For example, an online clothing store could ask: “What are you interested in most? Shirts, Pants, Hats.” Or maybe “When are you looking to buy? Today, tomorrow, in a week, in a month.” Once the user completes all the questions, they are then redirected to the checkout page with the free gift card in their cart. They must complete the checkout as if they were buying any regular product (keep in mind, they’re not actually spending any money).

Let’s analyze what we’ve done here. For a $5 offer, we’ve collected:

• An email address (at the beginning)
• Multiple answers to key questions
• A phone number (at checkout)
• A first and last name (at checkout)
• A physical address (at checkout)

That’s a lot of data that you wouldn’t get with a regular lead capture. You can now set up various retargeting campaigns on paid channels, you can put them in email campaigns or SMS, you can even set up direct mail campaigns.

But the best part is the question-answer data you’ve collected. You can aggregate this data, and from it, pull the most optimal user “profile.” You can learn which combinations of answers produce the best results (in terms of likelihood of conversion), and then tailor your marketing campaigns and overall messaging around those learnings.

Using zero-party data properly to create better relationships in your marketing efforts has immense potential. We encourage you to play with this idea or even give it your own twist. But whatever you do—definitely go out there and collect that data!

What Are the 5 Stages of the eCommerce Funnel?

Now that we’ve gone over some of the best funnels for eCommerce, let’s dive into the 5 stages of an eCommerce funnel.

1. Awareness: Reach your potential customers on whichever medium makes the most sense for your business. You may want to utilize paid ads (Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, Bing, etc.), content (blogs, SEO/AEO), organic social media, or influencer partnerships.
2. Consideration: As your potential customers compare your offerings against competitors, give them the educational materials they need to make a decision in your favor during their consideration stage (Us vs. Them content, product videos, social proof, etc.)
3. Conversion: Here, your users want to make a purchase. Make it as easy as possible for them with a wonderful user experience on your site or app (a streamlined checkout process, intuitive navigation, more social proof, perhaps free shipping, cart emails, and clear return details).
4. Retention: Bringing new customers into the fold costs more than encouraging existing customers to purchase again. Encourage your existing customers to buy from you again with loyalty programs, post-purchase emails that give them a chance to rate their experience or earn rewards, excellent customer support, and future product recommendations.
5. Advocacy: If you keep your customers happy through retention, they’ll likely want to share their positive experience with friends and family. Ask this happy cohort to review your products, offer referral rewards with them, or consider a VIP program that allows them to earn increasing benefits for repeat purchases.

Use eCommerce Funnels to Lower Costs and Grow Your Business

eCommerce funnels offer opportunities that every eCommerce business should experiment with. And when you start to think in terms of CRO, growth can really take off.

Keep in mind that many more eCommerce sales funnels exist outside of the ones mentioned in this article. Not only that, but you can create unique combinations that fit the needs of your business. The sky is truly the limit!

For even more insights on eCommerce funnels, conversion funnel optimization, and email marketing, please contact us!

To recap, using eCommerce funnels allows you to significantly increase the number of opportunities for experimentation and testing. Even if you don’t see a big impact in terms of conversion rates, you can always take the learnings you collect and apply them across all of your marketing efforts.

For example, you may learn that a funnel with a different type of messaging than what you’ve been focusing on results in more clicks through to the site, and that messaging can help improve your email flows and offer future test options on paid social

Creating a machine that constantly pumps out business-related learnings will only help lower your costs and increase your revenue in the long term. So go out there, create some funnels, and test them out!

The post Effective eCommerce Funnels: Use Them for Your Brand in 2025 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Here’s a question I get all the time: “Can you target BDMs in Asia on Facebook?”
Well, sure. But, what does that actually mean? Do you want the entirety of ASIA, the world’s most populous continent by far? Does Asia include the Middle East for you (it should, since that’s actually where the region is located, but probably doesn’t from my experience)? Are there any industries that matter most?

Who Is Going to Pay for Your Services / Buy Your Product?

I can keep going with this painful rhetorical exercise, but let’s not. Facebook and Instagram offer really powerful targeting capabilities that generally outweigh those of Twitter, Pinterest, Google Ads, Snapchat, and more while offering a bigger scale and lower costs than LinkedIn. You can even take a free course to learn about it. Wouldn’t you like to know exactly what those targeting options are, so you can start making better decisions about whom to target?
Your answer should be “yes,” because if not, good luck getting that sweet ROI on those BDMs in Bangladesh who got half your campaign’s impressions when you meant to target women small business owners in the tourism industry in Australia.

