Boomer Elmsdale
A target audience will increase the effectiveness of your Facebook ad tenfold, leading to $100s in increased revenue every day. In this article, we’ll explain how to create a profitable target audience through Facebook Ads and why our formula works!
Increase sales potential by creating an effective target audience through Facebook Ads.
One way that businesses market themselves is through Facebook ads. It’s a low-cost solution to reaching a market likely to be interested in your product or service. That’s because Facebook ads lets you set up a target audience to help sell your business to the right person. Reaching the correct target audience, however, is up to you.
Facebook makes a lot of money from their advertising structure, so someone is clicking on those ads. But how do you get users to click on your ad? Or better yet, how do you get the right user to click on your ad? First, make sure you’re doing everything you can to get your ads on the right timelines by creating the best target audience.
The problem Facebook poses is that people don’t log onto Facebook to spend money, so an ad has to be attention grabbing. It has to draw the customer into the ad, instead of the personal stories filling up their wall. After all, the reason they logged onto Facebook was more likely about watching up with friends.
The upside is that these ads are graphic, and a picture that appeals to your target audience can easily grab their attention. The other positive is that these ads flow seamlessly into Facebook. Some people may be half way through reading it before they realize it wasn’t posted by a friend.
Before you even delve into the many facets of a target audience on Facebook Ads, consider photography. A photo is more important than anything else in a Facebook ad. It takes up a lot of real estate on the ad and it’s likely a user’s first introduction to your business. It’s certainly the first part of the ad people will see. If your photo isn’t eye-catching, the rest of your ad won’t be either.
Choose a photo that people will stop scrolling for. Your target audience should be taken into consideration when you select your ad photo. It’s as much a part of getting your website in front of the right people as selecting your target demo is (but more on that next).
Consider a professional photo shoot if necessary. Your product or service needs to standout on a news feed, and if the graphic is boring, blurry or subpar, people won’t stop to click.
Not only does the photo need to be good quality, it should appeal to your target audience. Market research shows that photos of people are most effective in Facebook ads (although product photos when targeted correctly are also great sales tools). And if the people in the photo resemble your target audience—even better! They are more likely to consider a product or service that immediately resonates with them. If they see themselves in the ad you’ve created, your potential for a sale skyrockets.
When you pay for your ad, Facebook will ask you to pick target audience information. For example, a women’s bathing suit company is probably best marketed to females in a certain age range (i.e. not 13-year-old girls). You can pick a location to target, a gender and an age. You can also select interests from a scroll down bar to try and match your page to a person. For example, if you sell guitars online, select music from the drop down list. If you sell them in a local brick and mortar, utilize a reasonable location selection and then choose music on the interest lists.
These four options are the most important for a company targeting new customers. If you offer a service limited by location, entering your service area will be the best way to narrow your results. There’s no value is marketing outside of the area you can reasonably cover.
Stereotypes are not hard and fast rules, but they exist for a reason. If you’re marketing an automobile modification business, reaching out to men will likely serve you better than targeting a female-only target audience. It’s not to say women don’t have an interest, but if you’re relying on these bare bone designations, it’s probably your best shot at acquiring a customer.
Feeling stumped? Look at your current audience. Whoever is currently buying your product or service—think gender and age—is likely who will show interest when they see the ad on Facebook.
This gets tricky. It costs more money to choose a broad target audience. If you sell a baby product, create a target audience of expecting parents. But you’re spending more to reach a large group. If your target audience is more precise, you save money upfront and should enjoy a larger success rate from your advertisement.
When you select a more precise target audience, your return on investment, or ROI, is better. You can choose to target people based on specific phrases that have been used on their timelines, or look to Pages and apps they use to gain insight.
Think about if you’ve ever logged into a puzzle game through your Facebook app, I bet you Facebook has tried to sell you on more downloadable puzzle games, as well—or rather a marketing-savvy individual who knows how to use Facebook ads has tried to sell you a new puzzle game.
Identify trends between followers you already have. If several of your current customers like other pages in common, consider using those as your interest picks. If you’re selling a service to musicians, consider what magazines or books they may read or musicians they may follow. The more precise you can get, the better targeted your Facebook Ad will be. Identifying niche markets gets your company in front of the eyes that are most likely to become a customer.
Example: Selling a product related to breastfeeding? Ditch the “expectant moms” category and look instead to prospective or current parents who follow Le Leche League sites in your service area. That’s a more precise target audience for your product!
When you are working hard to reach a target audience, and save a little moola while doing so, it can be easy to make a slip up and choose the wrong audience members. When you do this, there is no broad group description to fall back on. But with a little risk can come great reward.
Avoid this problem by putting in the time to research thoroughly. The better you know your target audience, the easier it’ll be for you to seek them out.
There are other targeting capabilities including connections, relationship status, languages, education and workplaces. If you’re a divorce attorney trolling for new customers online, maybe don’t target a “single” audience, or anyone “in a relationship with.” It’s the same idea as only marketing student loan debt consolidation services to those who list college educations on their profile. Why would you market that service to a 15-year-old high school student? You wouldn’t.
Take the advice above and apply it to each of these sections. Make sure you are marketing ads to the right people and your ROI will skyrocket. And remember, the more accurately you can envision your customer and pinpoint their shared interests, the more success you’ll have with Facebook ads (and the more money you can potentially save on your ad.)
Those who say they don’t work aren’t using them right.
