Seasonal

How to Reach the Right Facebook Audience during the Holiday Season

Keeping in mind the sheer amount of Facebook users and the increasing competition among advertisers during the holiday season, it is crucial to define who you want to reach with your campaigns. With the multiple Facebook audience targeting options, you are likely to reach the right people. In this blog, we give you an overview of all the possible Facebook audiences.

How to reach the right Facebook audience during the holiday season

Throughout the holidays, consumers are extremely active on Facebook and Instagram. Time spent on Facebook starts increasing already in early October and reaches a peak around New Year’s Eve. According to research by Facebook, 49% of all people surveyed globally find Facebook influential in their holiday shopping and 28% say Instagram is influential in their holiday shopping. Therefore, it cannot be denied that the holidays are THE prime time for you to reach the right audience. What types of audiences can you choose from for your Facebook ads? We will give you an overview of the possible Facebook audiences and a sneak peak into how Remote Audiences specifically helped De Persgroep reach its goals.

Overview of Facebook Audiences

Facebook offers you a range of audience targeting options. Choosing a relevant audience for your business is crucial to reach your advertising goals. You can choose one or a combination of several different audiences:

• Custom Audience
• Website Custom Audience
• Lookalike Audience
• Open Targeting
• Product Audience
• Mobile App Audience
• Engagement Custom Audience
• Remote Audience

Custom Audience

Via a Custom Audience, you can reach your offline audience among people who use Facebook. This audience can be used with other targeting options. You can use email addresses, Facebook IDs, mobile phone numbers, Device IDs as identifiers to create a Custom Audience.

Website Custom Audience

A Website Custom Audience matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. You can use the Facebook Pixel to create an ad to show to that audience. Learn more about the Facebook Pixel in our blog. You can create a Website Custom Audience for any group of visitors you would like to reach with targeted Facebook ads. For example, you can run a campaign to reach people who have visited your product page but didn’t buy your product to encourage them to go back to your website. Or you can create an audience of everyone who has visited your website in the last month.

Lookalike Audience

A Lookalike 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. Based on your Custom Audience, we can start looking for people with similar behaviours or interests. This is a very interesting group depending on the quality of your Custom Audience to reach out to new customers you haven’t been in touch with before. We recently launched our Automatic Audience Creator with which you can automate the process of creating multiple Lookalike Audiences – saving you time and therefore money.

Open Targeting

You can also choose to reach people depending on specific characteristics. With the Open Targeting option, you can set a multitude of different options based on what Facebook knows about users such as:

• Demographic (age, gender)
• Interests (apps they used, interests shared on timelines, pages they liked)
• Behaviours (based on digital activities)
• Education (schools, fields of study, graduation years)
• Location (country, states, provinces, cities, zip codes, postcodes)

Product Audience

This audience is based on the people who have bought your products in the past and are likely to buy your products in the future.

Mobile App Audience

You can reach people who have downloaded and interacted with your mobile app.

Engagement Custom Audience

This is an audience made up of people who have engaged with your Facebook content. ‘Engagement’ refers to actions like spending time viewing your videos, opening your Lead Form or Canvas, or interacting with your page on Facebook. Read more about the real deal about Engagement Custom Audiences in our blog.

Remote Audience

Finally, our platform gives you the special option to reach so-called ‘Remote Audiences’. This type of audience is directly or indirectly connected to your own CRM database. With criteria set by you, we can automatically fetch the right people from your CRM and create a dynamic custom audience from it. This means that your Custom Audiences will always be up to date, increasing your relevancy and ultimately the success of your campaigns. De Persgroep has used this type of audience successfully:

"Our biggest challenge was to communicate to specific audiences with a relevant message and in an automated way based on our own data. Working manually gives us less time to spend on setting up campaigns, and obliges us to focus more on the creation of messages. Therefore, our goal was to provide everyone with a message or offer that aligns with the audience’s interests."

De Persgroep’s goal was to advertise the right message at the right time, depending on where the customer finds him/herself in the customer journey. By using Remote Audiences, the campaigns turned out to be more relevant, reaching the right audience at the right time. By communicating more relevant messages to the right target audience, De Persgroep could ultimately gain more conversions. Do you want to find out more about the story and success of De Persgroep?

Conclusion

Keeping the amount of Facebook users and the increasing competition among advertisers during the holiday season in mind, it is crucial to define who you want to reach with your campaigns. With the multiple Facebook audience targeting options, you are likely to reach the right people. When using Remote Audiences, you are even more likely to reach the right people as you could see from our success story. Want to step up your targeting game? Take a look at our Audience Targeting white paper and learn all the ins and outs!