If you’re a social advertiser, you have your work cut out for you. Along with your industry peers, you likely face a few key audience-related problems on a daily basis:
- Audience fatigue
- Audience overlap
- Ad relevance
This article aims to provide some relief, bringing these three issues together and offering a simple but broad solution. By using lookalike audiences and certain ad creative types, social marketers can tackle these daily frustrations and bring some peace to a challenging workday in the world of digital advertising.
Coffee break after reading this article optional.
The Audience Struggle Is Real
Every audience has a life cycle. Depending on its size, budget, and campaign length, an audience will eventually grow tired of the campaign’s ads (i.e., fatigue). Naturally, a smaller audience (< 80,000) will naturally fatigue quicker than a larger one. The most efficient way to avoid audience fatigue is to keep things fresh and strategize for new audiences every seven to 14 days.
This begs the question: “Where the *&%! am I going to get a new audience every week??” Answer to follow shortly…
Overlap and Relevance
Audience overlap is an another issue that social marketers face on a regular basis. This is a result of ad sets from the same advertiser ending up in the same auction, bidding against each other, and inevitably damaging performance. Having overlapping audiences can lead to poor delivery of your ad sets.
Additionally, averaging a high Ad Relevance Score can often be difficult, especially if you’re constantly trying to avoid overlap and fatigue. Facebook calculates the Ad Relevance Score based on the positive and negative feedback an ad receives from its target audience. In short, if you’re Relevance Score is high, your audience wants to see it, and if not—well something’s wrong.
Making the Best Use of Ad Creative for Your Audience Strategy
Facebook allows you to create Engagement Custom Audiences from four ad types:
- Canvas
- Video
- Slideshow
- Lead Generation
An Engagement Custom Audience is a Custom Audience made up of people who’ve interacted with your content on Facebook. "Engagement" refers to actions like viewing your video or opening your lead form on Canvas.
These four variations of ad creative are also the most customer-friendly and engaging ad types. Where it’s relevant to your campaigns, use these ad types as much as possible.
Retarget and Prospect
Using Engagement Custom Audiences (ECAs), you can retarget ads to people who’ve shown intent by interacting with your video, canvas or lead gen form. You can also use Engagement Custom Audiences as a source for a Lookalike Audience, which will let you find people similar to those who've engaged with content on Facebook.
Bringing It All Together
Marin Tip: Always try and track high-intent ECAs, capturing those who watched 95% of your video, or who opened and submitted a Lead Gen ad.
By thinking of Canvas, Video, Slideshow, & Lead Gen ad types not only as creative types, but also ‘audience making machines’, advertisers can very quickly begin to tackle fatigue, overlap, and relevance.
We all know who our target audience is. Still, we often struggle to reach them while we address the issues. The solution—combining Engagement Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences to consistently retarget while prospecting fresh audiences.
For example, suppose a 1% Lookalike of your website performs very well. However, if we use it too often, it may fatigue. If we make it any larger, it may be irrelevant. And, if we attempt to try different website pages, we’ll more than likely spend too much time analyzing potential overlapping instead of gaining new customers.
If your target your performing audience with a Video, Canvas, or Lead Gen ad, you enable two things:
- Retargeting: Lead consumers down the conversion funnel by retargeting those who’ve engaged in your creative, which inevitably indicates brand intent.
- Prospecting: Continue to prospect to a similar audience by creating a Lookalike Audience from your Engagement Custom Audience.
Marin Tip: Remember Marin Social's exclusive ability to create a Campaign Lookalike. Build a prospecting audience from those who've converted from an older, successful campaign.
It’s that simple—Video, Canvas, and Lead Generation. With a little planning and a lot of determination, you can use this 1-2-3 strategy to easily create Lookalikes to retarget and prospect.
