If you build custom audiences in intelligent ways, you can more readily tap into your true target market.
When using social media, it’s essential to tap into your proper target market. You may know where your target market is, and you may be accessing them in intelligent ways. But when it comes to Facebook, that’s not the full story.
But Facebook, as noted by Buffer, has the ability to build custom audiences, which you can use to look beyond basic demographic information.
You can build custom audiences in a number of ways – and target these custom audiences to make your ad campaigns more successful.
What are custom audiences?
As far as social media is concerned:
A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.
You can also tap into lookalike audiences, which takes a custom audience you’ve set, and allows you to find other audiences which share similar interests or habits:
For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.
Here are five examples of custom audiences you can simply and easily build in Facebook:
1. A customer list (or standard custom audience)
Based on a list of emails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs from your customer list. Facebook can take this list and match to its list of users.
Facebook can typically match 60-70% of the contacts on your customer list. You can then compile this list of users and target them via Facebook.
2. Website customer audience
You can build an audience based on traffic to your website. Using a Facebook tracking tool, you can create an audience according to a certain period in which people have visited any specific page on your site.
3. App activity
If your brand has an app or game, you can build audiences according to how people interact with it.
4. Offline activity
If you collect information manually on a spreadsheet, or if you’ve overheard chats in your store, you can use this data. Offline activity can often be as indicative and important as online data.
5. Engagement via Instagram and Facebook
You can group people based upon how they engage with your posts, videos, events and profiles over social media. You can also set the time period of this engagement, such as within the last 90 days, or within the last year.
In addition to the above, there are many other options. If you build custom audiences in intelligent ways, you can more readily tap into your true target market, allowing for more focused, productive and profitable ad campaigns.