Matt visits your bakery at least 3 times per week in the mornings before work. He picks up bagels and assorted breakfast items for his entire office. He’s so nice that his coworkers don’t even mind that these bakery visits might spoil their diets.

He is always in a cheerful mood and never fails to leave a tip for the employees working at the counter. He never misses work, and you wonder how he always stays so healthy, especially with all these buttery croissants he orders.

Matt also comments on your Facebook posts faithfully, making positive and well-crafted statements about your baking. Once he described your brownies as “delightful,” resulting in several people visiting the bakery asking to try the delightful brownies.

He is frequently liking and commenting on your Instagram posts as well, and even once tagged a friend in a photo of his morning bagel and coffee, saying “you have to try these delicious bagels!”

Why can’t every customer be like Matt, you wonder. Why can’t I find everyone like Matt in a five mile radius of my bakery and invite them to frequent my store?

You can, and you don’t even need to employ a mad scientist. No, Matt won’t get freaked out when he sees his exact replica in the bakery one morning. There is a way to safely and ethically “clone” Matt and no one will be the wiser. It’s called Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

More than 1 billion people are active on Facebook and more than 100 million people are active on Instagram. Facebook’s artificial intelligence programs are busy storing and analyzing data on all of these users: their likes, habits, behaviors, demographics, and more. Using this data, Facebook can find users similar to your ideal customer and prompt them to engage with your brand.

Data proves that the lookalike audience is an effective marketing tool for brands. Custom audiences are far more effective than casting a wide net and waiting to see who engages. With lookalike audiences, you can search for an audience just like your top customers.

While a business might have hundreds of customers, commonly 20% of those customers produce 80% of a company’s revenue. Those are the customers like Matt, the top 20% who drive your business with reliable, loyal purchases and interactions. With lookalike audiences, you can find and replicate customers like Matt.

In order to utilize lookalike audiences, you will need to have already designed a custom audience on Facebook, but the most optimal method is by using the Facebook Pixel.

What is the Facebook Pixel? The pixel is a snippet of code you implant in your website’s header. The code allows Facebook to track interactions on your website and matches those interactions to its users.

For example, if you had 1000 visits on your site last week, Facebook will use its Pixel to see what percentage of those visits were made by Facebook users. If 900 of those visitors have Facebook accounts, the Pixel can see those users’ likes and behaviors. With retargeting, you can advertise to those visitors on their Facebook feeds, prompting them with subtle reminders, but you can also find people just like them who have never visited your site, their lookalikes, their “Matts.”

Lookalike audiences are incredibly robust. You can target audiences based on specific behaviors and interactions on your website. When you create your custom audience, you are not limited to marketing to people who share your customers’ likes, you have a far more expansive list of options. Want to market to people like those who read your blog? That’s just one of the many options for how you can create lookalike audiences.

Data shows that marketing to lookalike audiences is a remarkably effective strategy for finding repeat buyers. According to SEO data company MOZ:  

“The next best audience to target is your current customer lists. Once they’ve purchased from you, they have a higher chance of giving you more money. Actually, they are 60-70% more likely to buy from you again in the future. But what if you’ve exhausted both of these audiences, and they’re simply not responding to any more ads?”

That’s where your lookalike audiences can come in. You can find another audience that is also likely to become repeat buyers from your brand.

Ready to start building lookalike audiences? Contact us today for a strategy session today.