When putting together your online marketing strategy, using social media channels such as Facebook is absolutely crucial. Using social media in digital marketing isn’t an exact science, but there are tricks of the trade which have proven to be successful time and time again. One of these tricks is the use of Facebook custom audiences. Here is everything you need to know.
What is a Facebook custom audience?
A custom audience on Facebook is a new phenomenon which will soon become a very important arrow in the digital market’s quiver. By using your existing email list, you can create a list on Facebook that is a very specific audience, targeting them with relevant information. This tool has a lot of potential to be very powerful in online marketing.
How to set up a custom audience
By using Facebook’s ad manager, you can quickly and easily start creating custom audiences. There are three types of audiences you can set up, namely:
- List-based audiences
These are created by using email addresses, Facebook user IDs, or phone numbers. - App-activity audiences
These are especially nifty, generating a list of people based on the activity they have done within a Facebook app. This could be something such as a list of people who have reached a certain level in a game. - Web traffic-based audiences
This matches website visitors to Facebook IDs and then generates a list of those people.
When in the ads manager, the first thing you need to do is create an objective, for example, Boost your posts. Click “Create custom audience,” then a window will pop up with the options listed above. By using Customer List as your option, you can upload your list of email addresses as a .csv file or even .txt. This is easy to do from Excel.
Tips and tricks
- Always make sure your list of addresses or phone numbers is from people actually opting-in to receive communication from you and not scraped from other sites.
- Ensure your emails are in the correct format i.e. someone@something.co.
- Make sure there are no spaces or hyphens in your phone numbers.
With Facebook custom audiences, a whole new world has been opened up in online marketing. If you’re ready to jump right in and take advantage of the amazing potential of the Internet to advertise your brand, get in touch with us at WSI OMS. With services such as content marketing, social media marketing and much more, we know the digital space. Contact us today.