It is a tried and true practice in marketing to build a list of contacts that consists of people who, for whatever reason, have shown that they have a high likelihood of becoming your clients.
The methodology of reaching out and contacting that list of contacts changes, but the basic principle remains. Your marketing is simply more effective when you direct it to people who have given you reason to believe that they have a high likelihood of buying.
When companies try to break into Facebook Ads and use that platform to drive business, a mistake that they often make is that they fail to take that opportunity to build a valuable asset in the form of a dedicated audience.
Three Types of Audiences
Experts have long talked about three types of audiences that exist in marketing:
- Audiences you neither control nor own. An example of this would be the people who see your roadside billboard.
- Audiences you control. An example of this would be the people who attend an event where you are one of a number of speakers.
- Audiences you own. An example of this would be your mailing list for a weekly newsletter.
The Facebook Ads platform is special in that it gives us the ability to target an audience that sort of floats between #2 and #3. While you do not own any Facebook audience outright, you are able to exert a level of control over that audience that comes very close to ownership.
Building Your Own Audience on Facebook
When you log into the Facebook Ads platform, you are immediately given access to many different options for audiences. You can target people based on geography, age, sex, interests, etc. This targeting system can be very effective, but even when used correctly, you are inevitably going to be directly competing against someone else, which drives up costs.
The way to cut these costs and increase conversion efficiency within the platform is by building your own audience based on interactions with your brand and your content.
For example, here is a process that we often follow with our clients:
- Go live on Facebook and share some valuable information with your page’s followers.
- Turn that video into an ad targeting a broad demographic, such as people in a given age group within your geographic area.
- Run this ad as a video views campaign.
Once a significant number of people (5,000+) have viewed this ad, we have now built an audience.
This audience is an asset, and it is ours!
Utilizing Your Own Audience on Facebook
Now that we have this audience, we can utilize it by creating new ads specifically targeting it.
These ads specifically and exclusively target the audience we have built. We do this because we know that these people are interested in our offering. That fact is a much more relevant item of information than anything else we may know about the audience.
By targeting this private audience that we have built and running ads that are optimized for conversions, we can see some of the most efficient conversion numbers in digital marketing. At this point, our marketing becomes very powerful and efficient!
However, this approach requires businesses to view their Facebook audience as an asset. That being the case, businesses need to be willing to invest in order to build that audience initially through video engagement ads. Once that investment has been made, though, so long as the videos are relevant to the offer, that newly built audience is going to print money!
