Meta’s Lookalike Audiences: Boost Your Success With Clean Data
In the fast paced world of digital marketing, we’re always on the lookout for ways to expand our reach and connect with potential customers. And with the ever-changing trends, we know that the power of social media advertising has been a total game changer. A useful strategy that has been circulating with a lot of brands in social media for the last few years is the use of “lookalike audiences.” If you’re unfamiliar, this is a way to expand your outreach on social media by targeting people who share similar characteristics with your existing customer base. Essentially, by making use of your customer data on social media, your website/app, or other marketing platforms, you can find and deliver your ads to those who have similar traits and interests as your current customers. Pretty awesome, right? In this post, we’re going to explore the process of building lookalike audiences for Meta, and dive into how your brand can maximize advertising efforts using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and eCommerce tools such as Klaviyo and Shopify.
1. Identify High-Value Customers: To begin the lookalike audience creation process, brands must identify their high-value customers. This is done by analyzing various metrics, including purchase frequency, average order value, and customer loyalty. By focusing on the top, say, 20 percent, of your customer base, your brand can ensure that you are targeting the most valuable and engaged audience members. Of course this percentage is variable, but at a baseline, Meta recommends using about 1,000-5,000 of your best customers to create your source audience. Using different CRM and eCommerce platforms here can fiercely simplify this process and save you the effort of manually going through your own data to find your best customers. For example, you can use Klaviyo’s Customer Lifetime Value data from your email channel (which is often where your best customers are) in order to create a more accurate audience.
2. Create Source Audience: Once your high-value customers are identified, the next step is extracting the relevant data that can be used to build your source audience. A simple method to use is creating a list of your most high-value customers and inputting it into Meta. If using a pre-existing list of customers isn’t feasible for your brand, you can also find shared characteristics from your high-value customers and give Meta access to data from your website, app, or social media engagement to create your custom audience.
However, leveraging CRM and eCommerce platforms at this step as well will take this outreach method to the next level, as these platforms can collect and store data outside of just your social media (such as shop purchase history, abandoned cart data, and engagement patterns). For example, with Shopify, you can actually create an audience within the platform and then integrate it into your social media lookalike audience on Meta. Learn about creating and integrating Shopify Audiences here.
Remember that your brand needs clean and accurate data in order to correctly identify your top customers. For example, you may have a customer who ordered 5 times, but used a different email address each time. Your platforms might count each of these email addresses as different people, and assume you have 5 different customers that placed 1 order, rather than 1 customer placing 5 orders. With clean and unified data, you’ll be able to know that this customer is actually worth 5 times what was originally assumed! The results can be dramatic. Check out one of our case studies to learn more.
3. Build The Lookalike Audience: Using the source audience, you can then create lookalike audience profiles. By inputting the customer data, the locations you are targeting, and your desired audience size, the platform's algorithms can identify and target your ads to users with shared characteristics to your target audience. Your audience will refresh itself every couple of days, and you can even decide the percent range of how closely you want your audience to resemble your current customer base. Note that you can even create up to 500 different lookalike audiences from the same source audience in order to target different branches of your customer base!
4. Test and Iterate: Once the lookalike audience is created, it's important to continuously test and iterate the campaign. You can experiment with different ad formats, messaging, and targeting options to refine your social media marketing strategy. By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates and conversion rates, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your ad performance and audience targeting.
With lookalike audiences as a tool in your pocket, you can boost your social media efforts and open your brand up to new avenues for growth and engagement. While the details presented in this post are specific to Meta, several other social media platforms also offer similar services, such as LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences and Pinterest’s actalike targeting. Keep in mind that the creation process will vary with these other platforms. However, while specifics may change between these platforms, the benefits of integrating CRM and eCommerce platforms, as well as of having clean data, remain.
To learn more about how Orita can help you achieve clean data, schedule a call with us.
