How to Create a Custom Audience and Reach the Right Customers with Facebook Ads

Many international sales businesses often collect a large amount of potential customer information during online marketing or product promotion at offline exhibitions. However, the biggest challenge is how to nurture and activate this customer group regularly without being counterproductive.

In fact, if you just continuously send mass emails or group messages on social networks, the results are not only ineffective but also risk losing many potential customers. Therefore, businesses need a more secure, compliant and sustainable marketing method, and Facebook Ads is the optimal choice.

With a huge user file and the ability to accurately target based on behavior and interests, Facebook Ads allows businesses to effectively reactivate potential customers. Not only does it stop at reaching the right audience, but it can also expand into many forms of multi-channel interaction, such as leading customers to WhatsApp to increase conversion rates.In this article, we will explore how to customize customer files and build specific targeted advertising strategies on Facebook Ads, helping businesses reactivate potential customer groups to achieve sustainable, accurate growth.

How to create a Facebook Ads Custom Audience file

1. Find your audience in Facebook Ads Manager
2. Select Create Custom Audience, select your customer list, and then select Next
3. Prepare the list and then set the data format. You can upload a list file or manually paste the customer persona information (separated by commas).
4. Match identification information
5. Upload your customer list and confirm the data before creating an advertising campaign.
6. After creating a new advertising campaign based on your business goals and needs, at the audience selection step, directly select Use an existing audience (previously uploaded the audience file).
7. Select the custom audience file you want to target, then finish creating your ad.

Prepare customer information1. Use CSV or TXT format file

2. The list must contain data of at least 100 customers
3. Must include at least one primary format information. The more types of identifying information there are, the higher the match rate will be.
4. Make sure the data column matches the format information.

Primary categories of identifying information (at least one entry is required)

Includes 7 parameters:

• Email address
• Mobile phone number
• Mobile advertiser ID
• Facebook application user ID
• Facebook page user ID
• Name
• Last name

Customer value

Customer value is an index related to customer transactions, calculated based on the quantity and frequency of transactions between customers and businesses.

• The “Value” column is only allowed to contain numeric values and cannot include currency characters.

Other identifying information (optional)

• City
• State/Province
• Country/Region
• ZIP code/postal code
• Date of birth
• Year of birth
• Gender
• Age

Collect potential customer informationBased on the main types of Facebook identification information mentioned above, we can proactively collect this data or directly export customer information from the SaleSmartly system.

Steps to export data

1. Customers on Facebook

(1) Access the customer list in the SaleSmartly system and filter out users whose social network accounts are Facebook Messenger.

(2) Select the customer to export and click Export data. The official ID in the yellow box is the Facebook Public Page User ID.

(3) After exporting, you can view the Task Center in the upper right corner, select Download file to export the customer information file.

2. Customers from channels other than Facebook

(1) Access the customer list in the SaleSmartly system and filter out customers with valid phone number or email (numeric value).

(2) Select filtered customers and click Export data.

(3) After exporting, you can view the Task Center in the upper right corner, select Download file to export the customer information file.

Organize potential customer informationBefore officially running ads, we need to collect potential customer profiles to ensure accurate targeting in subsequent advertising campaigns. Specifically, potential customers can be classified based on their stages and how they interact with the brand.

Some examples of classification for reference:

Classification by customer source

(can filter and sort directly when exporting data)

• Customers from Facebook
• Customers register by email
• Customers register by phone number
• Customers come from other social network channels

Classification by purchasing behavior

• First time buyers
• Customers buy again and again
• Frequent shoppers
• People who have never bought but have viewed the product

Sort by loyalty level

• Fans are loyal to the brand
• Customers make infrequent purchases
• Customers are at risk of leaving
• New customers

Sort by order value

• Customers buy in large quantities
• Customers buy with moderate frequency
• Customers buy small quantities

How to optimize Facebook Ads audienceMeta Pixel is Facebook's official data tracking tool, designed to monitor advertising performance. Meta Pixel is capable of collecting data, tracking and improving Facebook ad performance, and analyzing cross-device conversion journeys. Thanks to this, businesses can better understand user behavior, determine which devices are more likely to complete conversions, and thereby more accurately define target customer files.

When using Meta Pixel to track data, there are two important metrics that cannot be overlooked: conversion rate (conversion rate**) and transaction value (transaction amount). Besides, we need to further analyze customer value to optimize the Facebook advertising audience package more accurately.In the traditional way, downloading customer value data often requires many manual steps: statistics, calculating the value of each customer, then filling out the form and uploading to the system. However, SaleSmartly makes the process simpler. After the customer completes the order, we only need to enter the corresponding order information into the SaleSmartly system. The tool will automatically send transaction data back to Facebook, completely eliminating manual operations.

This automated feedback process not only saves time and improves efficiency, but also ensures data accuracy. With effective tracking and customer value management, businesses can:

• Organize customer data scientifically
• Optimize advertising campaigns towards personalization and precise targeting
• Improve Facebook advertising ROI
• Enhance competitive advantage in the market