Over the last couple years Facebook has made it incredibly easy to jump into advertising on their platform.  And that’s a good thing!  When you have a high performing post Facebook will often times give you a notification to inform you of this great news and offer to “boost” this post to reach even more people with it.  It might read something like this:  “Your post is performing better than 95% of posts on your page.  Boost it for $15 and reach an additional 5000 people near you.” Great plan, right!?  After all, if the users who follow your page liked the post the masses will as well. Yes and no.

Success on Facebook usually comes down to targeting.  The more refined and relevant the audience the higher likelihood of making a sale or converting on the desired action.  If you’re simply boosting a post to get more eye balls and more vanity metrics (likes, reactions, comments, etc.) you may just be spinning cash right down the toilet.

Custom Audience – meet my reader.  Reader – meet Custom Audience.

A Custom Audience can take many forms, but right now we’ll just focus on uploading a physical address list to your Facebook Ads Manager.  Let’s suppose you have a new product announcement that plugs in nicely with things you currently offer – a new rock bucket for that line of compact tractors you sell.  I’d imagine your accounting software – something like Quickbooks – will be able to easily export a spreadsheet or list of your customers who have purchased from you.  You may even be able to whittle that list down further to customers who have purchased a specific product or line of equipment.  The more refined the better.

Facebook has a unique syntax to help it understand and organize the data that you export from your accounting or customer tracking software.  For example, the column that features an individuals first name would be labeled fn.  Last name would be labeled ln.  Zip code would be zip.  You get the picture.

Opening that list in a spreadsheet program like Excel will allow you to easily manipulate the data you exported to convert it into a Facebook friendly format and add it to your ad account as a Custom Audience.  Facebook will then compare that data to registered users and match accounts.  Obviously not everyone on your customer list will have a FB account, but somewhere between 70-85% will! Now when you go to create that ad for the new rock bucket attachment you have in stock you can show that ad specifically to people who are owners of the equipment that matches.  No more wasting money showing your ad to 76 year old “Janine” who lives in town and just wants to share cute cat pictures all day.  The more relevant the audience, the lower your ad costs and the higher the conversion rate.

Think of the power of this!  Political campaigns can upload the voter registration data and market on Facebook.  Charities can upload their donor list and show ads for an upcoming fundraiser event.  Every time you have a sale you should be showing an ad to your custom audience.

Creating a Custom Audience from your physical address list on Facebook is a very smart move.  Contact us at Updraft Advertising and we’ll discuss ways you can implement this in your business.