Ask most specialty home improvement companies how they’re using social media and they’ll likely point to a Facebook page and a few posts they’ve paid to boost. Some may even have thousands of likes and a robust community. But most companies are failing to take advantage of the true power of Facebook’s advertising — targeted campaigns that reach not just your existing customer fans, but rather those who are similar to your customers.
The strategy is called Facebook Lookalike Audiences, and at least one company is using it to create thousands of leads at a fraction of the cost of other lead generation services. In fact, over the past 16 months, West Shore, a Remodeling Big50 company, has spent $300,000 on Facebook Lookalike Audience campaigns and generated net sales of $2.7 million and more than 14,000 leads. Even better, the company spends 18% of net sales on marketing. But with the Facebook campaign it’s only spending 11%, said Tom Aleman, marketing strategist for West Shore.
“It’s blown our expectations out of the water,” Aleman said. “If you asked anyone in the industry if they could get a few million dollars in sales at 11%, they’d bite your hand off to take it.”
West Shore is now spending $25,000 a month on Lookalike Audience ad campaigns. “People say, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe you’re spending that much on Facebook ads,” he said. “But for the price of one week of TV, you can make $200,000 on Facebook and keep that marketing cost really low.”
Part of the reason Facebook advertising campaigns are so effective is because with more than two billion users across its platforms, the social juggernaut is a “mobile marketing silver bullet,” according to Hubspot. “This is important because as consumers have shifted to mobile over desktop so have B2B buyers. They now do more research, reading, and work on their phones — and spend time on the Facebook app/Instagram/Messenger,” Hubspot said in its blog.
In his conversations with other home improvement companies, Aleman said it seems that the Facebook Lookalike Audience strategy isn’t well known. Instead, many companies are still simply paying to boost their posts, which only go to existing fans in limited fashion.
“There’s a big difference between putting a post on your timeline and putting $20 behind it to boost it versus building out a campaign,” he said. “We’re not throwing our ads out there to people who already like us, but that’s what most people do.”
But while the Lookalike Audiences aren’t well known, they’re available to anyone with a Facebook page — and the right kind of data. Aleman said having a good CRM is an important prerequisite to successful Lookalike campaigns because they rely on your existing customer data.
Facebook explains it like this: “When you create a Lookalike Audience, you choose a source audience … and we identify the common qualities of the people in it (ex: demographic information or interests). Then we find people who are similar to (or ‘look like’) them.”
Here are 6 ways to use Lookalike Audiences, according to Amy Crane, whose company manages $350K in monthly Facebook ad spend.
1. Lookalike Audience based on website traffic: Install your Website Custom Audience on your website and then create lookalike audience based on your WCA.
2. Lookalike Audience based on your email list: Upload your email list to Facebook as a Custom Audience and create a Lookalike Audience based on your current email subscribers.
3. Lookalike Audience based on your Facebook fans: Just type the name of your Facebook Page in the ‘Source’ box and now you can target users that are similar to your current fans. Easy, breezy.
4. Lookalike Audience based on customers: Just like targeting your email list, but now we can narrow down just to the people that have actually bought from you. Upload your most current list to Facebook and create a lookalike audience based on the people that already buying from you.
5. Lookalike Audience based on your conversion tracking pixel: Whether you’re tracking sales, registrations or sign ups you can create a lookalike audience based on the people that are converting. You’ll find all of your conversion pixels listed in the ‘Source’ box so pick the pixel you want to create a new audience for and you’re set!
6. Lookalike Audience based on mobile app users: Facebook isn’t leaving mobile app developers out of the loop. You can create lookalike audience based on your current users.
Aleman says he’s using at least 25 different Lookalike campaigns currently that serve promotions, contests, branding and re-targeting of customers who have been on the company’s site within the last 90 days. “Having that mix of ad sets makes them more reliable,” he said.
But even though setting up the campaign can be relatively easy, Aleman warned that success requires having a good infrastructure behind the campaigns. That means first having relevant content on your website to point people toward as well as having someone on the team who can build new ads, landing pages and contest forms. His team spends several days each month planning out new ads and analyzing what’s working and what’s not.
“It’s not just shooting ads out and it works,” he said. “It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to get there.”
