Facebook Audience Network: Audiences

Building and leveraging audiences is becoming more and more important for buisnesses as todays largest platforms continue to gain depth.

Depending on your business type, there are different options when deciding on what position you want to take. Included in your decision is the overall cost factor that is involved. The earlier you start to build your own audiences on digital, the less your cost will be in the future.

Compare the buisnesses who were early to build their google SEO ranking. Although there is an ongoing cost to keep your positioning on search, the earlier a business started, the less they paid in google advertising in the long run which let them focus on investing in valuable resources that were too expensive to both out-build & out-position by other businesses after the fact.

Look at what happened with Google AdWords, especially with the pricing as they refined their algorithms and made both their targeting features and their reporting systems more accurate for marketers to rely on them to show their clients tangible results.

Although results are more direct when the platforms are perfected, the later a position is built the more it will cost you over the long-run to catch up to an even playing field with those who took an early position.

Why is social media any different?

Pixel, Advanced Retargeting, Cold Traffic. If you haven’t started building your presence on social media or marketing platforms like Google AdWords, this is your best bet to catch yourself up to the thousands of businesses who are taking advantage of the underpriced attention online.

While costs are still quite low, you can leverage active interests in order to build an audience around your message. If you find that the costs of reaching the right number of audience members is too high while you are reading this based on your budget, you have the option to find influencers through instagram yourself or use a tool to help you with it.

Custom and lookalike audiences allow you to put your business in front of people who actually care.

So how can you create useful audiences for your business? First you need to know what custom and lookalike audiences are. Facebook allows you to create audiences based on a number of factors including location, online interests, behaviours, job titles and more. Custom audiences allow you to input this data and save it as a persona you can target with your ads. Before building your personas go to the audience insights tool and do some research. It will show you different statistics based on your audience.

The next thing you need to do is upload any information you have on current and past customers onto Facebook. Facebook allows you to build a custom audience based on the profiles of those customers. You can then leverage our retargeting resource to get more out of your past business.

Once uploaded you can create a lookalike audience based on your past customers. Facebook will take their profile information and create a persona for you to target based on that information. This is extremely powerful and is where you will start to see the most success.

Using our engagement resource you can also develop an audience based on people who are actively engaged with your business online. A custom audience can be built from general engagement or video views which you can then filter even further into people who have watched different lengths of your videos. As you break these down and learn to leverage the power of lookalike audiences you begin to get big results.

Finding influencer partners, buying an advertiser spot, and creating interest in your product through product placement will allow you to leverage communities who are hungry to get to their final goal by using your product to get them there.

Overtime, you will build an unbeatable position in the future marketplace by leveraging the increase in sales that you receive by taking advantage of the lack of competition online. Your primary focus is to follow and understand how your partners are interacting with their audiences in order to maintain the effectiveness of your long-term campaign.