Audience Targeting Tips

Here are a handful of tips for successfully targeting the audience that’s right for your goals:

• Don’t forget you can layer targeting options together, creating more and more niche audiences. You can choose only management within the healthcare industry, but then also only people with interests in finance from that group.
• You can upload your email lists (expect something like a 50% match rate generally), then pare down the targeting with multiple AND statements to get your exact target.
• Make lots of lookalike audiences. This can be especially helpful if you’re trying to reach people who will be more likely to take similar actions when compared to groups you’ve already successfully targeted.
• If you get very specific with your targeting (under 50k), don’t forget that you’ll need to rotate in fresh creative (or use dynamic ads!) to avoid showing that niche audience the same creatives 45 times per month.
• Don’t waste your time and money on generic “branding” — target only the audience that needs to know about you, and that requires all of the tactics listed above. Large-scale awareness campaigns are the work of Coca-Cola and other gigantic corporations, not regional business services firms.

Without further ado, below are the nitty-gritty options of Facebook and Instagram’s full targeting options:
*Please note these options are updated over time, and this pull is from December 2020, so when more behaviors and demographics are taken away over time, it’s not our fault!

Facebook and Instagram’s Full Targeting Options:

Demographics

• Education
  • Education Level
    • Associate degree
    • College grad
    • Doctorate degree
    • High school grad
    • In college
    • In grad school
    • In high school
    • Master’s degree
    • Professional degree
    • Some college
    • Some grad school
    • Some high school
    • Unspecified
• Fields of Study (you must search, no list available)
• Schools (you must search, no list available)
• Undergrad Years (1980 to 2024)

• Financial
  • Income
    • Household income: top 10% of ZIP codes (US)
    • Household income: top 10%-25% of ZIP codes (US)
    • Household income: top 25%-50% of ZIP codes (US)
    • Household income: top 5% of ZIP codes (US)
• Life Events
  • Anniversary
    • Anniversary within 30 days
    • Anniversary within 31-60 Days
    • Away from family
    • Away from hometown
• Birthday
  • Birthday Month
    • Birthday in January
    • Birthday in February
    • Birthday in March
    • Birthday in April
    • Birthday in May
    • Birthday in June
    • Birthday in July
    • Birthday in August
    • Birthday in September
    • Birthday in October
    • Birthday in November
    • Birthday in December
    • Upcoming birthday
• Friends of
  • Close Friends of Men with a Birthday in 0-7 days
  • Close Friends of Men with a Birthday in 7-30 days
  • Close Friends of Recently Moved
  • Close Friends of Women with a Birthday in 0-7 days
  • Close Friends of Women with a Birthday in 7-30 days
  • Close friends of newly engaged people
  • Close friends of newlyweds
  • Close friends of people with birthdays in a month
  • Close friends of people with birthdays in a week
• Relationship Status
  • Long-distance relationship
  • New job
  • New relationship
  • Newly engaged (1 year)
  • Newly engaged (3 months)
  • Newly-engaged (6 months)
  • Newlywed (1 year)
  • Newlywed (3 months)
  • Newlywed (6 months)
  • Recently moved

• Parents
  • All Parents
    • New Parents (0-12 months)
    • Parents (All)
    • Parents with adult children (18-26 years)
    • Parents with early school-age children (06-08 years)
    • Parents with preschoolers (03-05 years)
    • Parents with preteens (09-12 years)
    • Parents with teenagers (13-17 years)
    • Parents with toddlers (01-02 years)
• Relationship
  • Relationship Status
    • Civil Union
    • Complicated
    • Divorced
    • Domestic Partnership
    • Engaged
    • In a relationship
    • Married
    • Open Relationship
    • Separated
    • Single
    • Unspecified
    • Widowed
• Work
  • Employers (you must search, no list available)
  • Industries
    • Administrative Services
    • Architecture and Engineering
    • Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Media
    • Business and Finance
    • Cleaning and Maintenance Services
    • Community and Social Services
    • Computation and Mathematics
    • Construction and Extraction
    • Education and Libraries
    • Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
    • Food and Restaurants
    • Government Employees (Global)
    • Healthcare and Medical Services
    • IT and Technical Services
    • Installation and Repair Services
    • Legal Services
    • Life, Physical and Social Sciences
    • Management
    • Military (Global)
    • Production
    • Protective Services
    • Sales
    • Transportation and Moving
    • Veterans (US)
  • Job Titles (you must search, no list available)

