How to generate high-quality leads with Lookalike Audiences

Lead generation still remains one of the top 5 challenges marketers face today. Businesses cannot survive or thrive by focusing on their existing customers so they are always on the look for new customers. There are plenty of ways to tap into new audiences and grow your customer base, however only a few businesses use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find new customers.

What is the Lookalike Audiences tool?

Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool can help you identify and reach new prospects who are similar to your current customers. Simply, Facebook uses data to match people to an audience you have created before, by their behaviour, interests, preferences and engagement rate. It is without a doubt one of the most powerful features that Facebook offers since it gives you the opportunity to appear in front of an audience who is more likely to convert.

How to create your custom Facebook audience?

Before you create your lookalike audience, you need to give Facebook the right information so that it can deliver a new audience segment filled with prospects, including:

• List of previous customers – a list of emails, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs so that Facebook will match them with its users.
• People who have interacted with your posts, videos, events and forms on both Facebook and Instagram.
• People who have visited your website or a specific page within a certain period of time. To create a custom audience based on your website visitors, you need to have Facebook pixel installed on your website.
• People who have interacted with your business in person, by phone or another offline channel.

Mission complete. Now what? 

Facebook has completed its job to find an audience that will be receptive to your content. Now is your turn to create a campaign that will deliver more buyers and subscribers to your business.

The fact that you know their interests and preferences gives you a head start in terms of personalising your campaign and thus being able to create the right message for that audience. Since personalisation leads to a huge uplift in conversion rates, this is your chance to turn the lookalike audience into loyal fans.

This means you need to put as much time and thought into developing ads with relevant and engaging content as you would to your original audience and be prepared to adapt your message so you can ensure your ad earns a higher return. If a previous ad has yielded good results, use that as your basis and tailor your ad copy accordingly.

Lookalike Audiences is an incredibly powerful tool to use to scale your Facebook campaigns and reach new audiences, and they are very easy to build. If you need any help in getting started with your first Facebook campaign or building your custom audiences on Facebook, don’t hesitate to contact us.