Creating And Targeting The Right Audience In Meta (Facebook)

About 1 year ago, according to Meta for Business's Facebook data;  Facebook's Monthly Active Users were 2.74 billion.

Yes, billion.

So it's safe to assume that your target audience can be found within this large group of their users.

I'm not sure if you can visualize in your head how many people 1 billion actually is (U.S. Population is less than half), but another staggering number is that in that same month, 3.21 billion people used one of Facebook's services at least once.

Okay, so if all of those people are there, why are you having trouble getting the right people to your sales, lead or store page? Most likely the culprit is targeting.

Which is our topic for today.

Why targeting is so important to your advertising campaigns

The answer is simple. You're likely not going to sell cat food to someone who doesn't own a cat.

Also, it's widely known there are stages of a customer funnel.

1. Know: This is basically the brand awareness stage of the funnel. They don't know who you or your brand is. They probably don't know what problem you solve, or can help them solve. This is not the stage that you would want to target with a hard call to action sales pitch. It's counter productive and you can almost all but be sure that your campaigns will not succeed. Instead, offer an informative position. Try to create enough intrigue that they go for more. Some great examples to make best of these campaigns in order to progress this segment of your audience to the next stage in the customer funnel; e.g., blog articles you've written, youtube videos you've created, or e-books, reports, whitepapers, guides, or other resources that you know your audience will use and appreciate. Don't be cheap here. I am a Techstars alumni, and I will say one of the most profound principles of the organization and what they instilled in us as students was to "Give First", linked is a podcast on the topic :).  So if you really try to be selfless, and give good content to your audience at this stage of the funnel, it will pay dividends. This is going to be about 75% of your target audience.
2. Like: Have they followed you on social media yet? Read any of your articles, watched any of your videos, podcasts, or other content? Have they looked at deeper links in your website like Testimonials, FAQ, or About Us page? Have they signed up for your newsletter? This segmented stage of your customer funnel is looking for information to be sold on you or your product, brand or service. Statistics say on average this will be about 23% of your target audience.
3. Trust: If they've hit your Contact Us, Inquiries, or Buy Now buttons, they're the elusive 2% that are ready to take action now. Captivate them while they're hot and have shown intent.

Simply put, when you're targeting the right audience on Meta it's not just as easy as figuring out what you think your target audience's demographics are. If you get this wrong, it won't matter how great your ad or even offer is.  You can craft the most wordsmith'd, clever and compelling ad copy and still have it fall on deaf ears.

This portion is so important, Meta (Facebook) has what's called a "Relevance Score". Without diving too much into this topic, the short of it is your cost per click will trend lower the higher your campaign's relevance score is (right message to the right audience).

The Basics

Targeting by location is where a lot of people get started to begin refining their target audience on Meta (Facebook).

After you select the desired location of people to target, you will want to define the age group. This is an important feature. Let's say as an example that your product or service is for people of all ages, the messaging in your ad should differ. Simply put, you wouldn't talk to an 18 year old person the same way you would a 70 year old person and expect the same response, would you?

Additionally, you will also want to specify gender if your product or service is typically gender specific.

Meta has created some classes for those that wish to learn more about that.

The Interests

In most cases, just trying to use the basic demographics is not going to be enough to refine your audience.

This is why you want to refine by interests when it makes sense.

If your target audience isn't refined, your click-through rate will be low.

There is a little trick that I will share with you here; it's called the "No One Else Would Know" method. Here is an example; "A Poker Player might know who Doyle Brunson is, but no one else would know". If you wanted to target Poker players, you wouldn't want to use Dan Bilzerian as he is so popular, you don't have to know anything about Poker to know him. Doyle Brunson would be the winner in this instance.

Moving on, Meta offers thousands of interest based options. Just click the Browse button to look through all of the possibilities.

Try to make sure your ad creative and messaging will resonate with your targeted audience. If you're targeting poker players, speak their language. Use imagery they are familiar or identify with, e.g., at the card table, in the casino, living that lifestyle.

The Behaviors

There are some statistics surrounding consumer behavior when it comes to purchase decisions. Here is just a couple:

1. 54% of consumers make their decision to purchase in less than a week.
2. 75% of consumers have made their purchase by week 2.

To touch on this just a bit more, and hopefully point you in the right direction - you might want to drill down from Behaviors into "Purchase Behavior", to help narrow your target audience.

Everything from Business Purchases, to Clothing, Food and Drink, Home, Kids, Pets and more! If you take the time to really think about and refine who is going to buy your product or service at the end of the funnel, you can use these attributes to target them successfully.

Extra Credit

Sometimes you need to make sure the people make enough money to fit your criteria. Well, sadly we can no longer target by a persons income range. But what we can do is target by household income per zip code as shown below.

In Conclusion

Meta (Facebook) Ads can work very well if you take the time to ensure each ingredient for a successful campaign is carefully managed.

So I highly recommend that if you're not happy with the results of your campaigns, to take the time to go through each step detailed within this article.

If you still have questions or need help, please contact us and we'd be happy to assist you if we can!