Interests

(People who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to [insert interest])

• Business and industry
  • Advertising
  • Agriculture
  • Architecture
  • Aviation
  • Banking
    • Investment banking
    • Online banking
    • Retail banking
  • Business
  • Construction
  • Design
    • Fashion design
    • Graphic design
    • Interior design
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health care
  • Higher education
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • Nursing
  • Online
    • Digital marketing
    • Display advertising
    • Email marketing
    • Online advertising
    • Search engine optimization
    • Social media
    • Social media marketing
    • Web design
    • Web development
    • Web hosting
  • Personal finance
    • Credit cards
    • Insurance
    • Investment
    • Mortgage loans
  • Real estate
  • Retail
  • Sales
  • Science
  • Small business
• Entertainment
  • Games
    • Action games
    • Board games
    • Browser games
    • Card games
    • Casino games
    • First-person shooter games
    • Gambling
    • Massively multiplayer online games
    • Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
    • Online games
    • Online poker
    • Puzzle video games
    • Racing games
    • Role-playing games
    • Simulation games
    • Sports games
    • Strategy games
    • Video games
    • Word games
  • Live events
    • Ballet
    • Bars
    • Concerts
    • Dancehalls
    • Music festivals
    • Nightclubs
    • Parties
    • Plays
    • Theatre
  • Movies
    • Action movies
    • Animated movies
    • Anime movies
    • Bollywood movies
    • Comedy movies
    • Documentary movies
    • Drama movies
    • Fantasy movies
    • Horror movies
    • Musical theatre
    • Science fiction movies
    • Thriller movies
  • Music
    • Blues music
    • Classical music
    • Country music
    • Dance music
    • Electronic music
    • Gospel music
    • Heavy metal music
    • Hip hop music
    • Jazz music
    • Music videos
    • Pop music
    • Rhythm and blues music
    • Rock music
    • Soul music
  • Reading
    • Books
    • Comics
    • E-books
    • Fiction books
    • Literature
    • Magazines
    • Manga
    • Mystery fiction
    • Newspapers
    • Non-fiction books
    • Romance novels
  • TV
    • TV comedies
    • TV game shows
    • TV reality shows
    • TV talk shows
• Family and relationships
  • Dating
  • Family
  • Fatherhood
  • Friendship
  • Marriage
  • Motherhood
  • Parenting
  • Weddings
• Fitness and wellness
  • Bodybuilding
  • Meditation
  • Physical exercise
  • Physical fitness
  • Running
  • Weight training
  • Yoga
• Food and drink
  • Alcoholic beverages
    • Beer
    • Distilled beverage
    • Wine
  • Beverages
    • Coffee
    • Energy drinks
    • Juice
    • Soft drinks
    • Tea
  • Cooking
    • Baking
    • Recipes
  • Cuisine
    • Chinese cuisine
    • French cuisine
    • German cuisine
    • Greek cuisine
    • Indian cuisine
    • Italian cuisine
    • Japanese cuisine
    • Korean cuisine
    • Latin American cuisine
    • Mexican cuisine
    • Middle Eastern cuisine
    • Spanish cuisine
    • Thai cuisine
    • Vietnamese cuisine
  • Food
    • Barbecue
    • Chocolate
    • Desserts
    • Fast food
    • Organic food
    • Pizza
    • Seafood
    • Veganism
    • Vegetarianism
  • Restaurants
    • Coffeehouses
    • Diners
    • Fast-casual restaurants
    • Fast food restaurants
• Hobbies and activities
  • Arts and music
    • Acting
    • Crafts
    • Dance
    • Drawing
    • Drums
    • Fine art
    • Guitar
    • Painting
    • Performing arts
    • Photography
    • Sculpture
    • Singing
    • Writing
  • Current events
  • Home and garden
    • Do it yourself (DIY)
    • Furniture
    • Gardening
    • Home Appliances
    • Home improvement
  • Pets
    • Birds
    • Cats
    • Dogs
    • Fish
    • Horses
    • Pet food
    • Rabbits
    • Reptiles
  • Politics and social issues
    • Charity and causes
    • Community issues
    • Environmentalism
    • Law
    • Politics
    • Religion
    • Sustainability
    • Veterans
    • Volunteering
  • Travel
    • Adventure travel
    • Air travel
    • Beaches
    • Car rentals
    • Cruises
    • Ecotourism
    • Hotels
    • Lakes
    • Mountains
    • Nature
    • Theme parks
    • Tourism
    • Vacations
  • Vehicles
    • Automobiles
    • Boats
    • Electric vehicle
    • Hybrids
    • Minivans
    • Motorcycles
    • RVs
    • SUVs
    • Scooters
    • Trucks
• Shopping and fashion
  • Beauty
    • Beauty salons
    • Cosmetics
    • Fragrances
    • Hair products
    • Spas
    • Tattoos
  • Clothing
    • Children’s clothing
    • Men’s clothing
    • Shoes
    • Women’s clothing
  • Fashion accessories
    • Dresses
    • Handbags
    • Jewelry
    • Sunglasses
  • Shopping
    • Boutiques
    • Coupons
    • Discount stores
    • Luxury goods
    • Online shopping
    • Shopping malls
  • Toys
• Sports and outdoors
  • Outdoor recreation
    • Boating
    • Camping
    • Fishing
    • Horseback riding
    • Hunting
    • Mountain biking
    • Surfing
  • Sports
    • American football
    • Association football (Soccer)
    • Auto racing
    • Baseball
    • Basketball
    • College football
    • Golf
    • Marathons
    • Skiing
    • Snowboarding
    • Swimming
    • Tennis
    • Triathlons
    • Volleyball
• Technology
  • Computers
    • Computer memory
    • Computer monitors
    • Computer processors
    • Computer servers
    • Desktop computers
    • Free software
    • Hard drives
    • Network storage
    • Software
    • Tablet computers
  • Consumer electronics
    • Audio equipment
    • Camcorders
    • Cameras
    • E-book readers
    • GPS devices
    • Game consoles
    • Mobile phones
    • Portable media players
    • Projectors
    • Smartphones
    • Televisions

