Basic Strategy for Custom and Lookalike Audiences

Facebook’s Custom and Lookalike Audience features are the bread and butter of Facebook digital advertising right now. If you’re not using these features yet, check out my other posts on what they are and how to get started implementing them. If you’re getting started using these audiences, check out the basic strategy we use to generate quality leads for less.

Build Your Initial List

The best way to utilize Facebook’s custom audience tool is to target people who have engaged with your business before. They are your best bet at building relationships that lead to repeat customer behavior—increasing MMRR, word-of-mouth, lifetime customer value, etc. (You really want repeat customers…)

Market to your Initial List

Once this list is uploaded to Facebook you can use it a custom audience—marketing specifically to the people on your list.

These are your warm leads, that are ready to convert. You’ll want to focus your energy and budget down the funnel for these folks—marketing for conversions and sales.

(You may want to refer to these lists of interested parties as marketing- or sales-qualified leads, to differentiate them from your general leads pool.)

Build Your Lookalike List

Using Facebook’s Lookalike Audience tool, you can create an audience that mimics the behaviors and demographics of the folks on your custom list. Using this tool, you can leverage Facebook’s enormous wealth of data to pick out other Facebook members who are likely to be interested in your brand or product.

You can choose how broad you want your lookalike audience to be. Facebook creates audiences based on the percentage of Facebook users you want to target. A 1% lookalike audience will be half the size of a 2% audience, and so forth. Depending on how specific of a service or product you offer, you may want to widen out your lookalike, or keep it smaller.

You can also choose to target only those members of your lookalike audience that reside in a certain area, if you are offering location-specific services or products.

Marketing to your Lookalike List

Your lookalike audience shares many characteristics with your custom audience, so there’s a good chance that they’ll be interested in your services. Being that they aren’t already part of your custom list though, they probably don’t know about you—or much about you, anyway. They are cold leads, and should be marketed to differently. Utilize this audience to drive traffic and grow your list of marketing- or sales-qualified leads. Focus further “up the funnel” with awareness-style campaigns (leads, traffic, video views etc.).

Keep the Flywheel Spinning!

This is where the magic really happens, and you start to turn your basic funnel into a high-performing “flywheel,” generating its own momentum. Once you’ve created these custom audiences and lookalike audiences, you continually refine and adjust, with an automated system.

Once you’ve started marketing to your lookalike audiences (that were created based off of customer/leads lists), you can track the lookalike audience members, and add them to your marketing- or sales-qualified leads list, depending on their behavior. This puts them into a new campaign, aimed at conversions and sales, instead of awareness. In this way, you can keep accumulating new buyer data, further refine and optimize your lookalike audiences, and drive repeat sales at a lower cost.

Get Creative

The possibilities surrounding this basic structure, are pretty much endless. When you start accounting for individual events (like when you add something to your “cart” but never buy it…), you can start targeting very specific audiences, with very contextualized offers. It can be overwhelming to think about all of the possibilities, but it’s also exciting to think about which tactics could completely jump-start your revenue.

Conclusion

By tracking your website visitors and customers, you are able to do some amazing things with ad targeting. Not only can you target ads directly to your website visitors, or specific groups of visitors, but you can also target lookalike audiences, that mimic the features of your buyers. By sending the right type of ad at the right time, you can drive these lookalike prospects further down the funnel, eventually making a sale, and adding more data to your Ad Manager’s audience creator.

If you want to explore the different ways retargeting can grow your business, get in touch today!