Lookalike Modeling: How to Get Started

by Kelly ParrettMar 5, 2025Audience Targeting, Direct Mail0 comments

Lookalike audiences provide an effective way to target new prospects and expand your customer base. However, many teams lack the bandwidth and data expertise to create these high-performing target audiences.

Outside of platform-specific tools, lookalike modeling can seem like a daunting process. That’s why we recommend outsourcing your modeling for maximum impact. With the right tools, you can build and deploy lookalike audiences across multiple channels—without having to build the models in-house.

Here’s how to get started with lookalike modeling.

What is lookalike modeling?

Simply put, lookalike modeling is the process of creating a lookalike audience, which is an audience of new prospects created to mirror your existing customer base. These potential customers share behavioral and demographic characteristics with your current customers, making them more likely to be interested in your offering.

How does lookalike modeling work?

The lookalike modeling process uses your customer data as a seed for modeling. For example, Deep Sync’s process uses AI and machine learning to generate demographically focused consumer profiles where matches can be made between your data and our deterministic identity graph. These profiles are then used to inform the selection of consumers in our prospect universe with demographic and/or geographic similarities—giving you the ideal lookalike audience.

What are the benefits of lookalike modeling?

Lookalike modeling can be hugely beneficial to your marketing efforts, especially when you’re able to have more direct control over the process. Here are some of the top benefits:

1. Grow Your Audience

Demographic lookalikes that use your customer data as a seed for modeling are a powerful tool to grow your advertising efforts while maintaining the quality of your audiences. This process is especially helpful in identifying high-value prospects, resulting in improved lead generation, reduced marketing spend, increased conversions, and better ROI.

2. Avoid Lookalike Lock-In

Platform-specific lookalike models cause lookalike lock-in, where the audiences are not usable on other digital channels. This limits advertisers’ ability to gain a unified understanding of their audience and apply insights beyond a single social or programmatic platform—resulting in higher costs, redundant learning, and reduced omnichannel impact.

A portable lookalike model helps avoid these issues by enabling consistent targeting across multiple channels.

3. Create Portable Audiences

Lookalikes created outside of a walled garden are portable, enabling brands to accurately and confidently target the right audiences, at scale, across multiple destinations. For example, social media lookalike audiences built on Deep Sync One can be targeted across Meta channels like Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok.

This portability makes prospects significantly more likely to convert over time since the ads will reach them across disparate channels. In fact, brands with a well-executed omnichannel strategy will see a 9.5% yearly increase in annual revenue.

4. Customize Your Lookalikes

Lookalike audiences can be customized by size, making it easy to meet campaign requirements. Some lookalike modeling tools, including Deep Sync’s offline lookalike audience tool SnapShot, enable geographic and demographic prioritization for further customization.

5. Simplify Processes with AI and Machine Learning

New AI-powered lookalike audiences, like those available on Deep Sync One, simplify the audience-building process. So, brands don’t need to have in-house data experts to build these models.

6. Gain Audience Insights from Your Customer Data

Depending on how the lookalike model is created, the process can provide insights about the key demographics, interests, and behaviors of your most valuable customers. This makes it possible to better understand your customer base, inform future decisions, and see who is most likely to convert.

How to Get Started with Lookalike Modeling

The first step to getting started with lookalike modeling is to ensure your first-party data is clean, accurate, and ready to use. This means standardizing addresses, running National Change of Address (NCOA) updates, and removing duplicates or outdated records.

It’s also helpful to segment your first-party data to identify your best customers. That way, your lookalike audience can be built to model high-value customers rather than every contact in your database. For example, excluding inactive users or those who haven’t made a purchase will improve audience quality.

Once your data has been optimized, we recommend working with a data provider; their expertise can be incredibly helpful in building these high-performing audiences.

Build Social Media Lookalike Audiences on Deep Sync One

Lookalike Audiences on Deep Sync One are built using AI and machine learning approaches to generate demographically focused consumer profiles where matches can be made between a brand’s first-party data and our multi-dimensional, offline-to-online identity graph.

These custom on-demand audiences, informed by the intelligence within your current customer data, are extremely easy to create. Simply upload your data and let Deep Sync One do the rest! Once the audience is built, you can customize your audience size to meet your specific campaign requirements.

Simply make a free Deep Sync One account to get started.

Build Direct Mail Lookalike Audiences with SnapShot

SnapShot on AccuLeads uses the intelligence of your data to quickly create a custom prospect audience of demographic lookalikes for direct mail campaigns.

This automated service statistically profiles your best customers by matching your first-party data to a comprehensive database of U.S. consumers or businesses to create a customized market penetration analysis. The resulting report serves as the foundation to create fully customized lookalike audiences.

The audience can be further customized by selecting desired demographics like ZIP Codes, U.S. states, income brackets, and more. Additionally, email addresses and phone numbers can be added to expand touchpoints to other channels.

Learn more about SnapShot in this Product Sheet.