Facebook released a new feature for their advertising program called “Custom Audiences.” With custom audiences, you have the capacity to use Facebook ads in a new and more targeted way. The facebook advertising platform gives you the ability to get extremely granular with your Facebook customers and or propects — giving you the capability to include and exclude the exact demographic you want to market to and include even interests of your prospects is fantastic. Facebook’s Custom Audiences represents a entire new level of targeting your buyers.
Waste is a constant concern for us advertisers, and Yes, Facebook does have an ad targeting functionality, but the broad demographic information offered is next to useless for many marketers.
You see, the dilemma for many businesses is that their targeted demographic is very wide and includes people from all walks of life. Sound familiar? Perhaps you have reached the limits of what simple ad “targeting” can do for you. Introducing . . . Custom Audiences.
With Custom Audiences, marketers can upload a list of their own leads, customers, prospects, buyers, etc., into Facebook, in order to market to them in a special way.
You can compare this feature to re-targeting. In the same way you can visitors that that landed on different pages or by how far they got in your buying funnel. You can also upload different segments of your lists to show different Facebook ads.
Create a custom audience and upload your entire list and name it accordingly. Next, create another new audience and upload all of the buyers of a given product. Through the power of the Custom Audiences, you will now have the ability to market exclusively to your prospects that have not purchased. You might want to try offering a discount on your product or add additional bonuses.
Since you have your prospects and your buyer audiences set up you are able to constantly run ads to your entire list, yet by creating an audience for all of your different groups of buyers you can be confident that you aren’t wasting marketing dollars on people who aren’t interested in a product they have already purchased. This is because when you are creating your ad you have the ability to suppress any of your other audiences.
Target Your People
Think about this for example; you can target a campaign of upsell ads to recent buyers. You can target your customers that have already purchased your products these are prospects most likely to buy from you NOW! Thereby, eliminating wasteful ad spending and boosting your sales.
I love the fact that Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on matching (emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs). Most of the time your prospects and buyers will have used the same email to sign up with you that they have registered with Facebook. You can upload your list via a .TXT file or .CSV file.
Custom Audiences is what most marketers call “list segmentation.” I’m predicting other networks will follow suit pretty soon.
Setting Up Your Custom Audiences
Go to your “Facebook ads manager”, you will want to navigate to the Facebook power editor, this is the only place you are able to access your custom audiences in the future.
Now that you are in the power editor, click the menu item on the left side called “Custom Audiences”.
Go to the top left hand corner you will click “Create Audience. This will bring up the dialogue where you can name your audience, give a description and upload the file. Once your file is uploaded Facebook takes it’s time (about an hour depending on size) before you are able to effectively use it in a campaign.
When your audience is ready, create a new campaign and a new ad. Under the audience section on the left side, click “Advanced options”, here you will have the ability to include or exclude the difference custom audiences you have created. Configure the rest of your ad settings you will be all set to start super charging your Facebook advertising.
Realize, you can rotate through entirely different CTAs, targeted at completely different audiences simultaneously. By not advertising your product to your buyers, your click through rate will go up, decreasing your ad spend and increasing your campaign’s performance.
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