“I have a market that I would like to move into, and I have identified my target audience demographics, but what are my next steps?”
If you have a solid business case for expansion but are unsure about how to begin marketing your business in a new market and spreading the word of your arrival in the competitive landscape, you might be overlooking the benefits of social media audience targeting.
Facebook’s cross-border advertising solutions allow businesses like yours to create lookalike audiences for your target market, based on your customers. With this tool, expanding businesses can more effectively attract the target audience they are looking to communicate with and turn into loyal customers.
In this article, we’ll learn how Facebook’s cross-border advertising solutions can optimise your organisation’s ad spend, identify the highest performing markets and improve your cost per acquisition cost.
Create a lookalike audience and narrow your targeting focus
Facebook’s cross-border solutions allow businesses to create a lookalike audience for their prospective customers and use audience insights to understand more about target audience behaviours.
When you have a lookalike audience that matches the characteristics and interests of your current customers in your home market, you can easily start targeting those that speak the same language as your destination website. Targeting Facebook users by the language they speak means you will only advertise your brand to potential customers who speak that language. If your website is in English and Cantonese, then it follows that you only want to target speakers of these languages.
By only targeting relevant audience profiles, your audience group is narrowed down and your company will minimise wasted spend to get the most out of your investment.
Users can also make use of worldwide or regional targeting to determine the best performing regional markets in areas they are considering as part of their expansion plan.
When a business has chosen its markets, Facebook’s product automatically optimises your campaign budget to the countries where your ads have the highest audience interaction, thereby improving the return on investment for your campaign.
How do Facebook campaigns stack up?
Before you jump ahead and set up a campaign for business expansion, you’ll want to know whether Facebook’s cross-border solutions are successful.
There are a few metrics that show Facebook’s cross-border solutions are beneficial; they have been shown to outperform a business’ previous campaigns using other platforms. Businesses have seen improved CPA (cost per acquisition), including a reduction of 6.2 per cent on costs per action.
Multi-country lookalike audiences help businesses replicate success
If you know the demographics and interests which form the audience groups in your market, multi-country lookalikes can help you match your own market success by finding similar audiences in a specific target market, or internationally.
Lookalike audiences are created using seed audiences. Seed audiences can be created from a custom audience group, from uploading customers from your current market or those fans that engage with your page, as well as visitors to your website or a specific page on it, by installing the Facebook pixel.
So, the idea is to create a lookalike audience in country B based on country A. When you have limited budgets, initial marketing and or testing in your target market will also ensure that your spend is optimised and no time is wasted, targeting unengaged groups.
When you have narrowed down your target audience to those high-value customers, you will have a much better opportunity of reaching higher conversion rates than you would with a broader audience. The Facebook user base is so large, it’s incredibly easy to waste money on broad “interest” groups – rather than going straight for lookalikes based on your current customers. Such people are typically less engaged and less frequent purchasers of your products or services.
Worldwide and regional market targeting
Worldwide and regional targeting reduces the guesswork that your company will need to do when looking to buy ad space abroad, by focusing targeting to multiple countries. With the use of targeting, you can discover the markets where your company will most likely perform the best, with learnings based on quantifiable data.
Facebook’s technology then delivers your marketing campaigns to countries with the most beneficial cost per actions. Your company can choose the variables by which targeting is calibrated. For instance, you can set targeting parameters such as “Country Group”, whether they be Europe, Asia or Australasia, or you might set preferences such as “iTunes App Store countries”, or “Emerging Markets”.
To simplify your campaign trajectory, it’s sensible to set campaign targets early, so you have sight and accountability on your aims from day one. There are various KPIs you can track to establish the success of your expansion. “Engagement” is a popular metric to observe, as, by understanding the levels of engagement your ads have, you’ll understand to what extent your campaign has captured the interests of your target market.
Should you choose this option, your ads will be targeted to the users most likely to engage with your posts.
However, this tag doesn’t necessarily lead to traffic or conversions. If the main aim of your campaign is to boost conversions, you’ll be best served using the “Conversion” objective tag. If your aim is to raise brand awareness, as you enter a new market, the “Awareness” tag may be more suitable.
For those looking to optimise conversions, you can compare ad impressions with conversion data. This will show you how many people saw your ad compared to how many went on to convert, or perform another goal you were aiming for.
Based on this data, you will have a much clearer idea of where your audience is located and can set up tests based on these learnings, covering a smaller subset of countries.
Local relevancy – the missing puzzle piece
57 per cent of global online shoppers agree with the statement: “I would not feel comfortable buying from a foreign website that is not in my own language.”
If you are advertising to multiple markets, you need your ad platform to deliver your message in the right languages to different audience groups. Facebook’s dynamic language optimisation automatically delivers the right messages to people in a language they understand.
But who do you get to write these messages if you don’t have staff that speak the language of your target markets?
This is where professional translators can assist. With our professional language translation services, your ads will be written in a way that ensures your messages resonate with your audience, whatever country they live in, or the language they speak.
Get in touch with us today and we’ll deliver content that brims with local relevancy, due to expert translators immersed in the culture your brand is expanding into.
