5 Ways to Utilize Data With Social Media and Lookalike Campaigns

February 5, 2019

5 Ways to Utilize Data With Social Media and Lookalike Campaigns

In this article, we’ll go over 6 ways to utilize data with social media and lookalike campaigns.

In the era of Big Data, it is in your best interest as a business owner or marketer to harness the power of that data to drive your digital campaigns.

The social media channel in particular has developed especially robust and sophisticated data technology for marketing and advertising.

We’ll be focusing primarily on Facebook in this article, as it is the most widely used social platform, and the concepts covered here can be applied to other social media avenues. First we have to understand data to Utilize Data With Social Media.

Utilize Data With Social Media: What Data?

In the context of this article, we’re referring to two categories of data:

Data provided by Facebook via the Ads Manager, Audience Insights, and Analytics
- Including: demographics, likes/follows, browsing history, purchase history, app usage and much more

Your own data, or from a third-party system such as Hubspot, Zoho, or Salesforce
- Such as: email lists, customer purchase history, and more depending on how sophisticated your data management is

Ideally you think about and implement all of this data in an integrated manner. Regardless of where the data comes from, use it to understand your customers and audience so you can optimize your campaigns and the customer experience.

Now, let’s get into some of the ways that your data can be put to work.

1. Utilize Data With Social Media: Fortify Your Email Campaigns

With ever shrinking attention spans, and more and more distractions, getting your audience to engage with emails can be a challenge. Repetition is often the key to getting through.

Consider running a paid social campaign that mirrors, or complements your email campaign. This can be as simple as targeting ads your entire email list, or only those who failed to engage with an email offer.

When creating your ads, use similar messaging to your emails, or whatever is most appropriate for your situation.

2. Utilize Data With Social Media: Re-target Previous Customers

Often it can be more effective to reel in previous customers than to try and earn the business of new customers. At the same time, many customers would like to do business with you again, they’ve simply just been caught up in their lives and haven’t got around to it.

By using your customer data, you can build a paid social campaign to target those specific customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while. Consider your product cycles, and purchasing behavior to decide who you’ll target and with what messaging.

A simple discount, free shipping, or other similar offer can be enough to entice previous customers for a return purchase.

3. Target Purchasing Patterns

Facebook analytics and other various tools can show you what people are buying. Maybe you’re seeing that customers are often purchasing a certain style of jeans with a certain style of shirt.

Use that data to target customers who purchased those jeans with a deal on the shirt. Or create a bundle deal with both products for those who haven’t made a purchase yet.

By using your data to understand the purchasing patterns of your customers, you can create highly targeted paid social campaigns that deliver exactly what they’re looking for!

4. Create High Performing Lookalike Audiences

Tis is a great way to Utilize Data With Social Media. By using lookalike audiences, you can find new customers who are similar to your existing customers.

Essentially, you provide Facebook with some customer data (email addresses work, though the more data points, the better). Facebook then takes that data, and finds patterns (demographic, online behavior, purchases, etc.) amongst your current customers, and then looks for those patterns amongst a new audience.

This of course is an oversimplification of the technology, but you get the idea.

Due to the similarities to your current customers, this lookalike audience is much more “warm” than just advertising to a completely “cold” audience.

There are certainly a variety of angles you can use to approach this method, using different source audiences can be appropriate for different targeting. However, a straightforward option is to analyze your data to find your best customers, those that provide you the most value – the top 10-20%. Use those customers as your source audience that the lookalike audience will be based on.

Learn more about how to create a lookalike audience here.

5. Exclude Recent Buyers

This one might seem obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less important!

You’ll want to use your customer data to create a custom audience of those who have made recent purchases. Then, you’ll exclude that audience from any relevant campaigns to prevent serving ads for a product they just purchased.

This saves you money, as well as makes for a better customer experience.

Consider the tactics we’ve gone through here a starting point. As data and targeting technology grows more and more sophisticated, the possibilities are endless.

By Affix Advertising