With almost 2 billion daily active users and an average use time of about 35 minutes per user, Facebook is undoubtedly the best place for business advertising.
While there are several ways to advertise your brand and business on the platform, the key is to make sure your ads reach the right people. Facebook, fortunately, offers ad targeting to help you discover your target audience so that you can make the most out of your marketing budget.
Marketers see incredible rates of engagement with Facebook Video Ads, and with the right targeting and placement, you can gain strong traction for your business and steady returns on investment over time.
Let us discuss how you can find your audience on Facebook with Ad Targeting.
Why Is Finding Your Audience Important?
As you spend on each engagement on the social media channel, you certainly want to avoid wasting your time and resources on engaging users not interested in what you are offering.
By identifying your target audience, you can ensure that the right people see your ads and you see meaningful results with the efficient use of your limited resources.
Knowing your audience on the platform also provides guidance when you are creating a new product. When you know who will be using the product, it becomes easier to understand what features you should build into it.
Finding your target audience also helps create personalized experiences for them to help boost conversion and sales.
How to Find your Target Audience with Facebook Ad Targeting
Facebook advertising is a highly powerful business marketing tactic. Though many new social networks are getting popular these days, most businesses still use Facebook to connect with their potential and existing customers.
By finding the right audience that should see your ads on the platform, you can maximize the power of this marketing method and see desired results.
There are several methods and options you can use to target people on Facebook. Here are a few targeting options available.
- Demographics – You can target your audience on the basis of demographics like age, gender, income, marital status, language, etc. Facebook has a ton of demographic options.
- Location – Facebook lets you target users by country, state, city, or even postal code. You can even get more specific and target them on the basis of the location they work in or where they travel. This is particularly useful for an event as you can target people who are likely to show up.
- Behaviors – Facebook ad targeting uses a technology to track user behavior to show ads to people behaving in certain ways. This is a highly lucrative way to target on Facebook; you may display ads to those who visited your pricing page or blog recently.
- Interests – One of the most effective ways to define a target market, creating ads based on the user interests allows you to create a specific audience that is already interested in your offering.
- Engagement – This option shows Facebook ads based on the engagement of the users with your business. If somebody likes, comments or follows you or your posts, you can choose to display your ads to them.
- Automatic Optimization – With this method, Facebook automatically optimizes your audience on the basis of the demographics and target options available to find an audience that works the best for your business.
Facebook offers you three options when you are creating an audience for your ad on the platform. You can discover the ideal audience for your business under these categories.
Saved Audiences
As the name suggests, saved audiences are those you save and use again and again in your Facebook ad campaigns. If you know your market demographics, you can use the info to create an audience you can reuse multiple times.
The Ads Manager allows entering useful demographics you discover when you map out your customer persona. You can select the demographics, interests, location, and other details to create an audience you want to use in your campaigns.
Custom Audiences
These are the highest converting audiences on Facebook. You can upload lists of phone numbers or emails of prospects you want to display ads.
Facebook can exclude some people from those lists based on their interests. This option works with Pixel to enable you to display ads to those who have visited your site or viewed your pricing, for example.
Getting in front of your existing subscribers or customers on their favorite social platform reinforces your brand and lets you boost customer loyalty.
Create custom audiences by uploading your lists in CSV or TXT format or from your site or page visitors. You can then target the whole list or subsets of it using parameters to find your ideal audience.
With this option, you can target your customers who make a specific amount per year, live in a specific location, and work in a specific role depending on the insights you have about what type of people are most likely to convert.
You could also target people who visited your blog with offers about your product demo. They are already interested in your product but did not convert; Facebook ad targeting bridges this gap.
Lookalike Audiences
Once you have created some custom audiences, you can use the Lookalike Audience option on Facebook to target users similar to those.
For example, if you have built a custom audience from your purchase list, Facebook can find people looking like those who have purchased from you. Facebook identifies what is common among the buyers and looks for others who behave the same way to find your lookalike audience.
You may want to create lookalikes of your email lists, purchase lists, ad engagement, video views, website traffic, and Facebook page engagement.
You can start by creating a 1% lookalike of your email list before proceeding to a higher range and combine them later to create a set. You can also adjust the demographics for this option but Facebook already looks for similar demographics to identify the audiences.
Final Thoughts
Finding your audience helps you identify the most effective Facebook ad targeting options and strategies to get your business in front of your ideal customers.
Facebook Ad Targeting offers a wide range of tools and settings to help you make your ads as effective as they can be. Play around with the options to get meaningful insight into creating a powerful ad campaign that your business benefits from.
