One of the primary complaints I hear in Western New York is that Facebook ads are not working and advertisers are spending a lot of money. In this Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) presentation, Rick Mulready, The Art of Paid Traffic Podcast, sheds some light on these concerns. He specifically focused on Facebook custom audiences.
Just this week, I gave a Facebook live session on how to build better audiences, a key to getting better ad results. This was in part based on new information I learned at SMMW.
In Mulready’s presentation, he was focused on how to build connections to connections you didn’t have? To accomplish this, you need to start with custom audiences.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Mulready emphasized key elements essential to working with a custom audience:
- Understand your target audience. You must understand their needs and pain points.
- Be clear about your value. What can you offer that is of value?
- Create offers that solve your customer’s challenge or pain point.
- Communicate clearly.
- Understand that you are in the long game.
He listed specific custom audiences that you should have:
- From email list
- From your website
- From video engagement
- From Facebook engagement
As you build and use Facebook custom audiences, you will need to continue to retarget them. Your goal is to move them down the funnel from cold to hot audiences. You will be moving them from awareness to consideration to lead generation to paid clients.
Email List
This is a very useful audience. Individuals on your email list are a warm audience, they already know you and what you do.
To generate the most benefit, you will need to segment the list prior to uploading it to Facebook. Once you have uploaded the list, you can then create lookalike audiences.
Mulready provided an important tip: segment bounces and unsubscribers. You will want to exclude them from the audiences you create. You do not want to spend money on individuals who do not want your product.
Website Visitors
It is possible to target individuals who visit your website. While creating this audience, you can target:
- All website visitors
- Specific pages or categories
- Specific pages but not others
- Length of time on a page
- Events that occur on a page, e.g., add to cart
Additionally, you can test different time windows for website visitors from 1-180 days.
With different audiences and retargeting, you can track a customer’s journey through your website.
Video Engagement
Facebook loves video and really loves live video. As you create custom audiences, you can target individuals who have watched your video as well as people who have watched a percentage of your video.
Mulready recommends conducting a Facebook live and then amplifying it to your fans. After gauging the reaction of your fans, turn the Facebook live video into an ad for cold audiences.
You should then be thinking about using the video and images for retargeting.
Facebook Engagement
Facebook is making a huge push for engagement and community building. You can use this engagement for retargeting.
One of the areas Mulready highlighted was Facebook Messenger audiences. I will have to do more research on this particular audience engagement type. But I have started the process by including Facebook Messenger on my website.
Tips for Success
Mulready offered a number of tips for increasing success:
- Include multiple warm audiences in one ad set. Facebook likes larger audiences.
- Create a new ad account as a backup just in case your primary account is frozen.
- Test the conversion between desktop and mobile.
- Begin your ads with warm traffic and then move to cold. It lets you work out the bugs.
- Upload and review your custom audiences in Audience Insights.
Finally, Mulready recommended taking inventory of your content based on funnels, pages, etc. as a starting point for building and improving your Facebook custom audiences and ads.
I have heard Mulready speak on a number of occasions, typically, on Amy Porterfield’s podcast. He always brings value to the conversation.