Behaviors

• Anniversary
  • Anniversary (within 61-90 days)
• Consumer Classification
  • Argentina
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Argentina
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Argentina
  • Brazil
    • People in Brazil who prefer mid and high-value goods
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Brazil
  • Chile
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Chile
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Chile
  • India
    • People who prefer high-value goods in India
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in India
  • Indonesia
    • People in Indonesia who prefer mid and high-value goods
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Indonesia
  • Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
  • Malaysia
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Malaysia
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Malaysia
  • Mexico
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Mexico
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Mexico
  • Pakistan
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Pakistan
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Pakistan
  • Philippines
    • People who prefer high-value goods in the Philippines
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in the Philippines
  • South Africa
    • People who prefer high-value goods in South Africa
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in South Africa
  • Turkey
    • People who prefer high-value goods in Turkey
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in Turkey
  • UAE
    • People who prefer high-value goods in the UAE
    • People who prefer mid and high-value goods in the UAE
• Digital activities
  • Operating System Used
    • Facebook access (OS): Windows 10
  • Canvas Gaming
    • Played Canvas games (last 14 days)
    • Played Canvas games (last 3 days)
    • Played Canvas games (last 7 days)
    • Played Canvas games (yesterday)
  • Console gamers
  • Facebook Payments users (30 days)
  • Facebook Payments users (90 days)
  • Facebook Payments users (higher than average spend)
  • Facebook access: older devices and OS
  • Facebook page admins
    • Business page admins
    • Community & Club page admins
    • Facebook Page admins
    • Food & Restaurant page admins
    • Health & Beauty page admins
    • Retail page admins
    • Sports page admins
    • Travel & Tourism page admins
  • Internet Browser Used
    • Facebook access (browser): Chrome
    • Facebook access (browser): Firefox
    • Facebook access (browser): Internet Explorer
    • Facebook access (browser): Microsoft Edge
    • Facebook access (browser): Opera
    • Facebook access (browser): Safari
  • Operating System Used
    • Facebook access (OS): Mac OS X
    • Facebook access (OS): Mac Sierra
    • Facebook access (OS): Windows 7
    • Facebook access (OS): Windows 8
    • Facebook access (OS): Windows Vista
    • Facebook access (OS): Windows XP
  • People who have visited Facebook Gaming
  • People who have watched a Rewarded Video in the last 30 days
  • Small business owners
  • Technology early adopters

In honor of the Expats interest breakdown below, here’s a photo of the marvelous Rio de Janeiro, to give your eyes a rest.

