4 Facebook Audiences To Grow Your Business

When it comes to targeting on Facebook, the possibilities are endless. There are so many different angles and approaches to choose from. It can actually be a little overwhelming to decide what course of action to take. Obviously, some strategies work better than others and not all audiences will yield the same results. Your job is to determine which audiences to use to obtain the results you want.
Before we dive into our audiences, let’s briefly talk about cold traffic and retargeting. Understanding the difference between the two will help you determine your goals and choose the right targeting methods. In a nutshell, cold traffic pertains to your targeting efforts revolving around people who have not yet interacted with you. The goal here is to attract more new customers. Retargeting is exactly what it sounds like – retargeting, or targeting people again.

Saved Audiences 

Saved audiences are created by filling out various criteria in the audience builder. Marketers can specify basic criteria such as age, gender, and location as well as more technical criteria such as interests, hobbies, jobs, and income. There are thousands of inputs that you can mix and match to include, or exclude, in your targeting efforts through a saved audience. Be careful though, too many criteria can narrow your audience and limit your reach while too few criteria can leave your audience broad and ineffective. The key here is to consider your good or service in relation to your goal and act from there. Testing different audiences will allow you to compare results and hone in on what works.

Lookalike Audiences 

Lookalike audiences are an effective means of targeting cold traffic and communicating with people that are a good fit for your offer. A lookalike audience leverages Facebook’s data to find people who most closely match existing audience data such as a customer file, website traffic, or subscribers. In other words, it is a way to give all of the heavy lifting to Facebook to create an audience for you based on existing customers. There are tons of possibilities when it comes to building lookalike audiences and many different sources of data that you can use depending on your objective.
For example: Imagine you are a company selling a video editing software and you want to find more new customers. If you already have a customer base and a record of your customers’ information (name, email, phone number etc.), you can plug that list into Facebook Audiences and build a lookalike audience based off of your existing customer base. Facebook will automatically create an audience that most closely identifies with the list of consumers you have provided and store it in Audiences where you can easily implement it into your cold traffic campaigns.

Custom Audience – Customer File

Similar to lookalike audiences, you can create a custom audience based on a list of subscribers, past customers, or any other internal database that you have. Simply upload your file to Audiences and specify the criteria you wish to include from your data. This will create an audience consisting of the information and customers you have provided. The better your data, the better quality your audience will be. Custom audiences from customer files are quite effective for retargeting as your ads will be served directly to people who you have interacted with or sold to in the past.

Custom Audience- Website Traffic 

Website traffic can be a highly effective means of segmenting your audience and determining who to target based on their activity on your website. This requires the implementation of the Facebook Pixel on your website. By doing this and identifying destinations to be tracked, you are able to gain better insights about your website structure as well as retarget more specifically based upon the consumer interaction. This gives you a much more dynamic approach to retargeting. This allows you to retarget individuals who have added products to their cart, but who have not purchased yet.

Key Takeaways 

Now you have an idea of some of the possible audiences that you can use for your marketing efforts. A few important tips to keep in mind as you start:

• Testing multiple audiences will help determine what works. Data is your friend here.
• Utilize exclusions – you want to avoid overlapS in your targeting strategy. Don’t waste your precious dollars.
• Don’t be too narrow nor too broad. The big takeaway here is to find a balance based on your goals.