What is a “custom audience”? It’s advertising to people who are already familiar to you.
In other words, a custom audience is made up of a list of email addresses, or phone numbers, or physical addresses, etc.
Facebook first tested a custom audience product back in 2013. Recently, it’s been opened to the general public.
The way the Facebook custom audience advertising works is you give Facebook a list of your contacts, and then instead of advertising banner ads to random people on Facebook, your banner ads will instead be advertised only to people on your contact list.
Currently Google and Bing are experimenting on a similar product where your search engine ad is only seen by people on your contact list.
So obviously a lot of people in the marketing industry are excited by this.
It’s no secret that one of the reasons email marketing can be the most effective marketing technique in 2015 is because advertising is always more effective when your audience knows who you are.
For those thinking that you don’t want to stalk your customers by doing email marketing with them, advertising to them on Google, Facebook and everywhere, there’s a way to tone down the stalking ; )
With almost every custom audience product, there is something called a “cap frequency” that limits how many times a day each person sees your ad. So you can limit each place you advertise to people only seeing your ad once a day to blend in with the other ads.
Collecting and organizing customers contact info has never been more important!