• Expats
  • Lived in Brazil (Formerly Expats – Brazil)
  • Family of those who live abroad
  • Friends of those who live abroad
  • Lived in Algeria (Formerly Expats – Algeria)
  • Lived in Argentina (Formerly Expats – Argentina)
  • Lived in Australia (Formerly Expats – Australia)
  • Lived in Austria (Formerly Expats – Austria)
  • Lived in Bangladesh (Formerly Expats – Bangladesh)
  • Lived in Belgium (Formerly Expats – Belgium)
  • Lived in Cameroon (Formerly Expats – Cameroon)
  • Lived in Canada (Formerly Expats – Canada)
  • Lived in Chile (Formerly Expats – Chile)
  • Lived in China (Formerly Expats – China)
  • Lived in Colombia (Formerly Expats – Colombia)
  • Lived in Congo DRC (Formerly Expats – Congo DRC)
  • Lived in Cuba (Formerly Expats – Cuba)
  • Lived in Cyprus (Formerly Expats – Cyprus)
  • Lived in Czech Republic (Formerly Expats – Czech Republic)
  • Lived in Denmark (Formerly Expats – Denmark)
  • Lived in Dominican Republic (Formerly Expats – Dominican Republic)
  • Lived in El Salvador (Formerly Expats – El Salvador)
  • Lived in Estonia (Formerly Expats – Estonia)
  • Lived in Ethiopia (Formerly Expats – Ethiopia)
  • Lived in Finland (Formerly Expats – Finland)
  • Lived in France (Formerly Expats – France)
  • Lived in Germany (Formerly Expats – Germany)
  • Lived in Ghana (Formerly Expats – Ghana)
  • Lived in Greece (Formerly Expats – Greece)
  • Lived in Guatemala (Formerly Expats – Guatemala)
  • Lived in Haiti (Formerly Expats – Haiti)
  • Lived in Honduras (Formerly Expats – Honduras)
  • Lived in Hong Kong (Formerly Expats – Hong Kong)
  • Lived in Hungary (Formerly Expats – Hungary)
  • Lived in India (Formerly Expats – India)
  • Lived in Indonesia (Formerly Expats – Indonesia)
  • Lived in Ireland (Formerly Expats – Ireland)
  • Lived in Israel (Formerly Expats – Israel)
  • Lived in Italy (Formerly Expats – Italy)
  • Lived in Ivory Coast (Formerly Expats – Ivory Coast)
  • Lived in Jamaica (Formerly Expats – Jamaica)
  • Lived in Japan (Formerly Expats – Japan)
  • Lived in Jordan (Formerly Expats – Jordan)
  • Lived in Kenya (Formerly Expats – Kenya)
  • Lived in Kuwait (Formerly Expats – Kuwait)
  • Lived in Latvia (Formerly Expats – Latvia)
  • Lived in Lebanon (Formerly Expats – Lebanon)
  • Lived in Lithuania (Formerly Expats – Lithuania)
  • Lived in Luxembourg (Formerly Expats – Luxembourg)
  • Lived in Malaysia (Formerly Expats – Malaysia)
  • Lived in Malta (Formerly Expats – Malta)
  • Lived in Mexico (Formerly Expats – Mexico)
  • Lived in Monaco (Formerly Expats – Monaco)
  • Lived in Morocco (Formerly Expats – Morocco)
  • Lived in Nepal (Formerly Expats – Nepal)
  • Lived in Netherlands (Formerly Expats – Netherlands)
  • Lived in New Zealand (Formerly Expats – New Zealand)
  • Lived in Nicaragua (Formerly Expats – Nicaragua)
  • Lived in Nigeria (Formerly Expats – Nigeria)
  • Lived in Norway (Formerly Expats – Norway)
  • Lived in Peru (Formerly Expats – Peru)
  • Lived in Philippines (Formerly Expats – Philippines)
  • Lived in Poland (Formerly Expats – Poland)
  • Lived in Portugal (Formerly Expats – Portugal)
  • Lived in Puerto Rico (Formerly Expats – Puerto Rico)
  • Lived in Qatar (Formerly Expats – Qatar)
  • Lived in Romania (Formerly Expats – Romania)
  • Lived in Russia (Formerly Expats – Russia)
  • Lived in Rwanda (Formerly Expats – Rwanda)
  • Lived in Saudi Arabia (Formerly Expats – Saudi Arabia)
  • Lived in Senegal (Formerly Expats – Senegal)
  • Lived in Serbia (Formerly Expats – Serbia)
  • Lived in Sierra Leone (Formerly Expats – Sierra Leone)
  • Lived in Singapore (Formerly Expats – Singapore)
  • Lived in Slovakia (Formerly Expats – Slovakia)
  • Lived in Slovenia (Formerly Expats – Slovenia)
  • Lived in South Africa (Formerly Expats – South Africa)
  • Lived in South Korea (Formerly Expats – South Korea)
  • Lived in Spain (Formerly Expats – Spain)
  • Lived in Sri Lanka (Formerly Expats – Sri Lanka)
  • Lived in Sweden (Formerly Expats – Sweden)
  • Lived in Switzerland (Formerly Expats – Switzerland)
  • Lived in Tanzania (Formerly Expats – Tanzania)
