Finding offline customers online is like hunting for the elusive unicorn. But Facebook has come up with an advertising platform called “Custom Audiences” designed to demystify this unicorn. Per Facebook, “Custom audiences let marketers find their offline audiences among Facebook users.”
The feature allows you to match phone numbers and email addresses gathered offline to actual Facebook users. You can use any contact list you like, so the potential is significant. From fan acquisition to direct response, you can leverage Custom Audiences for any marketing campaign.
Fan Acquisition
For a fan campaign, think about using the Custom Audience as a qualified group of people who have already expressed interest in your brand. They are part of your loyalty program, or they’ve given you their email address to receive communication about your product. If they aren’t already fans on Facebook, they should be! They will likely be very interested and engaged in the content you share on your page, so go after them.
You can also use that opportunity to learn more about your consumer base and how it aligns with your Facebook fans. Use filtering and targeting techniques to give you a better idea of who this audience is. Find out if your Custom Audience is male or female, where they live, and if they are interested in sports or shopping, for example. Is this population similar to your existing Facebook fans? This exercise could also potentially highlight targeting parameters that you haven’t thought of before, useful for creating future advertising campaigns.
Direct Response
Again, the Custom Audience you’ve created is a population of people who have already expressed interest in your brand. You have a built-in audience of potential customers, and their potential for purchase is certainly higher than that of the general Facebook population. Take advantage of that! If your Custom Audience is created from a list of prospective customers, create an ad campaign that exclusively targets those users.
It’s Free, So Use It!
On a very basic level, Custom Audiences are just another facet of Facebook’s insane targeting, and as such, you should be using it to your advantage. Initial results from our campaigns have shown that Custom Audiences are extremely valuable targeting groups, both from a cost and engagement perspective. And, don’t forget that using this feature is free, so go try it!
How To Create A Custom Audience
Implementing the Custom Audiences feature is free and easy for Facebook advertisers. Simply take your list of email address or phone numbers and input into Power Editor. Facebook will encrypt the data and look for matches among real Facebook users. According to Facebook, match rates for these lists range from 50 to 95 percent, further demonstrating and validating just how large the social network’s reach is. So, it’s likely that the majority of your list will also be active on Facebook. Once the Audience has been created, it is accessible for use in any future advertising campaigns.