Facebook remarketing made simple

Have you heard about Facebook remarketing, retargeting or custom audiences and wondered what on earth those terms refer to?

Or maybe you think you know – but you’re not 100% sure?

You’re not the only one! This one area seems to be a major stumbling block for many business owners and marketers, and it’s not helped by the jargon being bandied around by bloggers and internet marketers who use Facebook ads on a much more high-powered level than we will ever need to!

Read on to discover exactly what Facebook remarketing is, why so many businesses have seen extraordinary results using this tool – and how you can use it too!

Or alternatively, I explain it all on video, here:

The first thing you need to know is that Facebook remarketing, or retargeting is all part of the Facebook ads toolset (for want of a better word.)  So, to get your hands on all the juicy goodness I’m about to describe, you’ll need to invest some time and money into Facebook ads. You need time to learn the basics (even if you’re planning to outsource this) and money to get access to a truly unique way to amplify your content, message and promotions. (For a quick overview of Facebook ads and all the massive potential they hold for small businesses, check out this SHORT VIDEO I made.)

And that’s something that many people miss. They see Facebook ads as ‘having to pay to reach the people we used to reach for free.’ But the thing is that Facebook advertising offers far more than just being able to reach the people who ‘liked’ your Page.

Facebook ads allow you to reach a highly targeted audience that you would never be able to reach just by growing your Page (and that targeting ability is unmatched by any other marketing tool.)

But it doesn’t stop there-  Facebook ads give you the ability to go back and talk to people who have shown an interest in your business or your content. That, in a nutshell, is what Facebook remarketing is.

(By ‘go back and talk’ I mean – ‘show a Facebook ad to.’)

Why is this so amazing? Well, we know that, in business, we need people to know, like and trust us, or our products, before they will buy from us. So, our audiences – online or offline – aren’t going to just buy the first time they hear about us – we are going to have to follow up.

(By the way, if you are one of those businesses using Facebook ads to blast people who have never met you before with ads that say ‘buy my stuff’ then please don’t be surprised if you don’t get any results! Facebook ads aren’t a silver bullet that change people’s buying behaviour – they are simply a channel that allows you to reach exactly the people you want to and to follow up with them.)

Please make sure you aren’t doing this with your Facebook ads!

 

Facebook remarketing gives us a simple and elegant solution to follow up with and build relationships with people who have shown an interest in our business or our content. Even better, we can do this in an automated way,  that is very cost-effective, and that we can track and measure.

Now are you excited?!! Great!!

 

Then read on to understand just how all this wizardy works …..

Facebook remarketing really can seem like magic!

Facebook remarketing – how it works

To remarket to someone (ie go back and talk to them again using a Facebook ad) you first need to include them within a specific list, or custom audience, that sits within the Facebook ads mechanism, rather like adding people to an email database. Unlike an email list, though, when you set up a custom audience within Facebook, you can’t see the actual information that you’ve collected – Facebook holds all that – you just get to see how many people you have in your audience.

Once you’ve got your custom audiences set up, then you can show an ad only to them by choosing your custom audience as the targeting option when you’re setting up your ad, rather than using any of Facebook’s other filters like Interests, Demographics, Behaviours, etc.

In other words, the Facebook remarketing process revolves around creating custom audiences of people who have met and responded to your business or content already.

Facebook offers several different forms of custom audiences, so that you can capture the information of people who’ve found your content in all sorts of different ways:

(For your free guide to follow each step as you set these audiences up for yourself, just click on the image below:

Facebook remarketing website custom audience

You can capture the information of people who have visited your website. You can choose who you want to target exactly – people who have visited a specific page, or who have visited one page but not another, or who have all the pages with a certain word in the url, or visitors based on a time period.

Facebook remarketing customer list custom audience

You can upload your existing list into Facebook to show ads to them. This can be a list of email addresses or phone numbers.
Now you’re going to ask why you need to do that when you can already contact them? It’s because the majority of your list won’t open all of your emails – so sharing the message via an ad becomes a very powerful boost to your effectiveness!

Facebook remarketing engagement custom audience

This is a more recent development – but one that is really exciting! You can now create a custom audience of people who responded to any piece of content you shared on your Facebook page and / or who watched any of your videos. Once again, you can specify particular posts or videos and specific responses. With the video option, you can also choose to target people who have watched a certain percentage or length of your video – allowing you to talk to only those that are the most interested if you want to. (And remember, your Facebook Lives count as videos!) Yes you did read that right! You can now target people based on how much of your message (in video format) they consumed – WOW

Facebook lookalike audiences

These aren’t strictly part of the Facebook remarketing system, but they are another bonus feature that Facebook gives us, so I’m including them here.
Not only can you create Facebook remarketing custom audiences but, once you have any of these in place – or indeed an audience of those who like your Page or who have RSVPed to an event, for example, you can ask Facebook to create a Lookalike audience. This means that the Facebook elves go off and find a whole new group of people for you who have the same demographics and interests as the ‘seed’ audience you asked it to work from. Facebook is essentially finding you a whole new audience who could be perfect customers, free of charge. Another WOW!! deserved here, I think!

 

Facebook remarketing – the opportunities

Once you put all these opportunities together, you can quickly see that your Facebook ad campaigns can change character – from being a one-off, stand-alone activity, to becoming a sequence of messages designed to attract and connect with the right people for you and then to encourage them to buy. Guess which type of campaign is going to be more successful? (And build you amazing brand awareness, goodwill and a whole throng of raving fans to boot!!)

For example, you could run a Facebook ad to share a blog or a video with an audience targeted by their interests, and then follow up by showing an ad for a relevant offer only to those people who watched the video or who clicked through to the blog. Then – you can retarget those who visited your sales page but who didn’t go to your thank you page.

Alternatively, you can run Facebook remarketing ads to specific segments of your email database, or to people who RSVPed to your Facebook event page. The possibilities are endless!

Get the idea?!! I hope you can see just how amazing Facebook remarketing can be for your business!

And that’s why Facebook ads are so powerful! You now have the opportunity to create a very specific and targeted series of messages for people, based on actions they’ve taken. And this will result in getting much better results than just blasting a generic message out to everyone!

I really hope that you are now massively inspired (and revved up!!) to go and create some custom audiences and Facebook remarketing ads of your own.

Want a free, step-by-step guide that shows you exactly how to set up these custom audiences? Then just click on the image below and I’ll send it over to you right away!

Please let me know what you plan to do – or ask any questions – in the comments.
And if you’d like any help with training, or getting this working for your business, please just whizz me over an email: juliaATbramblebuzzDOTcoDOTuk.