Imagine managing a store and being able to follow anyone who comes in with an advertisement that you can change based on what they have visited …

… to the products they have chosen

… to the parts of the store they visited

… which box they went to

… or have not gone

Powerful?

Yup!!!

The Custom Audience Facebook are all this and much more: they contain ideas that will help you consider the potential of this feature, so let’s see what the custom audience is before talking about what you could do.

What are Custom Audience Facebook?

The minimum number of a custom audience is 20; then you will import a list or you will have access to a part of the list created by Facebook and then manage the advertisements. You can access this option from your ads manager section (the top menu) and this is the first screen you’ll see …

Customer list

You can import a list of emails, Facebook user IDs, their phone number or mobile ID and create an audience based on all this.

• Email – Facebook integrates directly with MailChimp so you can use your MailChimp account to automatically import your emails, or you can simply copy and paste an email list or upload a file.
• ID of Facebook users – it is outside the terms of service to load a user’s ID for other pages, groups, etc. (it is also a problem for data protection). You can use them only to import the ID for your apps.
• Mobile ID – if you have an Android app or an iPhone, you can specify the ID associated with this app and target users who use it.
• Phone numbers – if you have a list of your customer numbers, you can import them and Facebook will try to link them with the numbers it has stored on user profiles and when it will provide a match, it will add it to the audience list.

Site traffic

You can install a tracking code on your site from Facebook and it will start tracking visitors to your site. Then you can create a list of all those who have visited your site or certain pages of it; the audience list is normally 30 days, but you can build one for 180 days.

App activity

If you have an app on Facebook, you can create an audience based on the specific actions that your audience did or didn’t do!

Set up tracking on Facebook

If you want to build a custom audience based on the people who visit your site, you will need to add a piece of code from Facebook to your site (a Facebook tracking pixel).

7 ways to take advantage of Custom Audience

1. Someone visits your “buy now” page, but does not complete the purchase

Imagine that you are a consultant and that someone clicks on a button to “buy” one of your hours, but then abandons everything just before entering your credit card information; after filling in the credit card form he would be redirected to a thank you page.

But don’t explain why your Analytics shows that that person has not reached the thank you page.

Create a custom audience based on the people who visit your shopping page, but who don’t reach that of thanks, then put retargeting to work with Facebook ads!

2. Inactive users on your mailing list

Having a mailing list is great, but if people don’t open your emails for you it will be harmful, as the service provider that sends the emails will track your open rates, so if they are low they will indicate that you have a poor quality list.

To reactivate these users, why not upload a list of inactive users on Facebook and target them with an advertisement for something really appealing? In this way you will involve them again, reactivating the engagement, so as not to be inactive in your mailing list.

3. Your customer list

You can import a list of users (customer list) and create an audience based on it, after which you can target your customers with excellent content, promotions, sales and so on.

4. Advertise a list of potential customers before calling them

Imagine having a phone number list of people who have or have not had an activity with you in the past: think about calling these people to encourage them to work with you.

Before doing so, you could create a custom audience for them and share promotional videos on your services, for example, you can share testimonial videos from your customers. You’ll see with it will always be easier to sell if your potential customers have seen videos before your call!

5. Create similar audiences

As we all know, Facebook is really good at tracking what we read, interacting with users and following it, so it knows a lot about us.

Here, based on any audience you have created, you can do another one like this: Facebook will try to find a group of people with similar interests / profiles to your audience and then start to target them with your advertisements.

6. Target your connections on LinkedIn

The people you connect with on LinkedIn are most likely professionals with whom you have created a specific custom audience to target them on Facebook.

Knowing that this audience could be made by B2B connections, by colleagues, influencers and potential partners, you can target your ads on Facebook specifically to these people to significantly attract their attention.

To do this, export your LinkedIn contacts with a CSV file, then upload it as a custom audience on Facebook.

7. Target new members

When someone signs up for your mailing list, you’ll have to make a great impression, so you won’t want to bombard them with email to build a relationship. Rather, use ads on Facebook, a great way to maintain a connection without pressing your new subscribers.

Use Facebook custom audiences to build strong relationships with your subscribers; you can also use existing campaigns on Facebook, or, if you really want to make a good impression, you can create them specifically for new members.

Note: if you have a team of developers you can also create custom audiences using the Facebook API (which creates these audiences “programmatically”).

Summary

Facebook Custom Audience is an effective way to reach your blog readers and business contacts in a targeted manner.

Which of these tactics will you use? Have you tried others in the past?