How Can Facebook Custom Audiences Grow Your Brand?

As a user, you might have grown weary of Facebook's features or the monotonous interaction with the same set of friends. But for marketers, it's a big pool for brand promotions and audiences. Facebook not only comes with a wide range of promotion and advertisement options but most importantly, it has a huge number of users. The size of Facebook's user base is what has always drawn marketers towards it.

One of Facebook Advertising's most impressive feature is the ability to create "Custom Audiences" for your ad campaigns with an aim to target your ads to a more relevant set of people.

Who are Custom Audiences?

A Custom audience will be that set of the audience that is known to a brand offline, but one that they are not engaged with on Facebook. Custom audiences let marketers find their offline audience among Facebook users. They hunt them down using offline information such as email ids, phone numbers and UIDs.

This feature of Facebook to locate custom audiences helps a marketer reach a filtered set of audiences, one that is already familiar with the brand but unaware of its Facebook presence. The brand is not expected to make an impression as the targeted users have already connected with it sometime in the past.

How can Facebook Custom Audiences Grow your Brand?

1) Growth of small business:

A business is always on the look-out to reach out to a larger audience. Facebook Custom Audiences is an extremely useful feature as it allows the brand to do just that. If you're a brand that has a relatively new presence on social media and is trying to establish a wider reach to more audiences, then your list of email ids should be the first thought to approach. This approach will make your audience aware of your social media presence and will also help them spread the word.

2) Promotion of events/products:

If they have had previous engagement with you, there is a high probability that they will do it again and Custom audiences is a good way to start. It is just a simple way of re-targeting them. You can upload a set of your users who signed up, but then never used your product and target your ads to them. Custom audiences can turn out to be an opportunity to gain them back.

How to get started?

• The Custom Audiences feature can only be found in the power editor and is located in the “Audiences” tab.
• To create a Custom Audience, use the Facebook Power Editor. Choose "Custom Audiences," and then, "Create Audience."
• Then you will be asked to name the audience and write a short description that you can look at on a later date. Make sure it's descriptive enough so you can identify it later.
• Then, select "Choose File" to upload a CSV or TXT file pulled from your database of those prospects you'd like to target. You can use phone numbers, email ids and UID.
• Your audience list will be uploaded into the Power Editor and can be used for any ad/campaign you create.

Image courtesy:  Vlado