With more than 2 billion active monthly users worldwide, Facebook is clearly keeping its reign as one of the most powerful social media platforms around. And for marketers, it is an incredibly powerful tool that could potentially make or break their brands.
But promoting a business on Facebook doesn’t come with a guarantee that you’ll achieve your goals. Like most marketing tools available, it’s effectiveness relies on having a broader marketing strategy. We have a lot of clients confessing they’re rather disappointed in the results they get through their Facebook posts (paid or not.) After a bit of looking around, we saw one common mistake a lot of them made.
They did not choose the right audience to target. And when you’re not addressing the right people, your entire strategy can, unfortunately, fall apart.
Here’s how you can figure out who you should target on Facebook.
How to Build Your Ideal Audience
You should already know something about your target audience. Facebook advertising allows very specific profiles of your ideal audience, and you should target the characteristics that fit what your customers (or potential customers) look like.
You can combine several different targeting methods to get a more accurate audience:
- Demographics – This is information about the person’s age, gender, marital status, education, etc.
- Location – Where a user is based. This is an important targeting tool particularly if you’re also looking for more on-location visitors;
- Interests – This can be a way to connect to people interested in what you offer;
- Behaviour – For this method, you’ll need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. The pixel will track visitor behaviour on your website, and show them ads based on what they did – like, for instance, reminding them to finish buying the products left in the cart;
- Connections – Helps you reach people from the extended circle of the users who already follow you. It may be easier to attract new customers on social media if they see other friends of theirs are interacting with your Facebook page.
By combining these different targeting options, you will then be able to reach the right audience for your brand. However, this is not the only targeting option Facebook offers.
Custom Audiences
Facebook’s audience targeting methods described above are great for attracting Facebook users to visit your business page or even website, but what happens with the people who already know you? Can you leverage that list as well? Yes, you can!
You can create a Facebook Custom Audience to find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. You have several options:
- Website custom audiences – Matches the people who visited your website with the people who are using Facebook;
- Mobile app custom audiences – Targeting people who already downloaded your app to get them to engage with it more;
- Custom audiences from a customer list – Any contact list you may have can be uploaded and used to create a new audience. For individuals in the EU, remember that you have to respect the GDPR regulations;
- Engagement custom audiences – Targeting the users who have already engaged with you.
Creating custom audiences is a powerful move because it relies on targeting people who already have established some type of connection with you. You show the ad to people who know you. As a result, when they see one of your ads and recognise your brand, users may be far more likely to click on your ad and visit your website or otherwise engage with you.
Facebook lets you create about 500 Custom Audiences per each Facebook ad account. It recommends you start using them after you’ve already built a following on the platform because that’s when you’ll see the best results.
Establishing Goals
Choosing the right audience is imperative in an ad campaign, but there’s one more thing you should focus on the next time you visit the Facebook ads manager to create ad campaigns: your objective.
If target audiences tell Facebook what your ideal customer looks like, ad objectives let the platform know what you want to get out of this whole process. In other words, what your business goals are.
Generally speaking, there are three broad goal categories you may want to focus on:
1. Raising Awareness
A common goal you may have in your Facebook campaign is to simply generate some buzz around your business or a particular product or service. This is a good goal if you’re in the incipient stages of developing your brand because it allows you to tell people what you’re truly about.
2. Increasing Conversions
You want more. You are content with the number of people who visit your website, but few of them make a purchase. If you tell Facebook your goal is to increase the number of sales, then it will optimize the campaign and show your ads to those users more likely to buy or use your product or service.
3. Increase Curiosity
You’ll find this one as the consideration option. Basically, it means you want people to think about your brand, and want to find out more about it. You can use it when you want to increase website traffic, for instance. Your objective here isn’t to get more people to buy, but to get more people on your site. As a result, Facebook will then know who the best users to help you achieve that goal are.
It’s very likely you won’t have just one goal. You may start off wanting to raise awareness, and soon be looking at different goals. Moreover, you can have simultaneous ad campaigns running with different goals entirely. For instance, a campaign to launch a new product will have an awareness objective, but your ads to increase conversions can still run at the same time.
Facebook Advertising Done Right
Facebook ad targeting is complex, but choosing the right Facebook audience and objective won’t necessarily bring the result you’re looking for. You also have to think about the copy, the design of the ad, the hook, and all these kinds of things. However, the audience and objective is certainly a good place to start designing an ad campaign.
If you want to create better targeted ads for your Facebook campaign, we’re happy to help. Get in touch with Australian Internet Advertising now and let’s find out who your ideal Facebook Advertising audience is!
