Facebook advertising is one of the most powerful and effective ways to build brand awareness. With Facebook ads, you have the power to get your unique offerings in front of targeted people who are part of your ideal customer demographic.
With over 1 billion active monthly users and growing across the globe, you have the potential to reach people from any geographic area you want with Facebook targeted ads. Half of all Facebook’s monthly users never access the site on a desktop, but do so on mobile devices. By using Facebook ads, you can reach these mobile-exclusive users.
Facebook ads target options give you the ability to reach out to your personal social network, target audiences, lookalike, and custom audiences. Ads can be as broad or specific as you wish. Today, we’ll cover in more detail how Facebook ads reach people on a highly targeted level, so you’ll be sure that your ads are displaying to a person who is a card-carrying member of your ideal customer tribe.
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How do Facebook ads work?
You might be worried that no one clicks on a Facebook ad anymore, but you’d be dead wrong. Facebook generates more than four billion dollars in advertising revenue each year. So someone is clicking on those ads. How can you get people to click on your ad and take the desired action? It all comes down to how well your ads are targeted to the right people for your product.
When you set you your Facebook ads, the network gives you four different ways to structure and pay for your ads. The specific goal you have in mind for your Facebook ads campaign will help you choose one of the following options.
- CPC (cost-per-click). If you use a CPC pricing strategy, you only pay once someone clicks on the ad. If your ads don’t convert to sales, then CPC ads can drain your marketing budget.
- CPM (cost-per-mille). You pay once Facebook shows your ad 1000 times. Again, no conversions, no more marketing budget.
- CPA (cost-per-action). CPA ads let you monitor and optimise how much money you spend to get a viewer to take the desired action, or convert, on your website or landing page after clicking your ad.
- CPL (cost-per-like). CPLs enable you to track and optimise the amount of money you spend to get someone to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your Facebook page after they click your ad.
If you noticed a running theme between these four ad structures, it’s that you must get the viewers to convert in high enough numbers for the ads to be a lucrative marketing strategy for your business. The most effective way to tweak your ads for the best conversion rates is through the process of creating targeted audiences.
What are targeted audiences and why are they so important?
In the Facebook ads manager dashboard, you have a chance to look over, review, tweak, and optimise your Target Audience. A target audience is a group of Facebook users who will potentially see your ad.
One of the greatest things about Facebook advertising that the other advertising platforms can’t hold a candle to is the sheer amount of granular, accurate data Facebook has on its users. With Facebook ad targeting, you can reach people based on incredibly specific demographic metrics, including age range, location, occupation, educational level, family size, etc. If you want your ads to display to 30-year-old women with children in grade school who play soccer, you can!
Facebook also allows you to target specific people using only their email addresses or phone numbers. This is called ‘Customer Audience’ targeting. So, if you have an email list and you want to keep your wares at the forefront of your leads’ minds while they’re on Facebook, you can with a targeted custom audience.
While the ad copy, image, and layout are all important to getting your ads to convert, who the ads display to is one of the most critical factors in running a successful Facebook ads campaign.
If your ideal customer is a woman with young kids at home who play sports because your product is a godsend to suburban soccer moms, you don’t want your ads getting in front of women who don’t have children, or whose children are in college. Nor would you want your ads getting in front of child-free single men or women. These not-so-ideal viewers may click on your ad out of sheer curiosity, but of course, they won’t convert. So you would be spending more on the ads without getting the desired sales from them.
Do some target audiences cost more?
Yes. The broader your product or service, the more it will cost to run even highly targeted Facebook ads. The more advertising dollars that are chasing after a specific product, in this case, an in-demand audience demographic, the more your ads will cost. Again, targeting the audience, even if your ideal customer demographic is broad, will still keep your costs low.
Where does Facebook get their information to target individuals?
Every day, Facebook users are liking and following all sorts of pages that interest them. People are also adding things to their timelines or their friend’s timelines. Facebook can also gather information from app users to target people. It is with this information and highly individualised activity that enables Facebook to garner information that is extremely valuable to marketers.
What are the different targeting options?
- Targeting by age range, location, and gender.
Keep in mind, Facebook does not allow you to target two different locations at once. If, for example, you wanted to focus your ad to people in New York and San Francisco, you would need to create two different ads for each city. Also, if your audience is non-gender specific, it’s a good idea to experiment with the ad copy to see how to get the best conversion rates when your ad displays to either men or women.
- Precise interest targeting and broad category targeting.
Here, you can target individuals with specific demographic information, such as their education levels, the type of job they have, and their interest such as reading, hiking, traveling, etc. Facebook can gather people’s interests based on what other pages they’ve ‘liked’ or ‘followed’ and also what type of apps they use or groups they’ve joined or perhaps manage. Facebook also uses what people have displayed on their timelines to determine their specific interests and highly personal activities.
- Connections Targeting
You can target individuals based on their connection to your page, or you can target friends of your page’s followers.
- Target a Custom List
Facebook allows you to target individuals from your CRM. You can upload your email addresses, and Facebook will create a lookalike audience or a custom audience based on your CRM’s interests and demographic statistics.
Facebook advertising is one of the most effective ways to get your brand in front of highly targeted people. But Facebook advertising campaigns that convert and give you the best ROI take time to perfect. And it also takes time and effort to best understand your target audience’s demographics, and how to tap into Facebook’s massive collection of data.
Here at Australian Internet Advertising, we’ve helped thousands of businesses grow their reach with unique Facebook ads target strategies. Contact us today and see what we can do to increase your brand awareness through Facebook Advertising.
