Have you heard of Facebook custom audiences? This great advertising option will revolutionize the way you get in contact with your viewers. It takes the guesswork out of targeting and gets you in-touch with the people most interested in your posts.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences to Create an Unforgettable Digital Brand
If you’ve already been using Facebook for advertising, then you may already be familiar with their unique targeting formulas. Even so, Facebook custom audiences is here to turn an already productive process into something even greater.
What is Facebook Custom Audiences?
Facebook Custom Audiences is a customer list that you make up from the audience you would like or the audience you already have. It’s part of a targeted advertising service that allows you to import email addresses and pair your contacts with their Facebook profiles.
Brands can expect 30-40% of their contacts to have Facebook profiles.
This is one of the most targeted forms of marketing, perfect for brands who want to keep their products at the top of their mind with interested consumers.
Facebook Custom Audience Types
There are six different options on Facebook for defining the relationship that already exists between your brand and your audience. You can find these options in your Facebook Ads Manager Audiences tool.
When you’re getting started you can target your customers by uploading a CSV file of customer data This will include email addresses fro your customer database, or even webinar attendees if you’ve hosted a webinar.
When you create an audience of website visitors, Facebook will add people who visited your site to your list. This triggers the Facebook pixel. This is an analytics tool that lets you measure the effectiveness of your advertising. By understanding the actions, people take on your website you can make sure your ads are being shown to the right people.
When you use this option, you can segment your audience. You can target the people who visited certain pages but not other ones. With the segmenting options, you can create as many exclusions or page visits as you want.
Facebook Custom Audience Engagement Types
You can define your engagement audience with six different engagement elements.
The first engagement element is video. This allows you to create an audience based on the people who have watched at least 3 seconds of your videos. This includes the videos on your Facebook page and Instagram business profile.
The second engagement element is lead forms. This is a feature for if you’re already using lead ads. Lead forms will get you in front of people who have opened or completed them.
The third engagement element is a micro-website within Facebook. This functions to create a list of people who have opened these collections or canvases on Facebook.
The fourth engagement element is Facebook page engagement. This allows you to reach people who have visited or interacted with your Facebook page through advertising. This helps to motivate you to spend more time on Facebook’s social channels.
The fifth engagement element is your Instagram business profile. This is specifically for your business profile, not your personal profile. It allows you to interact with your Instagram business profile on Facebook.
The sixth engagement element is events. If you host an event, you can remarket to the people who RSVP’ed to your event.
SEE ALSO: How To Effectively Survey Your Audience
Facebook Custom Audience Data Sources
The data that is available to you depends on what kind of custom audience you select. If you create a Facebook custom audience based on data you didn’t collect from the Facebook platform, such as your email or customer list, then you can only go as far as your personal data allows.
Facebook can only track information from the moment you put it on their website. Their Facebook pixel is only triggered after you put it on your Facebook page. It is also important to remember that Facebook only uses the data from the last 180 days.
Engagement audiences will use data from a longer period. For as long as you’ve had a business page or Instagram business profile, regardless of whether or not you’ve ever created a certain audience segment in Ads Manager, Facebook will be able to use the data from the last 365 days.
Facebook Event Custom Audiences
Facebook event custom audiences allow you to retarget people to create an audience where were either ‘going’ or ‘interested’ in one of your events in the last year. The only catch to this option is that the event must have originated from your business page. This means that you can’t retarget people who responded to an event through your personal Facebook profile. So remember, when you’re advertising on Facebook everything must come from your business page.
One of the great features of your Facebook event custom audience is that you can send one message to the people who responded ‘going’ and another message to people who responded ‘interested.’ You can share specific information that is relevant to their interest level.
For example, if someone responded that they’re going already, then you can share information about the event, the speakers or the agenda to improve their experience when they attend. However, if someone just responded ‘interested’ then you can send them a message to remind them to say they’re going, or send them an ad that will incentivize them to buy.
People on Facebook like to RSVP to events because they’ll receive notifications about the events. A simple click on ‘interested’ or ‘going’ will keep them informed and is super easy.
The success of this feature is due to several things. One of which is that this approach doesn’t take people off of Facebook to register. It makes the process easier than ever and takes the user’s experience into account.
While group targeting isn’t available yet, you can separate people into custom audiences depending on what they do with our site. If they watch at least 3 seconds of a video, you can put them in a video custom audience.
Separate those who are going or interested into different custom audiences. Then you can share a previous event’s video highlight reel from your business page to your group, and any group member who watches it for more than 3 seconds can be retargeted to RSVP to the event.
Facebook Page Engagement Increases with Facebook Custom Audience
A custom audience based on Facebook page engagement will target people who interact with your page on Facebook.
You can choose to target everyone who has engaged on your page, whether organically or through Facebook ads, in the last 365 days. This can even work with people who engaged with an ad not published on your page. Their engagement is still included in the audience.
You can also segment your Facebook page engagement audience by just the visited your page, who engaged with any post or ad, clicked any call-to-action buttons, sent a message to your page, or saved your posts. If a post included a video, then you can target people even further based on their engagement on a specific post. Specifically, you can target anyone who has watched at least 3 seconds of a video.
Think about your marketing sequence when you do this. No matter what your objective is, you can create a follow-up sequence.
Creative Ways to Combine Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook custom audiences lets you combine and target people who have engaged with your page but aren’t followers. With these kinds of people, you can engage in engagement looping. This is when you thank the page or person who shares your content from your page without prompting. This encourages people to come back to your posts and engage with you again.
Your engagement audience can be four times the size of the audience that actually follows your page. Even an audience like this which combines people who engage but aren’t followers and people who are following already can make a big impact on your page.
You can also create combinations that focus on marketing sequences. Creating a weekly video that answers your client’s questions can increase your brand awareness. Then someone who watches the video will trigger a custom audience sequence of events. The day after seeing the video, that same person can see an ad which is based on the Video Views custom audience. The day after that they may see an Instagram story pop up and show your brand on a new platform. This sequence will continue from there.
Using combinations will create a marketing sequence that takes place over about seven days. This can take people through your introductory content. Thus, Facebook ads can give the same exact content that you would give out through email, but without waiting for someone to sign up for your email list.
Final Thoughts
Creating a Facebook custom audience is a great way to build up your brand’s awareness. Using Facebook’s different options, you can reach out to people who haven’t actually committed to following your brand. This is a great way to advertise your events and products in a way that is seamless with your audience’s Facebook experience.
Is Facebook Custom Audiences better than programmatic advertising? I would love to know your opinion?
