Let’s be Friends. Connecting Braze and Facebook Part 1

Engaging with your customers across multiple outbound marketing channels is essential in today’s marketing. By utilizing a variety of touchpoints, it empowers you to create personalized experiences, reach a wider audience, and drive meaningful interactions with your customers.

Yet, many marketing teams narrowly focus their efforts on just a handful of channels such as email, in-app messaging (IAM), and SMS leading to missed opportunities in other established channels like social media.

Enter Facebook and its ability to send two distinct types of marketing communication:

1. Prospecting: Targeting new, lookalike audiences who share traits with your existing customers
   

2. Loyalty: Directly engaging known users through Facebook Messenger on a personal level

Each marketing communication path requires its own setup and configuration. So, to keep things concise, we'll split this discussion into two parts. In this post, we'll dive into the key steps for setting up prospecting campaigns within your Braze customer engagement system.

Establish Credentials

To begin your foray into Facebook you’ll need to enable the Facebook Custom Audiences Integration to connect Braze and Facebook. Fortunately, setting this up is very straightforward and only requires configuring the integration on the Braze side. To complete the integration, you’ll need to ensure you have the following information:

1. Access to your organizations Meta Ads Manager Admin account

   • This will be the account Braze utilizes to authenticate with Facebook

2. Administrative Access to your Braze instance

   • You will need these privileges to perform the configuration within Braze

3. Administrative Access to your organizations Meta Ads Manager

   • This will provide the necessary privileges to define audiences for targeting within Facebook

Once you have all those credentials, it’s time to get the party started!

Integrate with Braze

With your Meta credentials nailed down, you can now connect Braze with Facebook. Follow these steps to establish the integration:

1. Within Braze, navigate to the Partner Integrations section on the left-hand pane and select Technology Partners.

2.  You’ll find Facebook (social) under the All Technology Partners section. Don’t be shy, click on it.

3. On the Facebook configuration page, click the Connect Facebook button.

4. The setup process will prompt you for the credentials, which you secured earlier, to connect to Facebook. Follow the prompts and you should be good to go

PRO TIP: Utilizing a personal account to perform this integration is NOT best practice. Your organization should have defined an application account for establishing this integration.

5. After completing the account definition process in the Facebook portal, you’ll automagically be sent back to the Braze configuration page. Now that Braze has access to your Meta Ads Manager, you will be tasked with defining the Facebook Ad Account that will be receiving segment information via your Braze canvas.

PRO TIP: You may see several Ad Accounts depending on the privileges provided to the Facebook account utilized for the integration. Pick the account where your Facebook Audiences are defined and that will sync with Braze segment data moving forward

6. Once you have identified the appropriate Ad Account, select the corresponding check box and click on the Connect Ad Account button. This will complete the configuration process on the Braze side.

See! That wasn’t so hard. Give yourself a pat on the back since you just completed the process of integrating Facebook Custom Audiences with Braze!

Braze Segment to Audience Sync

Now that you’ve completed the hard work of setting up the Facebook Custom Audience integration with Braze, you can send those Facebook focused segments over to your Meta Ads Manager. When you setup a Braze Canvas, with the integration enabled, you can choose Facebook as a channel for your audience sync step (see image below). When your Canvas is launched, the segment data will be pushed over as an audience to Facebook where it can be defined in your Facebook Ad Campaigns.

In the second half of this Facebook series, we cover Facebook Messenger and the steps required to get the data communications going between Facebook and Braze. This integration will enable you to engage directly with your Facebook audiences through messages that will foster stronger relationships which will ultimately drive customer loyalty and engagement.