Successful Facebook Ads marketers have two weapons – custom audiences and lookalike audiences. If you’re not sure why targeting these two audiences are important, then have a read through this article to find out more about them.
Custom audiences are basically composed of people who’ve interacted with your business either online or offline. You can upload a customer list, a mailing list of people who’ve subscribed to your email newsletter, you can target people who’ve visited your website or used your app. You can also target those who’ve engaged with your Facebook page. You can even target people who’ve interacted with your business offline.
Based on the definition of custom audiences, you know these are people who are familiar with your brand or your business. And this is a good thing because these aren’t cold audiences. Rather, these are hot or warm audiences (warm are those who’ve engaged with you but not bought anything while hot audiences are those who’ve bought stuff from you).
If you ask any marketer, they’ll tell you that cold audiences are hard to sell to compared to hot or warm audiences. This is the reason why custom audiences are so important and so essential to succeed in Facebook Ads.
No matter the type of custom audience you choose, you can create a lookalike audience from it. It’s called lookalike because Facebook will be creating a list of people with similar characteristics as the original custom audience. Facebook’s algorithm is so advanced, and they know plenty of information about their users, so they can easily connect you to another group of people that matches the original group or audience.
While the lookalike audience is technically a cold audience (most, if not all, of them have probably not interacted with your business before), the main advantage here is that these people are similar to your custom audience so they MIGHT be interested in your business as well. Of course, it’s not a guarantee that the lookalike audience will convert as well as the custom audience but the odds of them converting well is pretty high (compared to a non-lookalike cold audience).
If you want to be successful like your favorite Facebook Ads marketer, start collecting your customer data today so you can use this in the future when you take the plunge and advertise on Facebook.