What We Can Do And You Can’t? Precise Targeting.

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Getting to know who your customers are is a crucial step for a successful Google Ad or Facebook campaign. Facebook alone has 1 billion+ daily active users, so you must target only those who are potentially interested in your product. Any audiences that are not likely to convert for you is a waste of your advertising dollar.

Of course, you already know that. A 15-year-old kid knows that. However, how do you execute that? These advertising platforms only let you target people in a pretty broad interest group.

For example, you are a home theatre company, and you want to get more inquiries to fill your sales pipeline. What do you do? Well, you or your marketing agency probably would run ads to people in a certain age range who are interested in home theatre, correct?

Well, advertising platforms from the big tech companies are super intelligent. Whatever you do on the Internet, they can sort you into an interest group.

Let’s say I’m on BestBuy looking at a TV speaker for my place. When I compare different speaker models, I go onto a speaker review site. Based on this interaction with various websites, the advertising platforms now think that I’m interested in home theatres.

Well, I’m not rich enough to install a home theatre in my house yet, haha. However, if your ads were to run to people inside the “home theatre” interest group, then you will be showing your ads to me, and wasting your money, right?

Also, even if I’m rich enough to own a home theatre. I’m not the right person to show the ad too because home theatre development should always take place during the building development instead of after.

How do you solve that?

One way to go about it is by using the Look A Like audience function available on these established advertising platforms.

A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers or your best current prospect.

It’s super powerful. The margin of error can be as low as 1%. With only 1% of the difference, you won’t have to waste money targeting people like myself and can truly target people who can afford to build a home theatre.

Well, the tool itself is perfect, but you can’t use it. Why?

Because this tool requires a significant amount of data to work well. According to Facebook, to make the algorithm work, you need to use a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers (or prospect) as a good starting point.

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Do you have access to that data? Even if you do, for many service-based businesses, this doesn’t help much. Because your customers change their online behavior as time goes. Today, I installed a home theatre, tomorrow, my internet footprint might be focusing on getting a new water boiler.

The data you provide to Facebook will be skewed heavily because your service is likely a one-time per year kind of deal.

So, how do we solve it?

As a web design and marketing company, we have access to hundreds of web properties. Every day, thousands of people land on to our web properties to find information and request quote. We can feed that data to Facebook.

For example, each day, around 2000 people are landing on our home renovation related websites. We know these people are in the process of doing a home renovation project like caulking around windows, vents, taps, or electrical outlets. We can feed this data to Facebook and get it to find more people like the 2000 people we tracked at a 1% margin of error.

Doing so, we have access to all the people in Canada who are currently doing renovation projects. By cross-referencing different data points, we can find out people who are rich enough to own a home theatre and start showing your ads to them.

Message From This Post’s Sponsor

To help you enjoy life and have your finances help you reach your life goals, speak to Vancouver financial advisor, Bily Xiao. He is a Certified Financial Planner in Vancouver with a background at Microsoft and other tech companies. His Vancouver Financial Planner website has been cited on Forbes, Yahoo Finance and The Huffington Post for his financial expertise and is a member of the Financial Planning Association of Canada.