If you are spending money in online advertising and aren’t utilizing Facebook Advertising as part of your budget, I truly believe you are not using your budget to its truest potential. Why?
Reach a Broader Audience
Facebook is seemingly constantly changing its algorithm. Organic reach never seems to be increasing. It looks like, unsurprisingly, Facebook is forcing us more and more to spend money for reach.
The best option? Utilize the tools they provide us with to the best of our abilities. Target your exact desired demographic. Reach people like the people you know you want. Learn about your audience. Repeat.
1. Target Your Audience
Who CAN’T you target on Facebook? From your customer lists to website visitors and your target demographic, the possibilities are seemingly endless. Even with just the basic use of the advertising system, you can target your ads to people in a specific geographic location, age, and income level. Add in different behavioral targeting for an extra layer of useful information.
Many people will visit your website, but not fill out your contact form or sign up for your newsletter. Whatever your goals are, target your website traffic specifically for those needs. Install a Facebook Pixel across your site. Create a custom audience for people who visit any site EXCEPT FOR your “Thank You” page. Create ads that speak to, say, the benefits of your newsletter. By creating these extremely specific audiences and ads, you are much more likely to see the results you’re looking for. By targeting your website traffic, you have already passed one huge hurdle: you already know they are at least mildly interested in your product.
2. Create a Lookalike Audience
A tool within Facebook Advertising that is slowly becoming more popular is the Lookalike Audience. Utilize any audience that you already have–created from a contact list, your Web traffic, etc. Facebook makes it very easy to create a Lookalike Audience right on the Audiences page. What does this do? It expands your reach to over a million people that have things in common with your audience. That could be demographics, psychographics, friends, etc. This can open your advertising up to people you never would have been able to target otherwise.
3. Learn from Audience Insights
This is a majorly overlooked feature and one that, once you discover it, you won’t know how you lived without it! This is particularly great for your newsletter subscription list, the list of lead, or website traffic. As soon as your audience hits over 1,000 matches, you can start to see some data. At first, you’ll see gender, age, and location data. As your audience grows, though, you’ll start to see SO much more.
Seriously. So much more.
You’ll see your audience’s purchase behavior. What they do on Facebook. Which type of online behavior they have. If they’re in the market for a car. How many people are in their household. What their household income is.
Obviously, you can see how useful this information can be not only to your marketing but to the business itself.
4. Repeat.
Take this information that you’ve learned from Insights, combine it with the performance statistics of your ads, and repeat from the beginning. Adjust your targeting. Create more lookalike audiences. Look at your insights constantly. Being quick on your feet is the way you will jump ahead of your competition and truly make the most out of Facebook Advertising.
Tell us: Are you utilizing Facebook Advertising? What is your favorite tool?
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4 Comments. Leave new
Thank you for sharing the great information. Love the article. Great job!
Thanks, Dennis! We really appreciate your continued support! 😀
Ann Marie,
I’m a serial entrepreneur since (gulp) 1985 and have seen a lot of things come and go. Demographics replaced by psychographics is probably the most significant change, and social media giving INSTANT feedback is another. Whooo.
One way I’ve used “lookalike audience” is with my local business, a martial arts studio. Add your Students to a group… get all their demographic/psychographic info… market to the ones that fit the profile in your local area. GOLD.
Thanks for making this available. In my blog at Shoestring101 I teach biz owners how to market more effectively; this post will go out to all my followers.
Keep Stepping!
Kurt
Hey, Kurt! Stepping in and saying thanks from Ann Marie and ALL of us over here at B Squared. We LOVE LOVE LOVE using “lookalike audiences” on FB. And so do our clients! Thanks for being such an awesome sauce supporter, friend! 🙂