Social Media

Facebook Custom Audience & Offline Activity: Know the Hidden Secrets

Two significant reasons propel Facebook ahead of contemporary digital marketing channels. The first one is that it is one of the biggest social media platforms in the digital world with around a whopping 2.50 billion monthly active users. The second reason is that advertising on Facebook is the most effective marketing strategy that has the potential to produce high profits.

The catch is in the fact that you need to understand the Facebook advertising platform and its nuances to get the best outcome. Here is where the significance of Facebook custom audiences is felt.

The Fundamentals of Facebook Custom Audience

1-The Fundamentals of Facebook Custom Audience

A Facebook custom audience is an effective advertising targeting tool. It allows you to identify and create a segment of users by using the existing data with you. If they are on Facebook, you can reach them with your ads.

Your custom audience list may be created with any combination of people who visited your website, purchased in your store, and downloaded your app, as well as people from your CRM. You may create ten different types of Facebook custom audiences. Each ad account is allowed to build 500 custom audiences on Facebook.

One of the ways to build a custom audience on Facebook is by making use of the offline activity of your audiences. 

What Makes Building Custom Audience on Facebook Crucial?

2-Building Custom Audience on Facebook

The success of any Facebook advertising depends on the ability to reach the target audience. This calls for setting your target audiences and account structure properly. In the ever-changing marketing scenario, Facebook custom audience is a robust ad targeting option that forms the base of scaling the ads.

Granular targeting is the contemporary strategy that produces the intended success in business. The future of Facebook marketing will rely on a business organization’s ability to build a custom audience on Facebook.

Different Ways to Build Custom Audience on Facebook

A variety of ways are available to build custom audience on Facebook:

  • Make use of offline activity data
  • Upload a customer contact list
  • Use data from how users engaged with you on social media
  • Use app activity data or website visitor data
  • build a custom audience on Facebook using any marketing app

The Significance of Offline Activity Custom Audience

Facebook keeps coming up with innovative advertising features to beat the competition and enhance its users’ opportunities to win in the contemporary business race. Offline Activity Custom Audience is the latest in the list of the amazing advertising features from Facebook.  It helps to exclusively customize your audience and effortlessly target them for running your marketing campaigns successfully.

Touted to be the future of Facebook marketing, the ability to build a custom audience on Facebook using offline activity proves to be an excellent tool that helps businesses to improve their ad targeting. It enables business organizations to target users even when they are offline.

This is made possible by finding the people who have interacted with your business early through sales calls, through customer relationship-based conversation over phone, or those who have visited your store before.

The Features of the Off-Facebook Activity Tracker

3-Off-Facebook Activity Tracker

This new feature from Facebook enables users to create a list of apps, websites, and brick and mortar stores that Facebook is aware they have visited. Users are given the freedom to turn off the tracking if they so prefer.

Considered to be an effective ‘clear history’ tool for Facebook users, this tracker shows the information that Facebook has collected about the users’ activity of the app during the past 6 months.

Facebook gets to learn this information from its advertisement partnership with third-party websites and apps that come forward voluntarily to provide the identities of its visitors. Physical stores also provide such data. Connecting offline data to Facebook enables you to dynamically retarget users who have earlier interacted with your business via offline channels.

Exclusive Benefits of Using the Offline Activity Feature and Custom Audience of Facebook

  1. Using Facebook Custom Audience is one of the easiest ways to convert prospects into leads/sales

    Having known that a prospect has already interacted with your brand makes it easy to convert it into sales. Hence Facebook custom audience is one of the key factors in the future of Facebook marketing.

  2. Build a custom audience on Facebook to generate more leads

    People who have visited your landing page early but didn’t sign up are easy targets through Facebook Custom Audiences. Targeting them to show your ads and getting them converted will be easier. Moreover, you can smoothly convert those who have been seeing your posts regularly and engaged with you before, into leads or sales – by showing them Facebook ads.

  3. Offline activity custom audience of Facebook helps retarget your visitors while converting them into your buyers

    Every business will be having its own set of visitors and existing customers whose trust it has earned. During new product launches, it will be easy to show them ads and convert them into leads or sales.

  4. Return on Investment (ROI)can be Increased

    ROI with Facebook Custom Audience will be much more when compared with that of cold audiences. The trust factor with existing users and acquaintances make it easy for affecting sales. Unlike any other cold targeting strategy, hot prospects in Custom Audience will be huge.

  5. User engagement will be much better when you build custom audience on Facebook

    With digital means, it is possible to engage with your social media network users in several ways. Building a custom audience on Facebook enables you to woo the users who show interest in your page or product. You may easily retarget those who have attended your events, seen your videos, replied to your lead forms, or interacted with you in any way.

