Facebook makes it easy to find international customers and build a global business from anywhere. This guide made available by Facebook for Business helps to learn more about some of the tools you can use to start finding your new customers across borders.
Quick Read
1. Identify New Markets
2. Find Your Target Audience
3. Extend Your Campaign
Step 1: Identify New Markets
Consider finding your next international customers in neighbouring markets, where potential audiences may already be similar to existing customers. You can use these tools to find similar markets to help grow your business:
Insight about a specific audience
You can use Audience Insights to learn about the international customer’s locations, demographics and size of a select audience from unadvertised countries (for instance previous purchasers or page fans).
For example, if you know that your potential customer are females, aged 18-30, you can find out where else they live, for instance in Brazil you may have 10 million potential customers.
Learn beyond your borders
Facebook’s Cross Border Insights Finder can help you identify, map and size new growth opportunities around the world and find new international customers. Find which markets are more likely to convert, cost less and encounter fewer ads versus your current market. Or read further market insights with Insights to Go.
For example, compare the conversion index across the world and filter by economic regions. You can get insights on a new potential economic region or country portfolio to target in Facebook Ads Manager, which will automatically optimise for reach and conversion based on the selected campaign objective.
Target anyone in the world
Now that you have an idea of where you’d like to expand, let Facebook find the best audience to target. Start by testing a campaign with worldwide or regional targeting to find out which markets to invest in based on performance. With worldwide targeting, your ad will be delivered and optimised globally to help you find conversions and customers at the best value.
Using Locations, you can target:
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worldwide (type in ‘Worldwide’)
by country group or geographic region (e.g. type in ‘Asia’)
by free trade area (e.g. type in ‘GCC’, the Gulf Cooperation Council)
by sub-regions within a country (e.g. type in ‘Michigan’)
by other features (e.g. type in ‘iTunes app store countries’ or ‘Emerging markets’)
You can save the groups of countries that you use frequently to easily reuse them in future campaigns. To do this in Ads Manager, select ‘Browse’ in the ‘Locations’ section, and choose ‘Create list’ under ‘Saved locations’. Add your countries in the empty box and click ‘Match locations’. Hit ‘Save list’ for future reuse.
You can review your results by location in Ads Manager. Use your campaign results to see which markets have the best performance to help inform you where to focus your marketing efforts.
Step 2: Find Your Target Audience
Now that you have an idea of where you’d like to expand, let Facebook find the best audience to target. To do this, use your current best consumers as your source audience and create a Lookalike Audience to quickly find similar customers in specific markets.
To create a Lookalike Audience, start by selecting a source audience from your home country and let Facebook find similar people in other countries or regions, or even worldwide.
Follow these to create a lookalike audience
1. Choose your ‘Source’
A source can be a Custom Audience not created with a data partner, your pixel data, fans of your Page or an audience created with Audience Insights. Consider using a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value, transaction value, total order size or engagement.
2. Choose the country/countries where you’d like to find a similar set of people. You can manually exclude certain locations by selecting ‘Edit locations’.
3. Choose your desired audience size with the slider.
4. Click ‘Create Audience’.
Try using your best customers in your seed audience. This can help lead to better results as Facebook will find a new audience that most closely resembles them. You don’t need to add additional interests or demographic targeting.
Step 3: Extend Your Recent Campaign
To get started, consider extending a recent campaign to the new markets you have identified. Simply duplicate your existing campaign in Ads Manager, then click ‘Edit’ to update your location targeting to include these areas. Try targeting local language speakers to test different markets without having to translate your creative, then analyse your results by market and consider customising campaigns for markets with the highest potential.
Targeting one advertising campaign in “Asia” may result in a higher performance compared to running individual campaigns for each country in Asia. This is because our system can better target your budget at the people most likely to take the action you have optimised for.
Conclusion
These three ways if done right could help you find international customers in countries that need your business offerings. Use Facebook ads manager effectively to identify new markets in countries different from yours. Then zoom into the countries to find your ideal or real target audience. Once you do, extend your campaign in that international market so as to reach more people.
Hopefully, this short guide is helpful to you.
