Audience Targeting: All It Takes is a Sprinkle of Fairy Dust

Every advertiser has an ideal customer in mind for their business. They might be prospects who’ve shared their email address; people with certain shopping habits; or users who’ve taken specific actions in the advertiser’s app. There are a variety of ways that advertisers segment their specific customers and it often differs by vertical, company size and even between two competitors with the exact same offering.

The challenge is that you must reach your audience across a variety of platforms in a way that enables you to deliver what your customer is looking for when and where they’re looking for it. What’s the best way to do this? It starts with honing in on your most valuable customer.

Tap Into the Power of Intent Driven Audiences
We all know that Facebook is an undisputed leader when it comes to user data. They have sophisticated algorithms that surface trends and they can segment audiences based on a wide-range of behaviors. But what is the one thing that’s missing in Facebook’s vast sea of knowledge? Intent.

If you’re a regular online-shopper, it’s easy to assume that you will buy again, and showcasing products similar to what you’ve recently purchased will most likely get you back to the shopping cart. But, what happens when you’re searching for something that isn’t necessarily part of your normal routine?

For example, what if you’re looking for a new investment opportunity, trying to book your next holiday, or searching for an apartment in a new neighborhood? Then outside your interests, behaviors and demographics, there’s a sprinkle of fairy dust required to surface what you need to know right now.

In partnership with Facebook, Skai developed a solution just for that. Intent Driven Audiences (IDA) enables you to capture the users who have searched for your products or brand in a search engine and automatically creates a Custom Audience in Facebook.

You can then match this audience (where you’ve nailed the intent) with other interests or attributes that make sense to your business.

Finally, take that very specific audience and multiply it 20-fold with Lookalike Audiences. Precision meets scale.

Since IDA has been out for a while, we hope you’re already taking full advantage of it. If not, please contact us to learn more.

Taking Intent-Driven Audiences to the Next Level
For even more results, we recommend tapping into the power of Facebook’s Audience Insights. Since it segments any audience by its demographics, device usage, interests, geographical dispersity and much more, you can analyze any Custom Audience you’ve created and then apply your learnings in your other Facebook campaigns. You’ll be surprised at how these insights can help to improve campaign performance.

In the context of IDA that means you can also connects the dots backwards! Take your winning age ranges, gender, device types and cities, and refine your search activity. Extract the best performing interests and compile a new keyword list to target in Google, Bing, Yandex and beyond. There is so much power in understanding your most valuable audience, we just need to learn to leverage it across all of our marketing efforts.

The Divide Between Search and Social? Not for your Audiences!
Advertisers are often reluctant to merge their search and social activities. Different online campaign managers, different publishers, even different platforms sometimes make it difficult to see the connection. But in a world where these silos exist, we gain advantage when our marketing programs transcend platform differences.

For example, advertisers who retarget subscribers and have a baseline of users either in a directory or in a CRM provider, can easily create a Customer Match in Google. Why not create a list-based Custom Audience in Facebook as well? Granted, not all users overlap, but we can estimate (and later on even measure) that a good percentage of them do match, and now we can shift learnings from one publisher to the other. Why should we manage a list that consists of the same people in two separate teams? Unite them to save time and enrich your analysis.

And the connection doesn’t stop here. Facebook’s Website Custom Audiences (WCA) is rule-based segmentation that is similar to Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). It has the same rules with different channels. Why not take advantage of both?

And what about Lookalikes? Google recently introduced Similar Audiences and Yahoo! Gemini has Lookalikes as well. Increase your reach by taking advantage of all of these similar methodologies.

Tying It All Together
Imagine that you could define your audience once and then find them across publishers wherever they are. You’d have a single place to analyze these audiences and their interactions in different channels, quickly deciding which should be paused and where you should invest more. This vision will be a reality in the not-so-distant future.

If we go back to our ultimate goal of reaching and engaging our most valuable audiences, we know it shouldn’t matter where you reach them, on which device and in what advertising channel. All that matters is that you reach them in a meaningful way. And if you could have tools that make this a reality, that are channel agnostic and only surface which users are worthwhile, where they are and how much to invest in them…why then you could sit back and let the magic begin!

It will take time to get there. Organizational structures, antiquated tools and competing priorities sometimes get in the way. But if we bring teams together more often and cultivate sharing across search, social and other media channels, we will all benefit and be ready for a future that makes it easy to find and engage our audiences wherever they might be.