5 Powerful Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies
Facebook is still currently one of the most widely used platforms online by adults. And the vast majority who use it daily continue to provide brands and businesses an opportunity for maximum visibility when implementing Facebook ad targeting strategies.
One of the toughest parts is how to get started but we are here to provide help and give you five of the most powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies that you can use every day to get great results.
Targeting audiences on Facebook can be done by a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible as targeting parameters. Mastering Facebook ads strategies will get you in front of specific audiences who are motivated and eager to be wowed.
Here are some underrated tips that you haven’t even thought of:
Recent Purchasing Behaviour
Back in 2013, Facebook had a partnership agreement with Epsilon, Datalogix, and Acxiom, which are data-forming companies. Acxiom alone has over 500 million active consumer data users worldwide, with an average of 1500 data points per person.
This means that Facebook has a lot of information about its users. If you like horror movies, like playing Candy Crush Saga or even taking prescription pills, Facebook probably knows about it. This gives the advertisers the power to reach out beyond their own CRM databases. They can take advantage of these data and target their audiences accordingly.
And so, purchasing behavior is powerful because it taps into insights learned from shopper loyalty programs of all types and then gets matched to Facebook user profiles. Purchasing behavior has many different subcategories, and this includes buyer profiles, clothing, food & drink, health, entertainment, etc. You can be even more specific and drill down into the types of behavior. You can target foodies, DIYers, fashionistas, bookworms, and so on.
Facebook will show you the number of user profiles you can target in each subcategory based on the number of users in that category they’ve matched to offline purchasing data. So really, it’s not just things that people do on Facebook, but also the sort of data that transfers through from other purchasing behaviors.
The options here are limitless, engage in your niche in your area, and explore. Purchasing behavior is just another addition to one of your Facebook ads that you can try and run. Try it out, it’s an underrated yet a great and powerful Facebook ad targeting strategy.
Life Events Targeting
You should already know by now that Facebook uses life events. With life events, you can mark your timeline with the different milestones of your life, I’m pretty sure you’ve already seen a lot of your friends doing this. You can make your date of birth, when you attend a new school when you get a new job, your relationship status, and so on. These life events can be a very good targeting point to those types of businesses that are based on selling to people experiencing major life events.
Funeral homes, for example, want to connect to people who are planning for a funeral, lost/losing a loved one, or are terminally ill. Wedding photographers target people who are engaged. Moving services want to target people who have just purchased a house or an apartment. A jewelry company may want to target those who are having their birthdays or anniversaries.
Facebook has a life event targeting option that you can use to run ads and get customers that way.
The Life Events parameter is unique in that you can target people at specific time intervals. This is a powerful trick that you can use for your Facebook ads as it supplies just another round of possibility of people buying something. As we all know, people are more inclined to buy something if it’s either for someone else as a gift or when it’s in a more predisposed setting like Christmas or birthdays.
Nurture Leads with Facebook Custom Audiences
This tip is called “closing the gap”, which is focusing on customers and people that you know and have already interacted with. Facebook Custom Audiences are an advanced feature that enables you to connect on Facebook with your existing contacts. Being able to get in front of your existing customers and app users on their favorite social network reinforces your brand. It also gives you the opportunity to increase lifetime customer value, order frequency, and loyalty.
This can work the other way around. You can increase the efficacy of your campaigns by excluding your existing customer list. One example is if you are offering a free trial to new users, there’s no reason to show it to your loyal customers.
Custom audiences can be created using your customer phone list or email list and uploading them to Facebook. You can also create a Custom Audience based on your site visitors. And you can really be specific when you use this. You can exclude a subset or a specific list or just get down to the very basic and target existing customers.
This tool is crazy powerful! You can target your existing customers who work in a specific field, make X amount of money per anum, and live in a certain ZIP code with a higher value product offer. You could also target those people who have visited your website with offers or free trials and product demos. These people already know who your business is and were interested enough to visit your website, but not convert. Facebook ad targeting using the Custom Audience can close that gap and get that sale.
The number of parameters that you can target here is huge. Marital status, net worth, living arrangement, parental status, location, interest – everything is there for you to leverage.
Lookalike Audiences
Once you have the Custome Audiences strategy in place, the next logical step is Lookalike Audiences. Even if you don’t have your own email or phone list, you can still create a Lookalike Audience using a tracking pixel to mirror your Facebook fan base. Lookalikes allow you to expand beyond your reach but still target people with highly specific profiles, by creating audiences that look like your own targets. This strategy is a good way to earn new fans and followers that can potentially be new customers.
For example, if you know 100 people visit your website, you can create a lookalike audience of those 100 people that visited your website who might also be interested. Let’s say you have a skateboarding website where you sell skate clothing, and people who visit that are most likely into skateboarding. Of those 100 people that visited, you can create a lookalike audience that will involve similar traits and similar likes and user behaviors from those people who interacted with your website and create an ad using the audience that it will have targeted from the trades that is collected from those 100 people.
Lookalikes allow you to expand beyond your reach but still target people with highly specific profiles, by creating audiences that look like your own targets. Once you created the audience you want to replicate, you can make it broader or more specific. Broader means Facebook is going to find you the top 10% of users in your target region who are most similar to your audience.
More specific means Facebook’s going to find you the top 1% of users to similar trades in your target regions. So you can really get quite specific here, and this is a great way to get new customers, a new fan base, and new followers, that are very similar to the people that are already interacting with your website.
Layered Targeting Options
The powerful thing about Facebook ad targeting is your ability to layer targeting options on top of the other, which will gradually make your audience more and more specific. You can use a combination of behaviors, demographics, and location data to reduce your audience to as little as one person. You can use these combinations of the different options that we’ve listed earlier to get a very specific audience and create an audience that’s just like the customers you want.
Let’s take a moving company, for example, that is promoting a special discount for senior citizens. They could target people who just purchased a house or apartment within the last month, layered with an age range of 60 years plus, and their specific service area location.
That is a great Facebook strategy because they’re literally serving the customers that they need. They have a specific promotion going on for senior citizens, and a moving company is most likely operating only a specific city or area. So that is a perfect strategy that would yield results because they’re being very specific in the audience, and they’re being very focused on who they are.
Another example would be a retailer that focuses on baby food and can target new parents within a specific area. These are just some examples of layering where it involves a combination of these targeting options that are mentioned above and the target options that are available in Facebook ads.
If you can understand the intent, needs, and likelihood to respond to any given audience segment, you can layer Facebook Ads targeting options to tap into it and get in front of them.
The Best Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies are Diversified and Comprehensive
When choosing what strategy to use, you don’t have to pick just one from the tips given above. Check each one out and see how they might fit in your target market segments. Figure out what you really need from your audience. Facebook ads are a very tricky trial and error game. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t, you just have to try it out and figure it out for yourself. There are some general guidelines you can follow, as said previously, so make sure to internalize them all.
Helpful Tips to Keep in Mind:
- Know your audience
- Create a persona for your target audience
Figure out:- Who are they?
- What do they like?
- Where would they be?
The most important thing for having good Facebook ads is understanding your customer. If you understand your customer’s intent, their needs, and their likelihood to respond to any given audience, then you can layer your Facebook ad targeting options to tap into this audience and get very good results. Focus on your target audience, the best thing to do is create a persona around your target audience. Who are they? What did they like? What would they like and what would they dislike? Who do you want to reach? That is the most powerful strategy you can use.
Brainstorm on who your audience would most likely be and then reverse engineer backward into your Facebook ads. Understanding your customers is just very powerful. And if you know who your target audience is, then your Facebook ads will be extremely powerful in getting right in front of your ideal customers.
