If you’re serious about generating great returns on social media investments, then remarketing and building custom audiences is something you need to explore. It’s a fantastic way to reach people already interested in your business, as well as finding new audiences who could be, in a creative, engaging and effective way.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is the process of displaying ad content to people who have visited certain pages of a website or stages of the online conversion process. Think about the times you have been browsing various hotels on TripAdvisor and miraculously tailored ad content of those hotels has later appeared in your social feed – that’s remarketing.
Custom audiences
The general rule of digital advertising (and marketing as a whole) is better audience, better results. A custom audience is the term coined for the remarketing demographics which you generate on social media, using either your own data, data collated from tracking codes such as Facebook Pixel, or a combination of both. Common types of custom audiences include:
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- Website visitors
tracking of page visits by users logged into social platforms
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- Customer lists
data you already have, including email databases which can be uploaded and connected to profiles on social media
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- Lookalike audiences
generating new audiences by replicating the demographic profiling of existing customers or data segments (Facebook only – read on!)
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- Activity and engagement
building audiences based on those who have previously engaged with your content
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- Applications
targeting mobile application users
Let’s focus on Facebook
Facebook sets itself apart from the rest because of its incredible targeting abilities. You can reach people based on a whole host of demographic profiling including basic fields such as age, relationship status and location, but also more advanced categories such as an amazingly wide-range of granular interests and behaviours, including likely to scenarios, for example buying a house or car.
Facebook’s remarketing and custom audience capacities are also far superior to its competitors, with a wide-range of options and greater flexibility to test, trial and optimise multiple audiences within ad campaigns. We particularly like Lookalike Audiences. These are an ingenious way of creating new target audiences based on the demographics of your existing customers and/or data segments. For example, if you have a database of UK customers on Facebook, you can replicate their profiling data to likely matches in other countries to the closest 1%. Before you know it, you could have identified two million potential customers in France. Wow.
What do I need to get started on Facebook?
The first thing you need to do is install Facebook Pixel to your website. This will allow you to track website actions, measure results, creature audiences for remarketing and optimise ad campaigns.
You will also need to setup an Ad Account which you can manage in Business Manager.
Twitter and LinkedIn
If you’re B2B, LinkedIn could be your ticket to effective remarketing (or retargeting as they call it). Large volumes of relevant users can be reached through their advertising options, which include website remarketing, customer lists as well as the traditional profiling features of job type, industry/sector and competitor audiences. Four out of five LinkedIn users are claimed to drive business decisions, with over 73 million senior level influencers with a LinkedIn account – not to be ignored.
Twitter provides the core remarketing options of tracking website visits, mobile application users and building audiences using customer data. Although it hasn’t reached anywhere near the heights of Facebook, it can still provide an effective tool to reengage with its users and turn them into new or repeat customers.
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