  • Lived in Thailand (Formerly Expats – Thailand)
  • Lived in UAE (Formerly Expats – UAE)
  • Lived in UK (Formerly Expats – UK)
  • Lived in Uganda (Formerly Expats – Uganda)
  • Lived in United States (Formerly Expats – United States)
  • Lived in Venezuela (Formerly Expats – Venezuela)
  • Lived in Vietnam (Formerly Expats – Vietnam)
  • Lived in Zambia (Formerly Expats – Zambia)
  • Lived in Zimbabwe (Formerly Expats – Zimbabwe)
  • Lives abroad
• Mobile Device User
  • All Mobile Devices by Brand
    • Amazon
      • Owns: Kindle Fire
    • Apple
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPad 1
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPad 2
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPad 3
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 4
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 4S
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 5
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 5C
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 5S
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 8
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone 8 Plus
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone X
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone XR
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone XS
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPhone XS Max
      • Facebook access (mobile): iPod Touch
      • Owns: iPad 4
      • Owns: iPad Air
      • Owns: iPad Air 2
      • Owns: iPad Mini 1
      • Owns: iPad Mini 2
      • Owns: iPad Mini 3
      • Owns: iPhone 6
      • Owns: iPhone 6 Plus
      • Owns: iPhone 6S
      • Owns: iPhone 6S Plus
      • Owns: iPhone 7
      • Owns: iPhone 7 Plus
      • Owns: iPhone SE
    • BlackBerry
      • Curve 9220
    • Facebook access (mobile): HTC Android mobile devices
    • Facebook access (mobile): Motorola Android mobile devices
    • Facebook access (mobile): Samsung Android mobile devices
    • Facebook access (mobile): Sony Android mobile devices
    • Facebook access(mobile): LG Android mobile devices
    • Google
      • Owns: Google Pixel
      • Owns: Nexus 5
    • HTC
      • Owns: HTC One
    • LG
      • Owns: LG G2 devices
      • Owns: LG G3
      • Owns: LG V10
    • Owns: Alcatel
    • Owns: Cherry Mobile
    • Owns: Gionee
    • Owns: Huawei
    • Owns: Karbonn
    • Owns: Micromax
    • Owns: Oppo
    • Owns: Tecno
    • Owns: VIVO devices
    • Owns: Xiaomi
    • Owns: ZTE
    • Samsung
      • Galaxy Note II
      • Galaxy Tab
      • Owns: Galaxy Grand
      • Owns: Galaxy Grand 2
      • Owns: Galaxy Note 3
      • Owns: Galaxy Note 4
      • Owns: Galaxy Note 5
      • Owns: Galaxy Note 7
      • Owns: Galaxy Note 8
      • Owns: Galaxy S 4 Mini
      • Owns: Galaxy S III Mini
      • Owns: Galaxy S III devices
      • Owns: Galaxy S4
      • Owns: Galaxy S5
      • Owns: Galaxy S6
      • Owns: Galaxy S7
      • Owns: Galaxy S7 Edge
      • Owns: Galaxy S8
      • Owns: Galaxy S8+
      • Owns: Galaxy S9
      • Owns: Galaxy S9+
      • Owns: Galaxy Tab 2
      • Owns: Galaxy Tab 3
      • Owns: Galaxy Tab 4
      • Owns: Galaxy Tab Pro
      • Owns: Galaxy Tab S
      • Owns: Galaxy Y devices
    • Sony
      • Owns: Xperia M
      • Owns: Xperia SL
      • Owns: Xperia Z
      • Owns: Xperia Z Ultra
      • Owns: Xperia Z3
      • Xperia T
  • All Mobile Devices by Operating System
    • Facebook access (mobile): Android devices
    • Facebook access (mobile): Apple (iOS) devices
    • Facebook access (mobile): Windows phones
  • Android: 360-degree media not supported
  • Android: 360-degree media supported
  • Facebook access (mobile): all mobile devices
  • Facebook access (mobile): feature phones
  • Facebook access (mobile): smartphones and tablets
  • Facebook access (mobile): tablets
  • Network Connection
    • Facebook access (network type): 2G
    • Facebook access (network type): 3G
    • Facebook access (network type): 4G
    • Facebook access (network type): WiFi
  • New smartphone and tablet users
  • Owns: OnePlus

