How e-commerce startups can use Facebook Audience Insights to gain more customers

Facebook is giving more power to marketing teams globally. In a series of updates & new tools for its ads platform, the Facebook Ad-Xchange, it has introduced a powerful feature called Audience Insights.

The idea is to give marketers trends about their current or potential customers across Facebook, allowing them to tailor their marketing messages based on what the tool surfaces. The tool gives insights about users in the following categories:

• Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role, and household size.

• Page Likes: The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports.

• Location and Language: Where people live and the languages they speak.

• Facebook Usage: How frequently people in the target audience login to Facebook and which devices they use.

• Purchase Activity: Past purchase behavior and methods (online vs offline).

The biggest challenge that any e-commerce startup faces in the country is the rapid expansion of giants like Flipkart & Amazon, which are growing horizontally & vertically at an alarming rate. This pushes new ventures with their backs against the wall.

Facebook audience insights is a boon for startups as they don’t have the resources to research, gather, delve deeper and draw crucial insights from the huge pool of raw data which a platform like Facebook offers.

Here are a few innovative ways in which e-commerce startups can derive a lot of value from this newly-launched feature:

1. Cohort Analysis: Using this tool, you can better understand your customers, their behaviours and inclinations, segment them & identify which cohorts are more profitable. You can create various cohorts of custom audience and study their behaviour. And thus get a much better understanding of your most profitable customers. For example, a small business owner may learn that a major percentage of women who have liked his brand’s Facebook page have higher affinity toward fast fashion retail brands even though the brand caters more towards luxury fashion. And then either make changes in his content strategy or product offerings accordingly. Thus increasing the engagement on the Facebook page, and also drive more sales and increase the ROI.

2. Personalized Communication with the audience: Businesses that use Facebook as the primary platform for marketing can tailor their communication and interaction with their audience segments based on their affinities, interests & behaviours. For example, an online maternity & Baby care seller can use the behaviour of expecting parents, based on the stage of the pregnancy, to shoot out offers & product information related to that stage; or an interior designer can share different layouts according to purchasing power (coupled with interests) with different segments and boost the ROI on marketing efforts.

3. Better Strategizing of offline marketing campaigns: This tool can give powerful insights about the affinities and receptivity of different marketing messages for a defined customer audience, which can be used very effectively for a more focussed and better structured offline campaign and thus improve their performance.

4. Market Research: Coupled with their online behaviour and insights for other sources, this is a veritable goldmine of data which can help marketers with limited budgets to get crucial insights about their customers which were earlier available to companies with deep pockets only. Also special applications and campaigns can be designed in case something in particular needs to be researched about a certain segment of customers.

5. Effective Cross-Platform Planning: Business that use Facebook as their primary source to cultivate their user base/customers can effectively use these insights to plan campaigns on different digital platforms and generate better ROI from them as well.

About the Author :

Raghav Kansal is a CEO of ET Medialabs - A company that specializes in Digital Advertising & Analytics Solutions. He has also been providing consultancy to various companies for their digital marketing and advertising strategies.You can reach him at [email protected]

Twitter: @raghav_kansal