Cross-border ecommerce marketing is a very different beast from regular ecommerce marketing. To successfully take your business international, getting informed about new markets and figuring out how to adapt content to new audiences is a must. From product preferences and currency to size, accessibility, and cultural differences, there’s a lot to keep in mind. Let’s say you’re scrolling through Facebook when you see an ad in a language you don’t understand. Would you be interested? Probably not.
As the single biggest social network in use today, Facebook’s 2.7 billion active users present a huge advertising opportunity to reach customers across the globe. And luckily for marketers and advertisers, Facebook has a whole host of tools to help with expanding to new markets and international audiences. So without further ado, here are five tools to boost your Facebook cross-border ecommerce performance.
1: Facebook Insights to Go
WHAT IT IS: Insights to Go helps businesses compare country and regional data based on past campaign performance across Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Audience Network.
WHY IT WORKS: With Insights to Go, businesses can see the way in which customers in new markets shop and where ads will have the most impact. These insights allow companies to identify and target the most lucrative regions for their business.
HOW TO USE IT: In the tool, choose a country, industry, and campaign objective.
The Insights Finder then shows you data for your industry and campaign objective in every country you select. These insights include:
- Survey stats: What users want
- Sales stats: Market size and growth
- Ad stats: To what extent different tactics improve results, ad spend, and more
- Behavior stats: How users act online
2. International location targeting
WHAT IT IS: With international location targeting, Facebook measures ad efficacy to pinpoint which regions are best for your advertising campaigns.
WHY IT WORKS: When choosing where to target your ads, you can select countries, regions, and objectives. Your ads will be sent to the best potential customers in your selected areas, making the most of your Facebook cross-border ad spend.
HOW TO USE IT: In Facebook Ads Manager, after choosing your campaign objectives, select the countries or regions you’d like to target as shown below. Options include worldwide, continents, geographic regions, free trade areas, saved locations, or even emerging markets. Facebook then monitors the performance of your ads to choose where they’re most effective. Facebook will automatically allocate more of your advertising budget to higher engagement areas, where more customers respond to your ads, while allocating less to areas of lower engagement.
3. Multi-language and country dynamic ads
WHAT IT IS: This feature adds even more to Facebook’s already powerful dynamic ads. Multi-language and country dynamic ads give businesses the ability to create one ad catalog for multiple countries, so that users in each country see an ad that’s localized for them.
WHY IT WORKS: With multi-language and country dynamic ads, users in different countries will see an ad for the same product, but personalized in their language and currency, along with product information tailored to their market. This saves businesses the tedious work of creating multiple catalogs in multiple languages for the same product.
HOW TO USE IT: When creating a product catalog, you’re given the option to add secondary language and country feeds. In Facebook Ads Manager, you can then add languages and additional information to your product catalog, as shown below. The information in the secondary feeds will override the default language and country when your ad is displayed in a different country, and display the correct information for the local audience. However, making this work is fairly technical – you can find more information here.
4. Audience Insights Tool
WHAT IT IS: Audience Insights gives users a way to define specific audiences (by demographics, purchase behavior, geographic information, and more) and learn more about how to reach them.
WHY IT WORKS: With Audience Insights, you get data about what your selected audience likes and how they behave. Understanding your audience will help you refine your ad strategy and create ads that resonate with the people you want to reach.
HOW TO USE IT: In the Audience Insights tool, you can choose between all Facebook users or just fans of your page. The selected audience can then be filtered, as shown above, based on demographics such as age, gender, location, relationship status, and job title. Once the setup is complete, you can name and save your audience. Audience Insights will then show you the top categories that your audience engages with, from page likes and purchase activity to location data and more.
5. Multi-country Lookalike Audiences
WHAT IT IS: If you know who your best customers are, Lookalikes can help you find similar audiences internationally without the need for intensive research. You can then target these similar audiences with your ad campaigns.
WHY IT WORKS: Success with a certain audience in one country can easily translate into success with similar audiences in other countries. With Lookalikes, you’re spared the time and effort of researching new audiences, as Facebook can automatically find cross-border audiences made up of comparable customers.
HOW TO USE IT: The Lookalikes tool is extremely easy to use – you just have to be the admin of the ad account you’re creating the audience in. Select the country or countries you want, then choose the type of audience: this could be fans of one of your pages, a custom audience you’ve created in Audience Insights, or an audience created from your Facebook pixel data. Facebook will analyze qualities of your chosen audience to create a similar audience in the countries you’ve selected.
This updated post was originally published on September 12, 2019.