Multiply Your Sales Prospects With This ‘Look-Alike’ Tool

What could possibly be better than high-value customers?

More high-value customers.

After you’ve done your market research and defined your ideal customer profile, you’ll have a database of people who are exactly right for your business. But you know how it goes, those people are never enough.

Enter ‘look-alike audiences’.

Look-alike audiences help you connect with people who are similar to your top customers so you can increase conversions and scale your business faster. This new audience shares common interests with your existing customers, which means they’re more likely to be intrigued by your business than, say, Dave the accountant who lives down the road.

Upwork, a freelancing platform, analysed their ad spend to check how look-alike audiences perform on their Facebook campaigns. They found the following stats:

• Highest CTR in 80% of campaigns
• Best CPI in 60% of campaigns
• Most CPA in 60% of campaigns

Look-alikes clearly have an impressive track record. So how do you find this magical audience for your business?

Before the advent of automated tools for marketers, you would have spent hours hunched over your laptop sifting through Facebook fans, mobile app users, and anyone who has virtually blinked in your general direction. It was time-consuming stuff.

Nowadays you can use customised services, automated tools, and even Facebook to find your next audience. Let’s focus on those last two.

For the patient: Facebook Ads

Facebook knows its audience, so it added the option for businesses to create look-alike audiences.

The process is simple. Once you’re logged into your Facebook Ads page, head over to your Audiences. There you’ll see the option ‘Create audience’, which will display a drop-down menu with the option ‘Lookalike Audience’. Then you’ll see this screen:

For the audience size, choosing 1% results in the most relevant (albeit smallest) audience. The larger your audience size, the more diluted the match will be. Once you’ve filled in the information all you have to do next is click ‘Create Audience’.

Using Facebook Ads is a walk in the park. But here’s the catch: the Lookalike Audience may take 6 to 24 hours to be created. If you’re patient enough and don’t have anyone breathing down your neck, this is fine. If not, you may be interested in something faster.

For the efficient: Triggr

Triggr is an automated prospecting tool that generates top-of-funnel sales prospects at the click of a button. One of its most interesting features is the “Look-Alike search tool”, which uncovers common characteristics (interests, purchasing behavior and demography) of a pre-defined list of companies and then filters millions of other companies to find the top matches.

The best part about Triggr is there’s no wait. As soon as you submit your reference companies, you’ll get a list of look-alikes that you can download into a CSV to plug into your CRM and other marketing tools.

Here’s how to use Triggr for a list of top look-alike businesses in less than two minutes.

Don’t feel like watching a video? That’s okay, we understand. We’ve typed out all the steps just for you.

Step 1: List the companies you want to replicate

To get started, log into your Triggr account (or sign up if you don’t have one) and click on the ‘Look-alike’ option in the left sidebar. The next screen will show you three steps.

The first step is to type the URLs of all the companies you work with that you’d love more of. If you already have a CSV with this information, you can upload it to spare yourself from typing.

Step 2: Select the role you’re targeting

The second step asks you to choose who you’re looking for from the dropdown menu. Do you want to engage with founders? CEOs? Managers? You can choose more than one if you need to.

Step 3: View your results and download the CSV

The third and final step is a tricky one. You have to click the big blue button. Once you’ve managed that, you’ll be greeted with a list of businesses that resemble the ones you defined in Step 1.

Now that you’ve got what you wanted, you can go ahead and download the CSV to feast your eyes on the names, emails, locations, roles, phone numbers and even LinkedIn profiles of each prospect.

Tip: If you poke around the Triggr platform, you can set up an action so that it automatically sends you the contact details of people in the roles you’re searching for. This useful feature will make your workflow more efficient and ultimately save you time.

Ready to find your next audience and expand your reach within minutes? Give Triggr a closer look or set up a demo to get the full tour before creating an account. No strings attached.