Tips On Creating Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences
June 8, 2017
Introduction
Something that is becoming a mantra in digital marketing is:
Remarketing is marketing.
Why is this so significant? Because there are now so many ways to track people’s engagement with your content and provide them more based on what they did, that these tactics are altering overall strategy.
Today when you create a marketing strategy, perhaps the biggest element will be how you’ll remarket.
This is brought on by technology and how we use it. Pixels and cookies attach themselves to our browsers, and social media platforms – literally – never forget anything we do.
Likewise, users don’t really surf the net today so much as they float around on digital currents, carried by whims to hundreds of pages and profiles a week. Unfortunately for marketers, they forget much of what they do or see.
In the digital world, there is no such thing as a “one call close” (unless you’re a plumber and the lead is standing ankle-deep in their own crap). You must have a strategy for creating more touch points with people who’ve shown some interest in your business.
Facebook Engagement Audiences is a tactic that lets you create these touch points with everyone who engages with your Facebook content.
Engagement Tracking
Facebook tracks all your behavior. You have no choice in this matter. It’s the trade-off for being able to use it for free.
As a business, this means you can create custom audiences based on what people did, then serve them up more content.
You can create lists based on video views, lead ads, canvas ads, and page visits. Here is the breakdown:
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Video: 3-second video views, 10-second video views, 30-second video views, video watches at 25%, video watches at 50%, video watches at 75%, video watches at 95%, video watches at 100%
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Lead ads: opened form, opened form but didn’t submit (otherwise known as a “drop-off”), opened and submitted form
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Canvas ads: opened, opened and clicked on link
- Page engagement: everyone who engaged with your page, people who engaged with any post or ad, clicks on call-to-action buttons, people who sent you a message, page or post saves.
Keep in mind that these audiences are based on actions that take place on Facebook, unlike other custom audiences built off website use and tracked by a pixel.
List Engagement Time-Frames
You can choose to track behavior from 30 to 365 days. How you set this up is important.
For example, say you set the tracking to look back 50 days. That means if someone engaged 49 days ago, they’ll be in your audience – for one day. If they don’t engage again, they fall off the list.
Anyone who engages within your set time period is added to the audience, which means the audience is constantly refreshed. This is a real advantage because you don’t have to edit or create new audiences unless you change the time period or type of engagement.
Because the list refreshes itself, the best practice is to keep the time frame shorter. This way you’re retargeting ads to people who recently engaged with you, increasing the chance they’ll convert.
Important note: If you are running more than one ad set, Facebook has a tool that lets you test if you have overlapping audiences. Your audience sizes need to be 10,000 for it to register.
If you’re a small business with limited audience numbers, don’t go crazy with creating engagement audiences. Try running one ad set based on an action you think will convert, or select actions that are not likely to create a lot of overlap.
Create a Facebook Advertising Strategy
With engagement audiences, your Facebook marketing strategy turns into a remarketing strategy.
Consider the marketing funnel:
For this tactic to work, you have to gain awareness for your brand and get people to engage with some type of content. That means that a significant part of your strategy is to capture people at the awareness level so they’ll take notice of your Facebook profile.
In this vital stage, you need to target potential customers and get them to take an engagement action.
For example you could:
- Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience based on people who’ve converted on your website.
- Run a Facebook Lead Ads campaign with a low-risk conversion, such as requesting a quote.
- Run an Engagement Campaign for form dropoffs.
Consider that by the time you’ve drilled down to people who did a form dropoff, you have a very specific audience you’re targeting. You can craft your message to them in a personalized, enticing way to get them to move towards conversion.
Case Study
At Marketing 360® we ran an engagement campaign, retargeting to people who liked our page. Results:
This campaign had the most conversions, highest conversion rate, and lowest cost per lead of any campaign.
Conclusions
Retargeting doesn’t just create more touch points in your sales cycle, it creates touch points that guide people through the buying process.
People don’t just move through your sales funnel with digital marketing, you guide them through it with remarketing content.
The more engagement you get on Facebook, the more you can retarget those audiences. The better you serve up content that guides people through your funnel, the more conversions you’ll get.
You may need to expose your brand to a potential customer 10-20 times to get them to convert. You have to engage them with interesting content, and carefully retarget them to build brand awareness.
If someone engages with your Facebook page or posts, they’re showing interest in your business. Carefully building on that interest and driving them towards conversion is the goal of Engagement Custom Audiences.
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