Find Your Next Customer With a Facebook Lookalike Audience

by Mindy Stoker
  |  March 4, 2020  |  
March 4, 2020

Man draws circles around drawings of people | Facebook Lookalike Audience
Are you ready to find the audience of your dreams? Most business owners know that in order to scale up their business, it’s essential to bring new people into the sales funnel. But where do you find those new people, and how do you know they will be the right audience for your business? What if we told you your dream audience was closer than you think. Thanks to Lookalike Audiences, you can reach people who are similar to your current customers and are likely to be interested in your business. Find out what a Facebook Lookalike Audience is and how you can use one to move your business forward.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences Are a Powerful Marketing Tool

Facebook knows a lot about its users, information like a user’s name, age, hometown, current town, birthday, and pages liked. Facebook learns this information not only from the data points taken from their platform but also from data points from thousands of other websites. Thousands of websites are using a string of code called the Facebook pixel. This pixel tracks everything users do on these websites and complies it along with the demographic data from each user’s account, as long as they are logged into their Facebook account. This pixel tracks sites visited, products added to carts, checkouts initiated, and more.

Through machine learning, Facebook can take all of this data and make connections. Finding patterns in the background, things like a correlation between where people live and their frequency of purchasing donuts or dog treats. While all of this data is anonymized, marketers can use it to reach their ideal target audience. It’s these billions of data points, and the high-quality data they produce, that is making Facebook a powerful advertising tool. Here’s another way to think about it, lookalike audiences give you a way to reach a cold audience that will act as a warm audience.  

What is a lookalike audience?

Facebook lookalike audiences are an advanced targeting option based on a custom audience. These audiences go beyond basic interest and demographic functionalities. A lookalike audience includes users who have similar attributes to the people who are in that base custom audience.

Creating a Lookalike Audience

Lookalike audiences are all based on a custom audience. What is a custom audience? It could be website visitors, people on your email list, or Facebook users who engage with your Page. Facebook takes the data points of your source, your custom audience, and finds a new audience of similar people. When you create a lookalike audience, you are building an audience that includes users who have similar attributes to the people in the custom audience you have selected. Because you have chosen the custom audience as a starting point, you have much more control over the targeting for your audience, and you end up with a better-quality audience.

As part of the creation process, you can choose the size of your lookalike audience. While larger audiences will increase your potential reach, smaller audiences will more closely match your custom audience. The quality of your custom audience matters, as well. If your custom audience, upon which the lookalike audience is based, is made up of only your best customers rather than all of your customers, it could lead to better results. Additionally, your lookalike audience will only include people from the country or countries you have selected during creation.

Ideas for Lookalike Audiences

Are you using video or B2B marketing? You should be. Video allows you to build brand recognition and trust, and Facebook users watch millions of hours of video on the platform every day. If you post videos on Facebook, you can create an audience based on people who have engaged with your videos in the past.

Do you send email newsletters? You know that your newsletter subscribers are people who are interested in receiving news about your business. Now you can use this audience as the source for a lookalike audience.

What about those people who have visited your website recently? Particularly, ones who have put something in their cart, but then didn’t finish the transaction. These website visitors are an ideal candidate for a lookalike audience.

Once you set up your lookalike audiences, you’ll need to test and monitor them. Try different audience sizes for different campaign goals and remember to keep your audience list up to date. You can also use lookalike audiences in combination with other targeting features and other ads.

At Vende Digital, we want to help you get your business in front of more buyers. Let us help you market your business online with confidence. Contact us to schedule your complimentary 1-on-1 planning session.

Key Takeaways

  • Facebook lookalike audiences are an advanced targeting option based on a custom audience.
  • Facebook lookalike audiences are a powerful marketing tool.
  • A lookalike audience includes users who have similar attributes to the people in the custom audience you have selected.
  • You can use lookalike audiences in combination with other targeting features and ads.
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