What You Should Know About Creating and Using Custom Audiences for Instagram Marketing

Creating custom audiences is becoming an increasingly popular social media marketing strategy as it allows you to create ads that are targeted at the right audience.

Custom audiences can help your brand identify and reach relevant markets. In fact, you can use this tool to enhance your direct marketing campaigns as well.

In this article, we will take a look at exactly what custom audiences are and the benefits they can offer to your business. You will also learn how to create an Instagram custom audience so that you can make the most of your content and increase your ROI.

What is a custom audience?

Whether you are a marketing specialist or someone with their own business, you must have heard the term ‘target audience’ before. Target audience refers to people that you identify as the core customers of your brand. Typically, this group shares similar demographics, including age, gender, location, and socioeconomic status. In the case of a custom audience, this targeting goes beyond the basic demographics. In this, customers are chosen from a list of existing customers who have shown an interest in your service or product. To find your custom audience, you will have to use a series of identifiers, like emails, online user behavior, and web traffic.

Another option that you can go for is creating a ‘lookalike’ audience. This covers the customers who are similar to people who are already engaging with your business. By taking this step, you can use shared affinities and common attributes for expanding your custom audiences into a larger group.

How can custom audiences help you?

Let’s get into the benefits of creating custom audiences to help you understand why this should be an integral part of your social media marketing campaign:

1. Find the right audience

One of the biggest benefits of creating a custom audience is that it allows you to reach out to the right people and connect with them. These people are the ones who are genuinely interested in your brand and the products or services that you offer. With custom audiences, you will be able to create the right messaging as well. This is because when you customize the ads for your audience, the process can help you get an understanding of your target buyer. The more you know your audience and what they need, the easier it will get to create a targeting message that resonates with them.

2. Target existing audience

By creating a custom audience, you can do more than just expand your reach. You can also make the process of targeting existing audiences more effective. With it, you can create relevant campaigns transmitting the right message to the right people. If your audience feels that you understand their needs, it is highly likely that they will spread the word among their peers and expand your reach even further.

3. Enhance direct marketing campaign

Custom audiences can help you enhance your direct marketing or email campaigns as well. Since you already have access to the names and email addresses of potential buyers, you will be able to build a list easily. This personal data can help you create custom audiences and use similar ads and content for targeting them.

Needless to say, custom audiences can help reinforce your calls to action and generate significant interest in your brand. Now, let’s understand how you can build an Instagram custom audience.

How to build a custom audience on Instagram

Before we get into building an Instagram custom audience, you need to make sure that your Instagram and Facebook profiles are linked. Even if you intend to run the ad only on Instagram, you will need the Facebook account for initiation, organization, programming, and budgeting.

Now, let’s get into the process of creating a custom Instagram audience:

1. Visit Facebook Ad Manager.
2. On the top left corner, you will find the menu option. Click on it, and you will find the ‘Audience’ button. Once you hit that, you will be redirected to another page.
3. You will find a couple of options, including ‘Custom Audience,’ ‘Saved Audience,’ ‘Lookalike Audience,’ and ‘Special Ad Audience.’ Hit the ‘Create a Custom Audience’ button, and a pop-up will appear.
4. This pop-up is to help you select the custom audience source. Under the ‘Meta Sources’ heading, you will find ‘Instagram Account.’ Select it and hit ‘Next.’
5. In the next pop-up, you will have to add the criteria to create the custom Instagram audience. You have the option to include people who fit any or all of the criteria you provide. The first thing that you have to do is select an ‘Event’:
• Everyone who engaged with the professional Instagram Account – This will include people who visited your profile or took action, such as Instagram likes, carousel swipes, button taps, shares, etc.
• Anyone who visited your profile – This includes everyone who visited your profile, regardless of whether or not they took action.
• People who engaged with your ad or post – This covers people who took action on your ad or post, such as Instagram likes, Instagram comments, carousel swipes, button taps, shares, etc.
• People who sent you a message – This only includes people who sent you a message on your professional Instagram account.
• People who saved your ad or post – This option lets you include people who have saved your ad or post.
6. The next thing you have to focus on is retention. This refers to the number of days you want people to remain in your custom audience list after they have engaged with your content. Once the set time period ends, people will be removed from the list unless they engage with your account again. The maximum retention time that you can add is 365 days.
7. You also have the option to include or exclude more people, depending on the ‘Event’ you want.
8. Add a name and a small description of the custom audience and hit the ‘Create Audience’ button.

Use cases

With an active Instagram business account comes a lot of engagement. In order to ensure that you take advantage of this, you have to leverage ad targeting. Here are a few ideas to help you with the same:

• Target people who have engaged with your account for promoting your product, blog post, sponsored content, etc.
• Target people who have sent you a message on Instagram and send them into a Messenger or WhatsApp conversation.
• Target people who have engaged with your ad or post for promoting your latest ad or post.

The type of custom audience you create and the retention you have will depend on the level of engagement you are getting, the volume of users, and how you use your account. You can start by boosting content to a wide audience. Then, depending on the people who engaged with your content or visited your website, you can create a custom audience. This list of the custom audience will be made up of users who have shown an intent to buy your products and are more likely to make the purchase.

Another way you can use your custom audience is by thinking about what you will be sharing with a custom audience that is made up of your existing customers. Typically, ads are created to get new customers. However, with a custom audience, you can keep your existing customers engaged. Start by creating a custom audience of people who had used your product before or shopped with you but haven’t returned for a while.

A custom audience made up of newsletter subscribers also opens up a lot of avenues for you. You can segment this list into engaged and disengaged subscribers and create unique content for each group. In the case of the disengaged group, you will notice that re-engaging them has a lot of value. In an analysis run by MailChimp, it was found that an active subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.

If you define a custom audience on Instagram, it allows you to create a clear, solid foundation for promoting your content. Since you will be creating content and ads for a niche demographic, this list can help you with that as well. An important benefit of Instagram advertising is that your ads look similar to a standard post, making them look less invasive than ads and drawing more potential customers in.

If you want to run robust ad campaigns on Instagram, a custom audience is the best way to tailor your content. It will help you reach the target audience with the right ad. So, if you have been asking yourself, “How do I control who can see my post on Instagram?”, custom audience is the answer.

Conclusion

Hope that this article helped you get an understanding of how custom audiences work and how you can use them for your marketing campaign. Currently, Instagram is among the biggest social media platforms on the planet.

And, if you want to create your marketing campaign a success, you have to create a strategy surrounding it. Socoid can help make your job a little easier by providing you with free Instagram likes and free Instagram followers. With a high follower count, you can work on building your business.

Instagram is continuously launching new features providing brands like you with a multitude of opportunities to reach your target audience and increase your revenue. So, if you want to take advantage of these opportunities, get started on creating your custom audience right away!