According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing 2015 report, 70 percent of the 5,000 marketers polled planned to invest more of their marketing dollars in Facebook this year. Moreover, 84 percent plan to increase or maintain their total advertising spend in 2015.

So what does this mean for businesses that plan to advertise on Facebook? Well, getting really good at Facebook advertising should be a top priority. With so many businesses competing for valuable ad spots, Facebook can be selective about the ads that they show to consumers, and they’re going to be focused on providing the most relevant, timely ads possible.

The best way to provide relevant ads that convert well are to get really comfortable with creating remarketing ads for custom audiences.

What is remarketing?

Also referred to as retargeting, this tactic allows you to advertise to people who have visited your site and shown interest in your products and services. By placing a pixel on your site, Facebook is able to track your website visitors and their activities. You can then segment those visitors based on the pages they visit and the actions they take and then create custom ads that are shown to them on Facebook.

People rarely purchase the first time they visit a website or see an offer. Typically, they take the time to learn more about you and your services and compare you to your competitors. By using remarketing ads, you can make sure your brand stays top of mind and increase the likelihood of converting those visitors to customers. At the very least, you can try to convert them to email subscribers so you can potentially convert them at a later date.

Because Facebook targeting can be as granular as you like, you can create a hyper-targeted custom audience with a customized remarketing ad, which guarantees cheaper traffic from users who have visited your website but not yet converted.

So audiences should you be targeting with Facebook remarketing ads?

Your Email Subscribers

You can stay top of mind and increase the likelihood of your subscribers converting to paying customers by serving relevant ads to your existing email subscribers. The key word in that sentence is “relevant.” Make sure that the ads are customized for that audience and the content that you are providing. If you have a large email list that has been segmented based on how they opted in, you can even show them ads based upon the list that they’re subscribed to. For example, if they opted in to a list by downloading a free offer on a particular topic, you can show them an ad on a related subject based on what you know to be their interests.

Your Website Visitors

Retargeting people who have already visited your website and showed interest in your products and services is the most common remarketing tactic. When someone visits your website, they’re added to your custom audience list in your Facebook ads manager, allowing you to retarget them later.

One especially useful targeting feature is that you have the ability to segment your website traffic and target people who have visited specific pages. You can even target people who visited certain pages but not others. This allows you to target people who have visited a sales page, for example, but never reached your thank you page…which means they showed interest in that product or service but never actually converted. Perhaps they weren’t interested, or perhaps they just got distracted and never completed their purchase. With a remarketing ad, however, you increase the likelihood of converting those customers that would have been otherwise lost!

Your Facebook Fans

It may frustrate you to pay to advertise to your existing Facebook fans, especially if you had to pay to acquire those fans in the first place. However, think of those Facebook fans as low hanging fruit. These people are more likely to convert to email subscribers or customers than entirely new leads on Facebook, and at a lower cost.

Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences are an amazing targeting feature within the Facebook Ads Manager, and especially useful for businesses with small email lists or a small number of Facebook followers.

Lookalike audiences allows Facebook to gather information about the demographics, interests and behaviors of your website visitors, Facebook fans, and email subscribers and then create an audience that is similar to those audiences. You are given the option to optimize the similar audience and Facebook will generate a list made of the 1% of Facebook users who are most similar. Because the list is optimized for the most similar Facebook users, these are the most likely to be interested in your products, services and content.

Wrapping Up

Retargeting with Facebook ads helps you stay top of mind to the Facebook users who are most likely to be interested in your products and services. The key is to retarget your content to a precise audience rather than a generalized audience. Take advantage of the many custom audience options to capture more conversions and meet your Facebook advertising goals.

Learn to Put the Pieces Together

We can’t all be good at everything, and staying on top of social media can be tough. Become a part of my Socially Fit membership community where I will teach you, step-by-step, how to sell using social media. Click here to learn more.