If you’re boosting a post on Facebook and picking relevant interests you think your audience fits in – then you’re doing it all wrong. You shouldn’t be playing a guessing game of what you think would work. I’ll show you how you can setup highly targeted ads with one simple trick.

Ready? Okay, let’s dive in.

If you’ve been doing business for awhile, you’ve probably collected a fair amount of emails from customers. You can use these emails to build a lookalike audience. Basically, Facebook looks at everyone who bought from you and uses its wealth of data to find everything those people have in common. This results in a customer profile far more accurate than what you or I can put into the system. The more emails you have the more accurate this profile becomes.

The emails have to be associated with Facebook accounts for this to work so if you’re a B2B (business-to-business) company, you likely have work emails in your list which means this method probably won’t work since people generally sign up to Facebook with a personal email. Fear not though, next week I’ll show you how to improve your ad targeting without an email list.

So you have an email list of customers, great! How do you use this crazy awesome feature?

The first thing you need to do is go to Facebook business manager (different from Facebook). If you’ve never done this before, follow these steps:

• Go to business.facebook.com.
• Click Create Account.
• Enter a name for your business, select the primary Page and enter your name and work email address.
• Enter your information in the rest of the required fields.

Create a CSV of your email list. Go to Google Sheets or Excel and create two columns. Name one “Names” and the other “Emails.” Put all your customers into these two columns and go to file > export > CSV. If you have a record of all the transactions a customer has with you then you can add that in a column called lifetime value (LTV). Facebook will use this data to identify the types of customers who spend the most with you. Format this as a number with no comma or dollar sign.

Now come back to Facebook Business manager and go under Assets > Audiences. Create a new audience and select “lookalike audience.” Select the source by choosing custom audience.

Go under “Use your source” and select “customer file” If you have LTV, add it under the appropriate listing. If you don’t, add it without LTV.

Now just simply upload the CSV, indicate the original data source was directly from the customers, and name your audience. Viola!

Now Facebook knows exactly the type of people who buy from you and (if you added LTV) know how much they spend. The system will create a new audience that is similar that you can feed your ads to. It’ll be much more effective than guessing what interests they have.