Target Your Facebook Ads with Rapleaf Data

The following is a guest post by Ryan Pitylak, CEO at Unique Influence.

As social media marketing gains momentum (and legitimacy), Facebook is emerging as one of the most powerful tools for online marketers. Just this year, 82% of SMBs reported using Facebook in their marketing strategy. So what is the key to getting the most out of your Facebook marketing? Learn all you can about your customers. This easy guide will show you how to create micro-targeted Facebook ads using a combination of Facebook’s Lookalike Feature and Rapleaf‘s email data append service.

Just follow these eight steps:

1. Export the email addresses of your most valuable customers from your database.

2. Develop a Lookalike Audience in Facebook’s Power Editor using a Custom Audience based on these email addresses. You will use this custom segment in all of your sponsored stories.

3. Upload at least 1,000 of your exported email addresses to Rapleaf. Add as many fields as you can from Rapleaf because their data is fairly inexpensive (a penny per data point). The most important data is gender, age, and zip.

4. Look for commonalities in the data. One way to do this easily is to go into Excel and create a pivot table off of the Rapleaf export. Place age in the “Row Labels” section, Gender in the “Column Labels” section, and “Count of Email” in the Values section. This will help you find age ranges and genders to target in your Facebook advertising.

5. Additionally, you should find the geographic location of your valuable customers. Download this free zip code database, do a vlookup in Excel to find the city and state associated with each zip code, and add the city and state to your RapLeaf export using the following two formulas (column AA in this example is the column in the Rapleaf export that contains the zip codes):

For the city:

=VLOOKUP(AA2,zip_code_database.csv!A:G,3,FALSE)

For the state:

=VLOOKUP(AA2,zip_code_database.csv!A:G,6,FALSE)

6. Once you’ve found the age, gender, and location of your most valuable customers, use that information to create several targeted audiences. For example, you might come up with one audience that targets males aged 25-34, living in Texas, and another that targets females aged 45-54, living in New York.

7. Create a post that will resonate with each of the individual audiences you’re targeting. Facebook is becoming more and more visual, so for each post, share a compelling image in your post and include some text describing the image and what you do. Also, add a link to your website after the text and ensure that it is visible in the post.

8. In the Facebook Power Editor, create a sponsored page post for each of the targeted audiences you identified in step 6. In each post, add your Lookalike segment in the Custom Audiences section of the ad creation.

Add the geographic location, age, and gender combination that matches the targeted audience for each post.

Now sit back and watch the power of micro-targeted Facebook ads.

Combining Rapleaf’s data append service and Facebook’s Lookalike feature will ensure you’re showing ads to people who look like your most valuable customers – the people most likely to engage with your brand.

Ready to target your Facebook ads? Get started with a free Rapleaf account here.

For more from Ryan, check out his Google profile or visit the Unique Influence website.