Feature Focus: 5 Ways Skai Helps You Target Facebook Audiences Beyond the Native Tool

Facebook audiences are the most critical component to get right when advertising on that channel. Third-party tools such as Skai Social offer advanced functionality that goes beyond what the native tool offers for marketers to strategically reach their most valuable customers.

Fundamentally, at its core, marketing is about reaching audiences with a message. Social advertising offers arguably one of the very best outlets to because of how much data on each social media user that can be used to segment them into targetable audiences.

In a January survey of 450 advertisers, publishers, and tech developers in North America by Winterberry Group and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), 62.0% of respondents said that improving audience segmentation to support better ad targeting was one of their top campaign management priorities.

Even though Facebook audiences can be segmented fairly well out-of-the-box with its native advertising tool, the problem for brands is that every one of their competitors can target the same people in the same ways. However, Skai Social gives our clients some extra Facebook audience capabilities which can be a bit of a competitive edge when paired with the right messaging. 

Five Ways Skai Helps You Target Facebook Audiences Better Than Facebook

Skai Facebook Audience #1 – Conversion Lookalikes

Lookalike Audiences are one of the most powerful tools in the modern marketer’s arsenal. Often used to expand existing audiences to new locations and products, their true potential is broader and can help scale virtually anything. 

A lookalike audience is an audience of people with similar traits as a determined seed audience. For example, someone can create a lookalike audience of people who visited their website to reach new people that share similar behaviors, interests, and demographics as their website visitors. This enables more accurate prospecting than reach new people with no shared traits as your key audiences. 

Skai improves the relevancy of Facebook’s native lookalike audiences by enabling Conversion Lookalike audience creation based on people who have converted from a specific campaign. Facebook marketers can create a Facebook audience of people with similar traits to those who have visited their website, but Skai clients can create an audience of people with similar traits to those who have visited their website and based on the campaign that they converted from. 

To learn more, read our case study, Leading Print Services Company Scales Conversions With Skai Social.

The value here to advertisers is that customers often convert from different campaigns. Maybe one campaign for a mountain bike targeted extreme sports fans while another campaign targeted long-distance bike racers. Even though both campaigns drove sales, it might make sense to have two new lookalike audiences—one for extreme sports fans who bought mountain bikes and one for long-distance bike racers who bought mountain bikes. This way, advertisers can target both groups with more focused messaging and have different bids and other settings.

Read the new Skai white paper on the cross-channel impact of social advertising

Skai Facebook Audience #2 – TV Signals

Powered by Skai’s Automated Actions, Skai Social clients can activate—and take various automated actions on—their social ads based on real-time television signals using TV Signals.

For example, a kitchen retailer, Wren Kitchens, relies heavily on TV advertising in order to raise awareness of their products within the UK. With the rise in competition, Wren Kitchens needed a way to amplify their current efforts and conquest their competitors. Skai’s TV Signals were leveraged to increase bids whenever Wren Kitchens or competing TV commercials aired. This further increased awareness of their brand while also driving sales of their products. 

A consumer goods brand also increased conversions by 36% by leveraging TV Signals to ensure whenever their competitors’ ads aired on television, their ads appeared on Social.

“A key priority of ours is providing signals that improve volume and efficiency coming from Facebook campaigns,” says John Dobrowolski, Skai’s General Manager, Social. “With half of consumers using social media while watching TV, it’s a terrific signal to augment Facebook ads campaigns”

How TV Signals for Social works

• Skai’s TV Signal for Social partner, TVTY, monitors 600+ channels around the world 24/7 (see the full list of monitored TV channels supported)
• Video fingerprinting technology identifies what’s airing in-real time and the brand is identified within half a second
• This information is sent as a trigger to Skai
• Skai’s Automated Actions can be triggered off of these TV moments

Skai Facebook Audience #3 – Custom Audience in Detailed Targeting

With Facebook Custom Audiences, social advertisers can upload customer data (i.e. names, emails, addresses, etc.) which Facebook will match to its user base and then target those people. This matching process is all done behind the scenes and not exposed to marketers to maintain user privacy. 

With Skai’s Custom Audience in Detail Targeting, marketers can mix and match user actions in order to build new, refined Custom Audiences lists.

Some industry examples

Retail: Target customers who have purchased one pair of shoes from your brand and apply and detailed targeting to reach people who are also on the list of people who bought a pair of pants. Then target these users who are in both audiences with ads to purchase a shirt from your brand to complete the ensemble. 

Consumer Electronics: Target buyers of your tablet and a stylus with a case for that device.

CPG: Target people who have purchased your detergent and softener with ads for dryer sheets.  

Finservices: Target someone who created a checking AND savings account to reach them with credit card ads. 

Skai Facebook Audience #4 – Third-party Audiences

Third-party data vendors act as an agent on behalf of marketers to gather audience data at scale from across the web and can help them use various methodologies and sources to find people clearly researching their next car purchase.

Especially for smaller brands challenged with undersized first-party audience pools—marketers cannot rely on first-party data alone for all of their data needs. As long as third-party data is collected in a strict-PII way—and can be used to drive business goals in combination with first- and second-party data sources—it can clearly provide value. 

Third-party data can help marketers:

• Identify high-value customers and high-potential prospects
• Reach “actionable audiences” for customer expansion, upsell and reactivation
• Optimize marketing spend by focusing on audiences with the highest potential
• Create robust customer profiles to enhance marketing strategy and customer interactions
• Model for honed audiences tailored to specific needs
• Acquire and engage more customers through paid social campaigns

We’ve previously announced our integrations with Experian and Epsilon that offer access to third-party audiences. Now we’ve expanded these capabilities from the U.S. to Brazil. Now advertisers can reach people in Brazil based on data from Experian. 

Skai Facebook Audience #5 – Localized Budgets

With Localized Budgets, when a social marketer creates a campaign in Skai, they are able to select an option to split each of their locations into their own respective ad set then easily apply a custom budget that reflects the location’s marketing budget. This removes the manual and extensive work retailers on Facebook have been used to, allowing them to focus on optimizing their campaigns and driving more sales. 

“Localized Budgets removes the extensive, manual work regionalized businesses on Facebook have been used to,” says Shai Maoz, Skai’s Senior Product Manager, who worked closely with retail clients to develop this feature. “This allows them to focus on optimizing their campaign strategy and driving more sales instead of wasting time building and re-building ad sets for each geolocation.” 

Although Localized Budgets isn’t specifically an audience solution, by leveraging it during social ad campaign creation, marketers can target multiple audiences very easily in an efficient workflow.

“This is a unique solution for a unique problem that only multi-location social advertisers face,” says Crissi Cupak, Senior Director of Product, Skai. “Skai is dedicated to helping marketers save time and drive performance, and Localized Budgets is the answer to a hard problem that our clients asked us to solve.”

Watch Localized Budgets in action with this video!

Have you mastered Facebook audiences in your social advertising?

Skai Social helps marketers engage social customers while achieving your branding and performance goals. Reach out today to schedule a quick and easy demo of any or all of our platforms to see how Skai can help your marketing organization shine.

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