When we use Facebook as a marketing platform, our goal is to reach as many relevant users as possible. Now traditional targeting settings inside Facebook can help with this – things like age, income, gender and interests. However, Facebook’s targeting can still be somewhat vague at times.
We often run lead campaigns in super-niche markets. Beyond that, private club memberships are not for everyone who reads Golf Digest, is over 55, and has a post code in a top 10% income area. This is where Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences help us better refine the results and get our clients the results they need. So let’s see how a private club can utilize these Facebook marketing tactics.
Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences are actually quite simple to understand. This feature enables you to upload a customer database, or a client/prospects list into Facebook. There are a lot of variables that Facebook will accept, but at minimum if you have a name, phone number and email address for each person this will work (creating an excel file is the simplest way).
The magic of Facebook is that they can take your list of data, and match it with the corresponding users inside Facebook. It’s worth mentioning that this information stays anonymous, and even you as the uploader don’t see the fully matched list. However, what it does let you do is use this synched up list as an audience to target with your ads.
Scenario – You have a list of hot prospects you want to convert. You compile their information into an excel sheet. Upload it into Facebook Audience Manager, and create the custom audience. Presumably you have an offer/message for these people. You create an ad/post highlighting this, and make sure you select the custom audience you just made as the target (as below). This ad will then run solely at those people sourced from your prospects list.
You may think, “why not just send an email to these prospects?” Well, you definitely could. But running an ad through Facebook could be a great supplement to that. Remember that you want to be in the prospect’s mind, and you want to hit them at multiple touch points. From a customer’s perspective it looks more professional operating across different platforms. A custom audience gives the ability to tailor ads towards a lead, a prospect, a hot prospect, etc. You can fire different messages at different stages of your sales funnel, and the more people progressing through the funnel, the more converted prospects your club can call members.
Lookalike Audiences
This is a step up from the custom audience that we just made. The difference here is that instead of matching your uploaded prospect list, you treat them as a sample. The lookalike function identifies similar traits between the uploaded individuals, and matches them to the Facebook user base. This gives you an audience list closely resembling your uploaded list, but on a drastically bigger scale. The positives are that these people should be similar demographically, interest-based and socially. The negatives are that you can’t see what the similar traits are, you have to trust the software.
Scenario – You want more leads for your club. Let’s assume you also have a spreadsheet of current leads, and/or recently converted members. Go to create a Lookalike Audience, and you will see the following menu:
- You upload the excel sheet of data you created.
- Then select an audience location, generally the United States for us.
- Then select how many audiences to create, and what accuracy you want in your Lookalike Audiences. We tend to create just two audiences; a 1% and a 5%. Facebook states a 1% audience most closely resembles those from your source data. The higher the %, the bigger and broader the created audience will become.
You then create the audiences and Facebook will populate them. Now they are ready to be used in your marketing efforts. You can create your ad/post, and select the Lookalike Audience you created as the target audience. You are now running a campaign at people with similar traits/interests/characteristics to your original source data. This should create better results than simply using Facebook’s basic targeting options.
These are two simple but very effective tools to enhance your targeting efforts. Try them out today and see if your results improve. Or contact the Private Club Agency, and we can help with your marketing efforts.