• Mobile Device User/Device Use Time
  • Uses a mobile device (1-3 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (10-12 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (13-18 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (19-24 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (25 months+)
  • Uses a mobile device (4-6 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (7-9 months)
  • Uses a mobile device (less than 1 month)
• More Categories
  • Interested in Upcoming Events
  • Marketing API developers (last 90 days)
• Politics (US)
  • Likely engagement with US political content (conservative)
  • Likely engagement with US political content (liberal)
  • Likely engagement with US political content (moderate)
• Purchase behavior
  • Engaged Shoppers
• Soccer
  • Close Friends of Soccer fans
  • Soccer fans (high content engagement)
  • Soccer fans (moderate content engagement)
• Travel
  • Commuters
  • Frequent Travelers
  • Frequent international travelers
  • Returned from travels 1 week ago
  • Returned from travels 2 weeks ago

Additional Facebook and Instagram Interest Targeting

Countless, uncategorized interests aren’t listed, such as “Katy Perry,” “Expensive Taste,” “Google,” and innumerable others. If you think it could be an interest, it probably is, but you’ll have to go to Ads Manager and type your search into the Detailed Targeting section to find out – there’s no repository for that level of interest.

Targeting Categories Recently Removed From Facebook

Facebook continues to remove targeting categories it thinks could get it into trouble, because, well, Congress is mad at Facebook. Thus, there’s no longer any targeting by race on Facebook’s network. There used to be a “Multicultural Affinity” interest category (strange, huh?), but it was removed earlier this year. We did save it, however, before the change, so you can see how sloppy, generic, and still somewhat specific it used to be:

• Multicultural Affinity
  • African American (US)
  • Asian American (US)
  • Hispanic (US – All)
  • Hispanic (US – Bilingual)
  • Hispanic (US – English dominant)
  • Hispanic (US – Spanish dominant)

Another removed Facebook interest targeting option was a Muslim proxy about Ramadan:

• Ramadan (Month)
  • Close friends of people engaged with Ramadan content
  • Ramadan month (high content engagement)
  • Ramadan month (medium content engagement)

While you can see why marketers would want to reach people based on those characteristics, it’s probably better for the world, and definitely, Facebook’s legal team, that they’ve removed those options.

Hopefully, this post has helped inform you of what you can specifically target on Facebook and Instagram, as well as give you some targeting tips. Targeting is essential, but essentials are often overlooked or ignored, and there’s no better way to waste your entire marketing budget than by doing just that. If you knew all of this already, please feel free to drop in a comment with any insights you might have to share, and if you’re looking for help growing your business, please reach out and let us know how we might be able to help you find the right audience.

The post Facebook and Instagram Targeting: An In-Depth Guide for Organic Growth appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.