5 Effective Targeting Strategies When Creating Your Ads on Facebook

 

There are many Facebook ad formats through which you can target your audience, with thousands of potential parameters in the ad targeting process.

Mastering your Facebook targeting strategy puts you in front of very specific segments of your audience, who spend an average of 35 minutes a day on Facebook.

Here are some effective Facebook ad targeting strategies you've never heard of:

1. Take advantage of recent purchasing behaviors among Facebook users

Not only does Facebook know you're playing Happy Farm or Candy Crush, it was back in 2013 when Facebook formed partnerships with data brokers including Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix.

This has given advertisers the ability to reach beyond their databases and leverage insights from shopper loyalty programs of all types and match them to user profiles. Facebook advertisers use this data to target audiences with thousands of different purchasing behaviors.

Here's what I use: People who have clicked the Buy Now button in the last 7 days (which is relevant to the company I'm promoting, and we sell products).

Subcategories of purchase behaviors include buyer profiles, apparel, food and beverage, health and beauty, and much more. Within each broad subcategory, you can drill down into types of behavior. For example, selecting buyer profiles will allow you to source from business owners, fashion creators, foodies, etc.

Facebook shows you how many user profiles you can target in each subcategory, based on aggregated data based on multiple offline transactions (or more simply, how many Facebook users in that category were matched with offline purchase data).

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The options here are limitless. Come in and discover!

2. Be creative and target life events

Certain types of businesses or campaigns rely on selling to people who are experiencing certain major events in their lives. It is clear that shops selling bridal suits want to communicate with girls who have recently gotten engaged, and sweets shops want to communicate with people who are planning to throw a birthday party for one of their relatives. Furniture sales companies want to come to you if you have just purchased a new home or apartment.

Facebook has every conceivable event targeting option possible, since we post them to our personal Facebook accounts.

 

The Life Events metric is unique in that you can choose to target people at specific time periods after the change. For example, a jewelry company is clearly interested in reaching people who are celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary, so they can target people who have been newlyweds for one year. Possible time ranges are 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.

3. Enhance customer loyalty with Facebook custom audiences

Facebook Custom Audiences is an advanced feature that enables you to connect on Facebook with your existing contacts. Reaching existing customers and existing app users on their favorite social networks strengthens your brand, but also gives you the opportunity to increase customer lifetime value, repeat order rate, and loyalty to your service.

This also works the other way – you can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and avoid wasted clicks by excluding your existing customer list. For example; If you're offering a free trial of your app or software to new users, there's no reason to offer it to your loyal customers.

Custom audiences are created by uploading a customer phone list, email list of buyers or subscribers in CSV or TXT format. You can also create a custom audience based on visitors to your site (and identifying specific pages visited on your site), or on specific actions taken within your app.

Then you can target or exclude the entire list, or target specific subsets of it using other targeting parameters to reach your ideal audience on Facebook.

This method is very powerful as you can target your existing customers who work in a specific job, make a specific amount of money per year, and live in a specific zip code with the highest value product offering if these characteristics indicate that these people are more likely to be your affluent customers.

Or you can target people who visited your website or blog and saw offers for your products or services through the site. They already know your name and were interested enough to visit you, but you didn't make a purchase! Facebook ads targeting custom audiences can fill this gap.

The number of different demographics that can be targeted and combined is amazing. Net worth, living arrangements, marital status, parental status, interests, location – it's all there, and more.

4. Expand to similar audiences

Creating Lookalike Audiences is the next logical step if you have a good custom audience strategy. Even if you don't have your own email list or phone list, you can use a mirroring of your Facebook fan base. Similar Audiences allow you to expand your targeting significantly but still target very specific people by creating audiences that resemble your own.

If you don't have a mailing list or a large enough audience, you can still create a lookalike audience using your website's tracking pixel to create a custom audience for your website.

 

After you've identified the audience you want to copy and expand, you can make the audience larger (broader) or smaller (more specific and similar to your original audience). At the most similar level, Facebook will find the top 1% of users with similar traits in your target country. On the flip side, to improve reach, Facebook will show your ads to the 10 percent of users in your target country that are most similar to your target audience.

5. Get closer to your audience with layered targeting options

The really powerful thing about Facebook ads is your ability to layer targeting options on top of each other, making your audience progressively more specific. You can use combinations of behavior, demographics, and geolocation data to narrow your audience down to one person. However, the feature that will be most useful to you is the ability to match ad creative and offers to smaller audience segments created using the dataset. In simple terms, you can get the most benefit from your ad when you customize your ad creative to the specific audience for that ad. For example, if your ad displays a men's blue shirt, you should allocate your audience to men who like the color blue.

Or another example: A moving company promoting a special discount for seniors could target people who have purchased a home within the past month, are aged 60 or older and locate their scope of work.

Or a retailer that sells baby products meant to soothe baby could target new parents who have purchased colic medications. Imagine being able to speak directly to the parent who is having that sleepless night with such targeted messages! (As a new father, I have to get this.) Your message can be tailored to speak directly to this issue and offer your solution.

If you can understand the intent, needs, and response potential of any particular audience segment, you can develop Facebook ad targeting options to capitalize on them.

The best targeting strategy for ads on Facebook is diverse and comprehensive. When you discover the strategy for targeting your ads on Facebook, you will not have to choose only one of the options mentioned above; Check out each of them to see how they might fit different segments of your target market.

Create personas for your ideal customers.. Who are they? where do they live? What do they do, and what do they do after work? What qualities and characteristics might they have, and how do they fit into many of the targeting determinants mentioned above?

When you determine who you want to reach, it will be easier for you to use effective targeting tools and options in Facebook ads.