How to Reap the Full Benefit of Custom Audience

  • Link all the marketing channels to Facebook: Take advantage of the opportunities offered by customer lists. This can be tapped by creating as many lists as possible. This provides immense possibilities to link your customer groups from various marketing channels to the social network. Thus, the network becomes a retargeting center.
  • You may make good offers to your important buyers: There are preferred and important clients in every business. And business owners will be well aware of these select customers. Segmenting the most active customers in separate lists and making special offers to them that they cannot refuse will be good for your business.
  • Segmenting customers at scale will prove beneficial: Try to experiment and create different lists. Following this and analyzing the results will enable you to learn what each group of customers prefer and what will be best for them.
  • Target only those users who you need to attract: Making your current ads efficient will be made possible by excluding those among the audiences that have already converted.
  • Deliver relevant ads based on the visitors’ preferences: Targeting the people who have already viewed your specific product or service page, but have not so far registered, and engaging them with highly relevant ads will ensure increased leads and sales.

Key Uses of Facebook Custom Audiences

 #1 For Remarketing

4-Facebook Custom Audiences Remarketing

One effective way of reminding people about the specific products and services that they are interested in is remarketing. It helps to encourage them to make the final decision and make a purchase. Just build a custom audience on Facebook and achieve this.

#2 For reaching the probable repeat customers

It is the existing customer list that makes a major contribution to your sales. Marketing to the existing buyers will result in getting a higher conversion rate than attempting to attract people who have not purchased anything from you so far.

Convincing satisfied customers is easier and productive than trying to acquire a new customer in the online scenario. You may build a custom audience on Facebook and use it for inviting past customers to your store.

#3 Grow your Facebook following by using custom audience

Promoting your Facebook page using a Facebook ad with a custom audience will ensure that people who already interact with you but are unaware of your Facebook page get to know of it.

 #4 The future of Facebook marketing is in increasing app engagement

It is not going to help much running an ad to people who have yet to download the app in the first place. Custom audiences of the people who have already downloaded your app will help to target your ad more effectively and facilitate gaining the maximum impact under your budget.

#5 Use lookalike audiences

5-Create Facebook Lookalike Audience

It is not just the people who interact with you; you may get big breaks by targeting those who are similar to the ones – who are more likely to use the products and services offered by you.

Expanding your Custom Audiences to Bolster your Business

In order to achieve business success and sustain, you need to expand your Custom Audiences.

  • Make effective use of Facebook Ad types
  • Tweak your ads at intervals to get maximum conversion
  • Make use of Facebook audience insights

How to create a custom audience from offline activity

Facebook offline custom audience creation is similar to a customer list, but here, you have to upload a list of customer activity occurring offline. You may target them then, according to their offline activity such as in-store booking or purchase.

Step 1: Create an offline event set
  • Go to the events manager of your Facebook business manager.
  • Click on ‘add data source’ and select ‘offline event set.’
  • Give a name to it and enter a description to stay organized.

6-create Facebook custom audience from offline activity

  • You may select ad accounts that would promote that campaign.
  • Choose people from your business for managing your offline event.

7-managing your Facebook offline event audience

Step 2: Select ‘offline activity’ as the audience source in the Facebook business manager.

8-offline activity in Facebook business manager

At this stage, your employees can upload offline conversions.

Step 3: Based on the offline events, create an offline activity custom audience.

9- Create offline custom audience in facebook

Step 4: Creating the audience
  • Ensure that you have set up the ‘offline event set’ from the previous step.
  • IN the Facebook business manager, select ‘Audience.’
  • Inside the Audience, pick ‘create audience’ and after that, ‘custom audience.’
  • Select ‘offline activity.’
  • Choose the offline event set, name, and timeframe.

10- create an offline activity custom audience

You may choose multiple events taken offline by customers as far back as two years so that you will be able to segment the audience you target.

You may also refine your data on the basis of the custom or aggregated value.

Now, all you need to do is upload your offline event sets regularly- on a daily basis. This will enable you to gather your audiences.

Wrap-up

A Facebook Custom Audience is a powerful targeted advertising service that allows business organizations to import user information to retarget on social media. Building a custom audience on Facebook helps to make effective use of advertising and grow your business.

Offline Facebook audience activity is a new tool that gives you more control over data. You may view, manage, and control the data received by Facebook more effectively by using this tool.

About author

Sorav Jain is an accomplished digital marketing entrepreneur and trainer, with over 15 years of experience in the field. He is the driving force behind echoVME, one of the best digital marketing companies in Chennai. Through his agency as well as his institute Digital Scholar, Sorav aims to raise the bar in terms of exploring digital marketing's potential and applying it for brand profitability.
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