If you’re looking to get repeat customers and to attract new ones, you need to be highly targeted with your marketing. For each stage of the marketing funnel, there are different objectives which each require specific tactics in order to target the right audience.

Here’s how you can use Facebook Custom Audiences at each of the stages of the funnel: discovery, conversion and loyalty. It’s also important to note that you should tailor your content to each stage of the marketing funnel.

To begin with, you need to enable Facebook’s Pixel code on your website in order to use Custom Audience lists.

Drive loyalty, get repeat customers – create a Custom Audience list for users who shop online

Attracting repeat customers and getting lifetime value from customers is vital. If you’re looking to target existing customers who have already bought online, use this Facebook Custom Audience list.

Once you’ve installed the Facebook Pixel code, whenever someone visits your site or interacts with your brand, they’ll be tagged with a code to track them. This will enable your ad to pop up while they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed. This is known as Facebook Remarketing.

To implement it, go to Audiences in Facebook Ad Manager, click on ‘Create audience’ and choose ‘Custom audience’ then ‘Website traffic’. Choose the drop down ‘People who visited specific web pages’ and insert the URL for your thank-you or order success page. Finally, give your audience list a name. Then, when you create your advert, select this Custom Audience list as your audience.

Use email addresses and phone numbers to target existing customers

If you already have a list of customers who buy regularly from you, or have signed up to your newsletter, you’re half-way there! Facebook allows you to upload a spreadsheet of email addresses, or phone numbers, so you can create adverts aimed at your current customers.

To do this, create a ‘Custom audience’ and then choose ‘Customer file.’ Read Facebooks’s best practices for customer data for tips of how to upload your customer details.

Conversions: drive sales and enquiries

Convert users who have chosen to abandon their transaction.

You can also create a Facebook Custom Audience list of users who visited your shopping basket but did not view the order success page.

To do this, go to ‘Create audience’ and choose the ‘website traffic’ option. Then choose ‘People who visit specific web pages but not others’. Insert the URL for your shopping basket for the option ‘include people who visit any web page that meets the following rules’, then insert your order success page in the ‘Exclude people who visit any web page that meets the following rules’.

By doing this, you can re-target users who have abandoned their shopping cart and bring them back to your website using Facebook ads.

Specific product or service page re-marketing.

All you need to do here is create a Custom Audience list for users who visit a specific product page. In this example, we are only targeting users who have visited our blue jeans category page.

You will need to wait until your audience list grows, so the audience list is large enough. The recommended minimum is 100 users.

Your Facebook ad will need to be specific to the product or service you are targeting, so when you design your ads bear in mind that the audience is already aware of your product and may be ready to take the next step towards conversion.

Drive people to your store or event

This step allows you to target people in your local area who are familiar with your brand. Add specific location targeting to your campaign and include Facebook Custom Audience lists of All Users who have visited your website.

The advert then needs to convince users to visit your store, or sign up to an event. Use the call to action ‘get directions’ to drive footfall to your store.

Example by Facebook:

Discover a wider reach of customers – let them come to you!

Your ideal audience list.

Facebook’s precise audience targeting means you can serve your content directly to your ideal customer. This is also known as persona targeting. Once you know who your ideal customer is and who will provide you with the highest return on investment, you can create your core audience and target them.

You can target your audiences by location, age, gender, languages and demographics, interests or behaviours.

Create a bank of similar users.

A ‘look-a-like audience’ is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are.

You start the process with your source audience, or in other words people who are already interested in your business. We recommend starting with a list of all the visitors to your website, this is so that Facebook can understand who is in your current audience and find other similar users.

In order to take advantage of this targeting, you need to install Facebook Pixel using Google Tag Manager.

First, create an audience list of all the users who have visited your website:

Next, navigate to ‘Audiences’ and create a ‘Lookalike’ audience and set the website audience list you created above as the ‘Source’. Finally, choose the audience percentage. I recommend choosing 1%. This means only the top 1% of best matches will be in your audience list.

Facebook’s targeting enables businesses to reach customers at each stage of the marketing funnel (loyalty, conversion and discovery) and is a powerful marketing tool that enables you to do sophisticated targeting based on your users’ behaviour and your own data.

So, get started! Set out your marketing objectives and start trying your own Facebook advertising campaigns, today!

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