Laser-Targeting Your Ideal Audience with Facebook Ads

With over 1 billion users on Facebook, you might be surprised at how incredibly specific you can make your Facebook target audience.

But any good marketer doesn’t mindlessly plow head-first into creating a target audience for Facebook ads without first putting a solid strategy in place.

So how do you determine who to target?

Before you can know how you want to customize your Facebook audience, you need to have a strategy in place. Guesswork won’t cut it and will waste your time and money.

You need to get clear about who your potential buyers are, gathered from data such as customer surveys, analyzing your sales pipeline, and referencing your buyer personas.

Get inside the mind of your ideal customer and find out who they are, what makes them tick, and where they’re hanging out on Facebook.

1. Demographics Targeting

There are three big umbrella categories you can choose to target your ideal customers: demographics, behaviors, and interests.

Facebook targeting generally works best by layering location, interest, behavioral and demographics-based targeting.

By mixing all of these together you can create a very specific and layered Facebook audience.

Although Facebook has an almost endless array of targeting options, some categories within demographics (such as location) are going to be stronger for targeting than others.

Some basic demographics available to target are ethnic group, age, and gender.

This is an area where split-testing or a test campaign can pay off, because sometimes who you think your ideal customer is might not actually be the case.

Digital Marketer gave an example of how they thought their site Survival Life’s ideal buyer was older white men.

A Facebook ad campaign proved them wrong when they didn’t limit it by gender and women ended up converting more than men.

Other noteworthy demographics to target are:

Education: Education covers users’ educational level such as whether they’re in high school, have a bachelor’s degree, a doctorate, and so on. You can target their field of study, the school they attended, the years they were an undergrad, and their educational level of attainment, such as currently in high school through to advanced degrees.

Location: Location is one of the big factors, especially if you’re a local business. For example, a chain of local pizzerias would most likely want to keep their focus local.  Conversely, if you sell products in multiple countries (or want to broaden your reach to include other countries), you can extend your target audience to include those countries while excluding anywhere you don’t sell.

Finances: You can target users by their income range and net worth.

Generation: Are they of the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z crowd?

Housing: You can target by any combination of housing information, such as whether they rent, own, or are first-time home buyers, the type of home such as apartment, condo, multi-family, or single; the value of the home; the number of acres of property; when the house was built; the number of square feet; household composition (such as housemates, new parents, family-based households), and so on.

Relationships: Customers can be targeted whether they’re single, married, divorced, have children, and are a mom or a dad.

Political affiliation: This can be effective if you’re in an industry that might appeal more to a certain political affiliation than another, such as marketing a shooting range discount to Republicans.

2. Behavioral Targeting

It can be tempting for a novice to Facebook marketing to simply target general demographics, but honing in on interests and behaviors makes your targeting especially strong.

Behaviors are often derived from third-party data, but can also be derived from the things people tend to celebrate or brag about on Facebook, like a new baby or engagement.

There are multiple layers of behavioral traits to choose from so you can get quite specific.

Even people who have friends who are experiencing certain life events can be targeted. For example, a home goods store can market wedding gift ideas to the friends of people who are getting married.

Some behaviors that can be targeted are:

Purchase Behavior: Purchase behavior is a key area to target. 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase, so Facebook understands what people are likely to buy.

Automotive: What kind of vehicle do users drive? Is it new or used? Are they shopping for a new car?

Digital Activities: Are they console gamers? What internet browser do they use? Are they early or late technology adopters?

Expats: A target audience can be anyone living outside of their country of origin. For example, an American travel and health insurance company could target American expats living in Spain. 

Media: Do they listen to satellite radio, or watch a particular genre of TV show (action, comedy, etc.)?

Mobile Device User: What brand of mobile device do they use?  Are they new smartphone or tablet owners? 

Residential Profiles: How many years users have lived in their home? Are they likely to move or need to take out a new mortgage?

Seasonal and Events: Are they engaged in seasonal content, such as baseball or rugby?

Travel: Are they frequent travelers, do they travel for business, take family vacations, or have they recently returned from a trip?

3. Interests Targeting

With Facebook users continually viewing, clicking, and liking pages, products, and things of interest, Facebook has a good understanding of individuals’ hobbies, pastimes, and interests.

Through posts they share on their timelines, apps they use, and pages they like, advertisers can reach specific audiences by their interests.

Interests cover virtually anything you can think of, from what people do for entertainment, whether they’re into bodybuilding, what they like to eat and drink, what technology they like, whether they have pets, and so on.

With a multifaceted approach to your Facebook targeting that mixes key demographics, interests, and behaviors, you can get incredibly specific with a killer ad campaign that will target your ideal customers.

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