Lookalike Audiences can help you to find new customers, by combining your data and what the ad platforms know!

What's a 'Lookalike Audience' again?

A lookalike audience is an audience of people who are similar to a list of existing customers you provide. Because these people are similar, they're more likely to become a customer!

And because of this, lookalike audiences can be much stronger than broad or interest-based audiences.

Here's your Lookalike Audience guide:

📃Start by exporting a list of existing customers from your CRM, Email Marketing Platform or Online Store:

Most of these platforms will have the ability to export to an Excel sheet or CSV (Comma Separated Values (Basically a simple spreadsheet)) file.

🙋‍♂️In your export, include key information about the customer:

Platforms such as Meta (Facebook/Instagram) will identify people by their email and physical address. For something like LinkedIn you can also include employer and job title.

👌Ensure your list is a reasonable size:

For privacy protection, lists should be a minimum size, such as a minimum of 100 people in one country for Meta.

🛒Consider adding/using abandoned-checkouts or leads:

If your customer list isn't big enough, consider including any people that have engaged with you, such as newsletter signups or people who have started checkout but didn't complete their order. They're not customers exactly, but they're close! 

📱Also consider social media engagers:

You don't need to export a list for this! Most ad platforms will also allow you to match to people who have interacted with your ads or social posts, or viewed your business profile.

⬆️Upload your list:

Create a new audience, choose lookalike (hands on guides are linked down below) and provide your list.

Here's the clever bit: the ad platform examines your list, finds those people, and evaluates what characteristics make them the kind of person that buys from you.

It then finds other people with the same/similar characteristics!

📊Choose your audience size:

Depending on how big your list is and how niche your market is, the ad platform can tightly match to your existing customers or loosely match. This is done by a 'percentage value'

See how this looks in Meta ⤵️

You can choose how many similar audiences to create, and how closely they match to your existing customer list. In the example above there are 2 audiences, one that is closely matched (within 2% accuracy), and another that is a little broader (2-6%).

Why go broader? Well, it gives you a larger number of potential people to target, even if they aren't exactly like your existing customers!

🧪As always, test!:

Test a few difference audiences and lists in a couple of campaigns, and see which performs best. We'd always recommend having broad or interest-based campaigns running alongside, so you're maximising your potential results.

Once you what see which lookalike audience works best, you can lean your budget into that and even turn the other campaigns off!

Guides on how to create Lookalike Audiences on-platform:

🔗Meta

🔗Twitter

🔗Tiktok

🔗LinkedIn

In the next post we'll cover how to target your existing customer list directly!