Precise selection of the target group touches on a great many aspects in business.
This ranges from starting a new business or launching an innovative product to extensive sales funnels and strategic prospectuses.
The goal is one - to reach a specific group of people who may be interested in your message, service or offered product.
Characterizing the ideal target is also an integral part of any advertising effort.
Facebook's platform is visited by nearly 1.73 billion users every day so it is absolutely essential to focus on specifying the audience that belongs to your target group.
Otherwise, the money spent on advertising campaigns would be inefficient - your ads would be displayed to those, who are not interested in your offer.
In other words. You will burn through the budget.
In this article I would like to introduce you to the 7 most important aspects , which will help you choose the right audience for your niche.
1. Get to know your potential customer.
When you create distinctive sales messages, you create them with a specific goal in mind, which is most often customer acquisition.
Are you sure you know the needs and desires of the person who would benefit from your offer?
Browse industry discussion forums, online review sites and join Facebook groups that your potential customers may belong to.
Learn about their needs, fears and desires - pay attention to the vocabulary and slang they use.
This will help you tailor your communication and message even more precisely to your audience; Facebook’s detailed targeting may only help you with this.
Whether it's interests, location, age or other behavioral data, the Audience Insights tool, which is built into the business manager on Facebook's ADS platform, can help you.
At this stage you are able to create the first sketches of your ideal customer.
Create a memo or document and carefully review related content with an audience that may be interested in purchasing your product or service.
In the example above, those interested in vegetarian cuisine are linked to a number of companies, competing brands or online stores - you can see the entire list in the second screenshot.
Drawing further inferences, you may find that your ideal customer prefers looser communication because they are more likely to watch meme sites than political debates.
Every single piece of information has a huge impact on the selection of the target audience, which will carry over to the results of advertising campaigns in the future.
2 Use interests when targeting in detail.
Having already gained a better understanding of what our customers might be interested in - we can get down to practice, that is, selecting the right interests.
Detailed targeting by interests is one of the simplest yet most effective methods on Facebook's advertising platform.
Keep in mind, however, that you will not find all interests here.
Most often, the search engine shows the most recognizable brands, magazines or related content. You may not find your local competition or favorite restaurant there.
As the people’s belonging to specific interests updates on a regular basis, the proportions of these groups may slightly vary within a time. Each of us belongs to a group of specific interests, and you can check them in detail HERE.
All you have to do is type the brand of a particular car into the search engine a few times to belong to a particular interest.
Ba! Even if you text someone a few times on Messenger that you are looking for inspiration for a vacation trip - travel agents will immediately start attacking you
If, when selecting interests at the targeting stage, you encounter some difficulties and lack ideas - use suggestions.
Facebook will then suggest you interests similar to those you have already typed into the search engine.
3 Location and Demographics.
In addition to interests, you also have the ability to target by detailed locations and data closely related to demographics.
Facebook allows both affiliation and exclusion from specific locations.
This gives you a wide range of possibilities because with this method you can identify the audience that lives or resides (works) on a daily basis in a specific facility such as an office building, a hospital or a small, modern housing estate.
Here's a tip on how to do such micro geotargeting:
It requires a lot of time and work to determine precisely where on the map we want to reach with our advertising.
In addition, take into account that your target audience should not be too narrow - in this case, the budget for the advertising campaign, will not be spent at all.
Of course, you can geotarget on Facebook as standard:
- By zip code
- After the provinces
- After countries
- After the localities
- After range pins
- After the coordinates
- After the exact address
Also remember to mark the specifics of the specified location correctly.
Learn its importance and consider which option will be most suitable for the structure of your advertising campaign:
Moving on to demographics, here we have the standard targeting options for any advertising platform.
Here we will specify the age, gender, and language of our target audience.
I recommend at the very beginning of creating advertising campaigns to choose a wide age range and both genders.
The results can surprise us, and it happens that the cheapest conversions will appear from people who, according to our analysis, do not fall into the ideal customer persona.
Leave the detailed narrowing of gender and age for later during the detailed optimization of ad campaigns.
If you would like to draw more demographic data that you can use to target your ads - you can use Facebook's suggestions.
You'll find interesting information about education, relationship status, earnings (U.S. only), and even your last move or occupation.
4 Narrowing.
If you sell a product or service that is intended for a specific and narrow target group - you need to take care of detailed and accurate targeting.
This is what narrowing is used for.
Narrowing down makes it more likely that our ad will reach the exact person we care about!
The best part is that the narrowing can be done indefinitely!
