When it comes to Samba’s Flow Campaigns, Samba Enterprise users can expect advanced support for their marketing channels, including two of the largest social media networks, Facebook and Instagram, giving you a convenient and effective means of reaching your customers where they’re most likely to be.

Despite it being a great feature, many people might struggle with the ability to reach their customers effectively. Standard advertising may prove somewhat ineffective, simply because it will be casting too wide a net including many unknown users. The key is in having an effective means of targeting individuals you know will like your product and covert and luckily, Samba’s custom audience integration has you covered.

Linking Facebook and Samba

To get started creating more accurate and effective Facebook Ads and Instagram campaigns, you must first set everything up correctly in Samba.

You can view the entire video process here:

First, you’ll need to connect your Samba Enterprise account with your Facebook Ads account. To do this, go to Settings > Implementation > Facebook Ad Account.

Here you’ll need to click on the Facebook “Connect” button to log into and connect your Facebook account. Once clicked, a new window informing you about connecting Samba and Facebook will appear. It’s important to note that before you take this step, make sure you have access to your organization's advertising account in Facebook Business Manager. If you join without having access, you won’t be able to proceed to the next step.

If everything is OK, click “Continue” and then “Ok” on the next window.

If you look at the Facebook Ads Accounts section in your Samba admin panel, you should now see available accounts. Please note, your organization should be listed in the "Ad account" column. If not, please click “Disconnect” and repeat the process, making sure you’re connecting the correct Facebook Ads account in the previous step.

Next, you’ll need to select which of your e-shops corresponds to the Ad account utilizing the “Assigned E-Shops” drop-down menus.

After it’s selected, simply click the “Save Settings” button.

If everything is working correctly, your Facebook Ad accounts tab should now be highlighted with a green background (as shown in the image below).

Creating Custom Audiences in Flow Campaigns

While you can use your existing custom audiences in existing campaigns, we'll show you how to create a new custom audience.

You can also view the entire process on the video:

From your Flow Campaigns section, click the "Create Campaign" button located on the right-hand side of your admin panel.

Select a name for your new campaign and complete all the corresponding details.

In the Flow Campaign window, you can already set up your entire campaign flow and audience creation. We’ll show you how to transfer that audience to Facebook.

First, press the “+” button.

From here, you can choose a variety of different actions but for now we’re just interested in Facebook. Continue by clicking the Facebook channel icon.

Next, from the “Ad Account” drop-down menu select your organization and then select an existing or “New custom audience” in the “Custom audience” section.

You can now name that new audience and also provide information regarding what you know about the customers or campaign in the details. This information is especially useful when you have a large number of audiences you want to target.

Press “Create Audience” to confirm and save the entire campaign

Example of a structured flow campaign using a Facebook Custom Audience:

Setting up a Facebook Custom Audience

While the previous steps focused on linking and creating your own audience, we’ll now cover how to use these custom audiences directly in your Facebook ad campaigns.

First, you’ll need to log into Facebook via your Business Manager and open the menu in the top left-hand corner. From there, click on “Audiences” in the “Assets” column.

In the Audiences list, you should see the one you created in Samba Enterprise. In our example below, you can see the “Test” audience we created in one of the previous steps.

To see the details regarding that audience, simply click on the audience name.

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Creating a Campaign with a Custom Facebook Audience

You can create a Facebook campaign via the menu in the upper left-hand corner of your “Ads manager” section. To create one, simply click “Create Ad”.

The specific marketing settings are up to you, utilizing the standard Facebook marketing tools that target conversion, brand promotion, and more.

Once completed, click on the "Set Up Ad Account" button if you do not yet have an ad account.

If you don't currently have a Facebook Ad account, you'll need to go through the initial setup.

Next, you’ll be asked to add a custom audience, among other various campaign settings. Simply enter the custom audience you created earlier, as shown below for our "Test" audience:

Once you've set up your banners, sizes, forms, budget, duration, and more, you're ready. A similar procedure can be used for Instagram, which can be accessed via the Facebook network settings.‍

It’s important to note that Samba will add customers to Facebook’s audiences once every 24h. In Facebook’s audiences, previous data is not deleted. With that, you should anticipate issues using time-based campaigns, such as those for holidays, birthdays, customers that bought something in previous week, and so on. A partial solution would be to restrict the time frame of when and how long those Facebook campaigns run.

Effective Facebook and Instagram Campaigns

With Samba, you can create much more effective Facebook campaigns that target your ideal customers. For example, through flow campaigns, you can easily create an audience of customers who have spent more than $30 on your e-shop over the past month and run a special ad campaign for them with an incentive to purchase again.

With advanced flow campaigns, audiences can be broken down into much more detail, for example, individuals who have purchased some particular garden products can be segmented and offered additional, complementary products on Facebook.

At the same time, with flow campaigns, you can set up an audience made up of those customers who haven’t converted on other marketing channels, like email, and see if you can effectively get their business via social media.

When you take into account the fact that you can still filter on Facebook, you truly have the ultimate marketing tool. For example, for those customers who just purchased something from the aforementioned garden category, you can limit your targeting to just men and offer them a selection of garden tools, while for women, you can offer smaller accessories or designer garden furniture.