Audience targeting is super important when it comes to Social Media Advertising results as it ensures the right marketing messages are being delivered to the most relevant people. Social media is important to reach new and existing users, but remember your product or service will never be right for every single person, so choosing the right people will allow you to reach your goals more effectively, without wasting time, budget, and resources on a campaign targeting people that will never be interested.
Reaching valuable social media advertising results is made easy now with the many tools that can allow us to target the right people. Facebook Audience Insights is a start. This is an incredibly powerful tool that helps marketers learn information on aggregate Facebook users, people connected to your page, or people in custom audiences. Including;
- Demographics – age and gender, job role, education, lifestyle, marital status
- Page likes – top pages users like within different categories
- Purchase activity – previous purchase behaviour
- Location and language – where users live and what language they speak
- Facebook usage – how frequently are people in the audience you are looking at on Facebook and what device do they use to do so.
The Audience Manager Tool can help you create and manage Facebook target audiences. There are three primary audience types Core, Custom, and Lookalike audiences. Each type has many additional options.
Core Audiences are those you define based on location, income, age, interests, behaviour, and gender for example. Interest targeting is a great hook as it allows you to target people specifically interested in subjects that relate to your product or service. You could even target people interested in your competitors.
Custom Audiences are of high value as they allow you to retarget past website visitors or those who have engaged with your forms of content such as your app or social accounts. Within this, there are many options, from targeting everyone who has visited your website, to those who have visited specific web pages to those who haven’t visited your website for a while. This is great as you can reach users that have an interest in your brand or product. This can make this form of targeting very high value for your business and produce excellent social media advertising results.
Lookalike audiences allow you to take consumer data and create a target ‘lookalike’ audience based on those who have similar interests and qualities to them. Again, refining options are available. For example, you could create a lookalike audience based on ‘Recent Buyers’, ‘Frequency’ – those who have bought from you multiple times, or ‘Value’ – those who have purchased high-value orders. Through these tactics, you can target people who can increase your Return On Ad Spend. However, make sure your audience size is big enough otherwise there won’t be enough data to work effectively.
Each different targeting strategy works better for different businesses, you just need to know which works best for you. Perform ads with different audiences, and see which perform the best. Use the data to make informed marketing decisions!
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