7. Synchronize with Social Media

Welcome to the last stage of your Getting Started with Remarkety Course! Along the way, we've covered important steps for setting up your Remarkety account. Now we have one final important lesson for you: Integrating your Remarkety account with Facebook and Instagram.

Why You Should Integrate with Facebook

For those unfamiliar with Facebook Custom Audiences, it’s a feature of the social media platform that allows you to show your store's ads to selected audiences. This is a powerful tool for both customer retargeting and customer acquisition, especially when used in accordance with your other automated marketing plans. 

In this part of the course, we’ll give you a background on custom audiences in social media. We’ll explain why it is strategically useful as it relates to your marketing practices with Remarkety and our role in the process. Finally we’ll go over the steps for Facebook integration.

Custom Audiences

We'll start with the basics. Facebook and Instagram Custom Audiences (CA) and integrations work the same way. For brevity’s sake, we’ll focus solely on Facebook CA, but everything we talk about here applies to Instagram just as well. 

Using CA you can target your store's ads by general demographic. This demographic could include age, gender, location, etc. Because Facebook's reach is so big, even a multi-conditional demographic could be quite large. There exist methods to target even more specific audiences for the sake of your ad spending and returns.

One of the possible approaches for specializing your ad reach is by setting up localized audiences. Upload a list of your store's contacts to Facebook and then their algorithm will find the users associated with the same email addresses and contact info. They also have the ability to find Facebook users who exhibit similar behaviors as the contacts you uploaded. This allows you to target your ads to people who have already interacted with your store or likely would.

Click here for more information on Facebook Custom Audiences.

Strategy 

Custom audience targeting can be incredibly advantageous when used in conjunction with your other Remarkety efforts. Think of Facebook's "audience" as a Remarkety segment. You can double down on reaching your segment lists in this different context. The VIP segment you email through Remarkety can be directly contacted on Facebook and Instagram, as well. Here are 5 ideas for strategically contacting your Remarkety segments via CA:

1. Retarget unengaged or unresponsive contacts
   Reach out to customers who are not currently engaging with your email or SMS efforts.
   
   
2. Unsubscribers
   Target customers who unsubscribed from your store's marketing with specific messaging.
   
   
3. Newsletter follow ups
   Quickly follow up your recently sent newsletter to remind engaged customers about the content included (like a current sale) or to alert customers who did not open the email.
   
   
4. Interest-based
   Because customers engaging with a particular type of content can shed light on their interests, you can accordingly send ads to them on Facebook. For example, customers can be tagged based on the content they click on inside of your emails. For an apparel store, engagement with "women's clothing" helps provide information on the gender/interests of that customer. You can share that information to Facebook advertising to show specific ads.
   
   
5. Optimize social ads
   Exclude recent purchasers from social ads since you are charged per ad. Make the most of social ads by investing in customers who have yet to make a purchase or by reengaging old and inactive customers.

Remarkety's Role

Remarkety links the segments you create on our platform with Facebook CA lists. Since our segment lists are dynamic, we update these lists on Facebook daily. This way, if a change is made within a dynamic segment list on Remarkety, that change will be reflected in the audience that Facebook shows the ad to. Without Remarkety, these changes would have to be made manually.

So we manage the data upload and updates. How you choose to use your Facebook audiences is completely up to you. You create and set your social ads the same way you would without Remarkety.

Integrate with Facebook

Connect your accounts

Follow the steps below to integrate your Remarkety segments with Facebook CA.

1. Make sure you are signed into the Facebook account you wish to use.
   
2. Switch to your Remarkety dashboard, click Settings -> Integrations and then go to Setup Integration under the Facebook section.
   
3. Confirm with Facebook and select which Ad Account needs to be connected to Remarkety.
4. Allow Remarkety to manage your ads.
5. That's it! Easy right? Remarkety is now connected to your business's Facebook account. 
6. To check that the integration was successful, reload your Remarkety Integrations page. Click the "Facebook" integration link to save settings. Once the settings are saved, a green banner will appear at the top of the page and the integration will show as enabled.

Create a Custom Audience

Follow these steps for creating your Custom Audience:

1. Create your Segment List on Remarkety's dashboard, as described above.
   
2. Click on the Segment List you want to connect to Facebook.
   
3. Find and select the Facebook tab towards the top of the page.
4. Choose your desired setting:
   • Do not sync with an audience 
   • Sync with an existing audience
   • Sync with a new audience
5. Hit Save. Now work with ad creation and implementation for this audience the way you normally would on Facebook.

Congrats! You've made it through the first course of Remarkety Academy. 

We hope you are excited to begin your automated marketing journey. We’re confident you’ll see results soon. Just take the time to practice using the platform and send campaigns to your customers. When you’re ready to move on, take the next course in the Remarkety Academy. It will kick your automated marketing game up even further.