Facebook advertising can get you incredible results if done correctly and your targeting is what will decide if you're successful or not. To avoid wasting both time and money, you want to ensure that you’re targeting people that are interested in your offering and likely to bring you business.
In short, custom audiences “let you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook” (and Instagram) and by using a customer list, website or app traffic or engagement on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook can create an audience.
Custom audiences are every marketer’s dream and we've listed our top 5 reasons why.
It's however important to note that you do require decent engagement and website traffic or a good-sized database to use custom audiences and if you’re a new business, it’s probably not the strategy for you to start with.
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Remarketing
The main reason to using custom audiences is that you are able to remarket to people that you know are already interested in your business. For example, if you create a custom audience of people that have engaged with your social media pages in the last six months, you can remarket to these people and almost be certain that they are going to be interested in your new offering. It's a good opportunity to remind people about your business.
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Hyper targeted ads
If you choose to create a custom audience from your website traffic you can even specify which pages your audience has visited and when. This is particularly valuable if you have an online store, an events page or similar as it allows you to put hyper targeted ads in front of people. In addition, you could potentially convert your “Google searchers” (the people that found your website via Google) to Facebook followers.
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Grow your social media following
Another favourite feature of custom audiences is that you can upload your email list or customer list which Facebook in turn will try to match to Facebook users. If you have a big database that you communicate with via email direct marketing, this is a great opportunity to try and get their attention on social media as well. You are likely to share information more frequently on your social channels than in an email.
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Grow your database
Just as you can utilise custom audiences to grow your following, you can use it to grow your database and if this is a priority of yours, a custom engagement audience is your best friend. You already know that these people are interested in your business so why not capitalise on it and get them to sign up to your newsletter, which offers a more personalised and direct form of communication. Host a competition or offer them something in return!
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Find new customers
From each custom audience you are able to create what Facebook calls a Lookalike Audience, meaning you can target people who are similar to people that have interacted with your business. Facebook will look at the interests and behaviours of your custom audiences and try to match that to another Facebook user. In other words, Facebook is basically finding new customers for you. Just don't forget to limit the location of your lookalike audience so that you're not wasting money on targeting people on the different side of the country.
And that's why custom audiences are so valuable to marketers.
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