Facebook Custom Audiences: how to set them up

Creating a strong Facebook presence is an essential aspect of any well-rounded content marketing strategy. As more marketers flock to social media for advertising, Facebook Custom Audiences is one way to target users and make sure your advertisements are being looked at by the right people.

This tool allows you to create a custom audience using your current database, and this can be anyone from your followers, those on a mailing list or anyone who has interacted with your brand.

There are many benefits to this style of marketing, and it can greatly help you to define and improve your content by having a specific audience to focus your efforts towards. Want to know more? We’re here to offer the ins and outs on how to set up Facebook Custom Audiences.

Here’s how to set up Facebook Custom Audiences

Why choose Facebook Custom Audiences

Cold traffic targeting is a common content marketing practice, though it is the exact antithesis to target marketing. Cold traffic is a way to describe customers who are not yet informed about your brand or service. Of course, it’s much more difficult to turn these users from browsers to buyers, and this is because you’ll need to take the time to convince them that you are worth investing in.

Since there is an overwhelming amount of content on the web, this can be a huge hurdle, especially for newer businesses. This is where Facebook Custom Audiences lends a hand. With more than 2 billion users, this is an excellent avenue to find and directly target new as well as returning customers.

As mentioned, custom audiences are based on users who have previously interacted with your brand, based on mobile phone numbers, email addresses as well as other forms of interaction with your pages. This data will be matched with individual Facebook profiles, and these are the initial steps to creating a custom Facebook audience. This allows you to tailor your ad to target a very narrow number of people, looking for those who will be the most interested in what you’re offering.

The different types of Facebook Custom Audiences

Within the realm of Facebook Custom Audiences, there are a few different types and each one has its own purpose. Knowing which custom audience to use at each specific time will allow you to make the most of your visibility as well as your conversion rate.

When you log in to create a new custom audience, you will be given a choice of a few, and we’re going to break them down for you:

Contact list audience

This audience will employ a list using both phone numbers and e-mails pulled from your database. This list is manually uploaded using a CSV file and will be composed of people who are already familiar with your brand, having used your services or bought your products before. When choosing this contact list, you will be looking to target this audience to create further sales or continue to convert these same clients.

One way this custom audience works is by getting page likes from people who have previously done business with you. If you’ve spent time and energy cultivating positive relationships with these clients as well as offering them good services, then they are likely to oblige.

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Post engagement audience

This option is fairly self-explanatory and comes down to people who have previously engaged or interacted with your Facebook content at an earlier date. This type of custom audience offers the most insight, as it offers information based on more specificity. This includes custom options to make an audience based on people who have interacted with your videos, your images as well as different facets of your page.

This further breaks down to people who have clicked on one of your calls-to-action, people who have saved your posts, people who have messaged you directly and finally people who have simply viewed your page. The information offered by this audience is crucial because you’re already aware of the advertisements that have worked in the past and you can target accordingly.

Website traffic audience

This custom audience will only work if you have a custom audience pixel installed on your website, as it will work to collect the information of people who have visited your website during a specific time frame. Another catch of this plug-in is that it’s necessary for the person to be logged into their Facebook account at the time that they visit your website.

This audience is based on people who have visited your website but haven’t interacted with your business any further. If they’ve been on your website, it’s fairly safe to assume they’ve interacted with your brand and thus, creating an ad for a special offer or retargeting them with a related piece of content will definitely work to entice users.

App Activity

This audience is created based on the activities that people take based on where they’re using the app from, whether that be on their desktop or on their mobile. As is likely obvious, it’s becoming increasingly common for people to access their Facebook from their phones. If your business utilizes an associated app, then you should use this custom audience targeting option. This one can be thought of as similar to the website traffic audience and can be used to re-target people within the app itself.

There are plenty of times when custom audiences will be beneficial, but this will always relate back to your goal. If you’re trying to obtain a specific result with your advertisement, then targeting a custom audience by way of Facebook is the right move. If you’re already working with a Facebook for Business page, there is no harm in trying.