Make the most out of Facebook's advertising potential

In simple speak what Facebook can do is download your existing customer database and using either their email or phone number, effectively pull up your customer’s Facebook profiles and find their interests, likes, dislikes and location – AND THEN – use this data to match to other new customers with the same interests, likes, dislikes and locations. 

I know, both scary and exciting at the same time.

Clearly you need to have permission to use the data for marketing from your customers, your customers need to have an active Facebook account, you agree to Facebook’s extensive terms and your data needs to be in CSV or TXT format but this could be pretty powerful for you to target new customers. Facebook tends to match up between 30-50% (sometimes more, sometimes less) depending on the quality of your list so the more contacts you can provide the higher the quality of the list.

Are there Privacy Concerns?
Again you need to have permission from your clients to use their details for marketing, and it ultimately depends on what is covered in your own privacy consent form but according to Facebook it’s ok because the data sent to Facebook is encrypted before being sent so the email or phone number never changes hands and only a unique digital fingerprint is sent to them which is then matched to their existing Facebook database.
In their words –

• The list will be hashed before being sent to Facebook. The system will match the encrypted data against Facebook’s active users, and build a custom audience in your account with everyone that matches your list.

• Hashing and encryption are two ways of securing information. Encryption lets you later recover the original text by decrypting it. Hashing summaries text into a short fingerprint that can’t be decrypted.

• With just a hashed fingerprint, there’s no way to know exactly which text was summarised even though any given text always produces the same fingerprint.

• …Facebook is able to find your ideal audiences for you without either company’s data leaving its respective servers.

What do I do with this amazingly targeted audience? Yeah fair question so how are you going to use this list in your next targeted marketing campaign? Using Facebook you can do a few things with it either:

1. Bring in new fans to your existing Facebook Page – using a few sweet techniques we have already covered

2. Target specific customers – if you are looking to help first home buyers you could offer a few ebook on buying a new property to get them to contact you.

3. Provide a specific offer – Waive annual fee, free valuation report, use your imagination here!

Ok cool, so how do I create a customer audience?
Using your existing Facebook manager you can do this either using the Ads Manager or Ad Creation tools.
If you’re using Ads Manager

1. Go to your Ads Manager.

2. Select Audiences from the left side and click Create Audience.

3. Choose whether you’d like to upload your Custom Audience through MailChimp or a data file.

4. If you’re uploading a file, create a .CSV file in Excel with a customer list you want to create a Custom Audience with using email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs from your app. The document should have a single column of data with no heading.

5. Follow the required steps to upload your Custom Audience.

If you’re using ad creation

1. Go to Ad creation to start making your ad.

2. Go to the Create Your Audience section and select Create New Audience.

3. Choose whether you’d like to upload your Custom Audience through MailChimp or a data file.

4. If you’re uploading a file, create a .CSV file in Excel with a customer list you want to create a Custom Audience with using email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs from your app. The document should have a single column of data with no heading.

5. Follow the required steps to upload your Custom Audience.

Brave new world
This is an incredibly powerful way to use Facebook advertising (that on a cost per click basis is way cheaper than Google Adwords) to get in front of more customers. It only takes a few minutes to do and if you are already advertising on Facebook it is definitely worth checking out. We would love to hear your thoughts and any successes you’ve had using Facebook Audiences on our Top Broker Facebook page or LinkedIn.

This article originally appeared on Top Broker, a growing online space where tips and strategies are shared by Australia's top mortgage brokers.