Custom audiences, tailored audiences, matched audiences

Using customer data for your paid social campaigns

Paid advertising on social media can be a bit of a minefield to say the least. Designing your campaigns for different ad placements, deciding on your messaging and calls-to-action as well as planning and managing an advertising budget can be time consuming, confusing and frustrating. Then we have to go through all the different targeting options!

Targeting using demographics (age, gender), location, language, interests and behaviours seem like an obvious choice but can come with some risks. The data that social media sites hold about their users is based on what their users are prepared to tell them. Not everyone wants Facebook to know every detail of their personal life; others will deliberately change their details to hide from employers, parents and exes! This makes demographic targeting problematic.

So what’s the alternative?

If you have a list of opted-in email addresses for your customers and/or prospects, did you know that you can use this list to create audiences for your campaigns?

Facebook call these custom audiences, Twitter has also started calling them custom audiences (previously ‘tailored audiences’) and LinkedIn calls them matched audiences. They’re all essentially the same thing.

Why would you want to target your customers?

There’s a couple of reasons why you may want to advertise to people who have bought from you in the past:

• To cross sell additional products or services. Not all customers will know about everything you offer, so use targeted campaigns to let them know what they’re missing
• To re-engage customers who haven’t bought from you in a while with campaigns to entice them back
• For referral programs – used to encourage your loyal customers to recommend their friends

Upselling to existing customers is often easier (and cheaper) than finding new ones as they’re already familiar with you and what you do.

What else you can do with custom audiences

Just because you can target your current customers, doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily want to. This is where lookalike and similar audiences come in.

Each social media platform will let you create another audience that is similar to your customer list. It will look at their characteristics, demographics, interests, and find other users that match. These lists will exclude your current customer list so you won’t be advertising to people who have already bought from you.

We’ve successfully used lookalike audiences on Facebook and Twitter to target people interested in horse racing events. By uploading a list of 5,000 emails of previous event attendees, Facebook was able to identify 3,500 Facebook accounts. They then analyse these accounts to find commonalities and traits within the customer list. Facebook could then create a lookalike audience of over 100,000 people within an hour’s drive of the venue, all interested in horse racing.

People won’t always explicitly say they like a particular hobby, interest or pastime on their profile which makes them difficult to target with interest targeting. However, they will likely talk about and follow related topics and accounts which Facebook and Twitter can identify and use to create an audience with the same interests.

Before you start, you need to make sure your data is compliant with the relevant data protection/marketing communications regulations in your country. If you’re not sure, it’s best not to risk it. It’s also a good idea to have a clear privacy and data policy on your website, so when people visit and submit their details, they know exactly how their data will be used.

You’ll then need to format your data in such a way that the social media platform you’re using can process it. This will be different for each platform, but Facebook, for example, give clear guidance and templates you can download to ensure you don’t get any errors when uploading.

Once you’ve uploaded your data, you can then create a lookalike audience.

Not using social media advertising? Google Ads also offers a similar form of targeting called customer match which lets you target your search and display campaigns based on your customer data.

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