With so many people in one place, Facebook presents a huge opportunity for businesses to reach out and connect with potential customers. But unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as it once was. You and I both know that the reach of organic content is decreasing.
Effective Facebook targeting increases ad conversions while lowering the cost per conversion—the ultimate measure of an ad’s value.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences allow you to build targeted lists of potential customers who share characteristics with people who already buy from you. FB advertising tools are much more sophisticated in their audience matching. Plus, with Lookalike Audiences, you don’t even have to know what data points you’re trying to match. Facebook will figure that out for you.
Why are lookalike audiences important?
While you might have a good idea of who your ideal customer is, lookalike audiences dissect your existing followers and user base to find their commonalities. This audience is a way to target a group of new people who will likely be interested in your business because they're similar to people who have converted for you before. Most importantly, this informed targeting optimizes your media spend and lowers the cost of acquisition in the process. You can target people who are similar to your email list, website visitors, customers, video viewers, Facebook followers, and more.
Facebook lookalike audiences can easily supplement your existing ads. For the sake of stretching your social media budget, Lookalike Audiences allow you to experiment and target multiple audiences at once without running different campaigns.
Why Set Up A Facebook Lookalike Audience:
The most powerful reason to target a lookalike audience is to find people who are similar to your existing buyers. If you have a customer list, you can upload that list to Facebook and create a custom audience of your buyers. From there, you can create a lookalike audience based on your buyers, which targets people with similar attributes to those who made a purchase.
Depending on how closely you want to match your base audience, you can set up a lookalike audience size that’s anywhere from 1% to 10%, where the 1% includes only those people who most closely match your base audience. You can control the size with a slider that appears when you create the audience. In Facebook Ads Manager, open the Audiences tool and click the Create Audience button.
Lookalike audiences give you a way to reach a cold audience beyond interest or behavior targeting. For example, say you’re showing targeted ads to warm traffic, such as people on your email list, website visitors, or Facebook fans. Lookalike audiences give you a way to reach cold audiences that are like those warm audiences but much bigger.
They save you a ton of time. If you’ve already gone through the legwork of fine-tuning a Custom Audience, you’ve done the hard part. Lookalike Audiences allow you to squeeze more out of what you’ve already established.
How To Use Facebook Lookalike Audience Tool:
Choose an ideal group
You can choose between page fans, visitors to your website, and customer lists. You'll need at least 100 people in your customer group for Facebook to create a lookalike audience, but Facebook recommends including more than 100 people. A larger sample size with more data points provides the most accurate picture of your audience, which equates to more efficient spending.
Select audience size
Larger audiences give you more reach but the matching will be less precise. This can be helpful if you're looking to reach the most people with a broad sweep but are less concerned about how closely they share similarities with your current customers or fans. A smaller lookalike audience is more targeted and more closely aligned to the characteristics of your current customers or fans.
Target specific demographics
If you want to only reach Facebook users who resemble your current customers you can add those parameters using the drop-down menus of the Power Editor tool. In addition to age and geographic location, you can also add parameters that target a specific gender.
Create your ad
Use power editor to input the text and image for your advertisement. Keep standard Facebook best practices in mind - use engaging language and eye-catching images to draw customers to your posts.
Final Words:
Facebook Lookalike Audiences can help you find your new best customers. When you create a lookalike audience of a custom audience, Facebook finds users who have similar attributes to the people who are in that base custom audience. This will eventually elevation of your business goals.