Example:
Suppose you sell expensive tennis racquets, which are a premium product.
Not every amateur can afford this type of product so you are looking for a true fanatic and enthusiast.
In addition to a person's interest in tennis as a sport, you narrow your audience to those who are additionally familiar with individual tennis players or interested in recent tournaments.
Due to the fact that the product is very expensive - I further narrow down the audience with interests that can attest to high earnings.
The above structure works great for any type of product or service.
It can help you reach a narrow group of people for whom you have prepared a specific and rare offer.
By narrowing the next level down, you increase the likelihood of reaching your ideal customer, but at the same time you limit the top of your funnel.
So remember not to narrow down your campaigns too much - then they can be very expensive and the frequency will quickly reach its 'maximum'
5 Exclusions.
There have already been constrictions, so now it's time for... exclusions!
This is where you try to minimize as much as possible the chance that a particular person will see your Facebook ad.
If you advertise products for vegans or vegetarians, you can tag specific interests and brands related strictly to carnivores.
For example, if you are creating advertising campaigns targeting leads, more specifically, you are looking for valuable candidates for an important position - exclude people with workplace status similar to„party animal”.
Exclusions have countless uses and when using them, you are really only limited by your imagination.
You can exclude more than just interests.
You can also exclude people who like your fanpage or even liked your photos on the company's Instagram.
All this to reach new, fresh audiences.
If you already know how to create custom groups, you know very well that you can also exclude your current customers. After all, you don't want to inflict them with your advertising over and over again when they've already taken advantage of your offer!
6 Narrow vs. Broad audience.
And that's the question!
It appears very often on many topic groups, practically every day.
In this chapter, I will try to explain to you the key differences and aspects that will clear up your doubts about audience sizing for your advertising campaign.
The first issue is the advertising budget. If you have large sums of money and misalign the budget of your advertising campaign with your audience then you will spend it completely ineffectively and just burn through it.
Too much money for a narrow audience means high frequency.
A recipient who sees your ad 17 times in a day will certainly not buy anything from you because he will be fed up at the very thought of your company's name.
In this situation, you will certainly spend the advertising budget in full, but conversions will either not be there at all or they will be expensive and counted on the fingers of one hand.
If, on the other hand, the audience is too broad and you allocate too few resources to the campaign - it will get lost in the maze of competition and lack of optimization.
Your campaign needs data to optimize itself.
By giving it a £10 daily budget and 2 million potential reach, you are not able to provide it with valuable information and competitors with much larger budgets will eat you for breakfast.
Remember, there is no such thing as perfect target audience sizing and budget. It all depends on the industry and the specific product/service.
Only through testing are you able to find the optimal solution and compromise that will provide you with multiple conversions and effective campaign results.
Facebook's algorithms are getting smarter and more accurate, so we can get super-low-cost conversions using a very wide audience - despite the lack of narrowing and exclusions, Facebook will decide for itself which audience is likely to become our customer.
Also! I did a lot of campaigns where I completely did not use interests. I was literally targeting everyone - leaving out the age narrowing.
The detailed targeting field was blank and the potential audience for the ad was...13 million people.
Nonetheless, the campaign generated many sales and low-cost conversions.
The more data your Facebook Pixel has, the easier it is for Facebook to reach people with ads who will take valuable actions on your online store.
7 Test all audiences.
All the fun associated with Facebook ADS is the creation of various tests and the subsequent analysis of the results obtained.
Probably at the stage of audience research you will come across dozens of different interests or demographic characteristics that your potential customers have.
Don't underestimate any of them. Often you may think that a certain segment of people who are your customers do not fall into interests that deviate from your niche. You would be surprised!
With extensive testing, you are able to increase your chances of reaching the most relevant people on Facebook.
Thus, you have the opportunity to optimize advertising expenses and get many conversions at a low cost.
In my case, it happens that I even test dozens of different options before deciding that this particular group of people will use my services or buy my products.
It depends, of course, on the budget you have to use at this stage of implementing the marketing strategy.
Summary
Selecting a target audience is a process that I personally spend most of my time on when designing advertising strategies.
As a result, I am able to minimize the risk of burning through the budget and can focus on creating messages to specific people, which I define as a precise audience.
Adjust the size of your target audience to the budget you have - this way you will spend the money on ads most effectively.
There are products and services on the market that are so specialized that you will have a hard time selecting the perfect target for your prepared offer.
E.g. Specialized dental machinery or services in unpopular niches or industries.
Facebook is a powerful tool and there will always be a way to reach people who will become your engaged customers.
Good luck!