Facebook Audience

How do you build the ideal Facebook ad audience for your brand?

You may love it or loathe it, and indeed Facebook can inspire strong feelings, but with more than 2.7bn monthly active users as of 2020’s second quarter (source: Statista), the platform is a force you can’t afford to ignore.

After all, it’s where your customers virtually hang out, and advertising on it is fast, cost-effective and targeted. Used properly, it can enhance your website and blog traffic, sales, revenue and leads. Not only that, but it’s engaging, measurable and can drive repeat business, referrals and SEO rankings. Equally, it can help you break into fresh markets.

If you’re a smaller business, use it to steal a march on your bigger competitors (while remembering that all of them will be using it themselves). Finally, most people access Facebook on the go, and mobile is the way forward for all things online.

But if you’re joining the six million-plus businesses using Facebook ads to push their brands, you won’t maximise your investment without targeting the right audience. After all, even if you could reach all Facebook users, they wouldn’t all want what you offer. Try to target everyone and you will end up reaching no one.

Here are some points to consider:

  • Know your goals

What exactly do you want to achieve with your Facebook marketing? What do you want people to do after viewing your ads? Are you prioritising conversions or still at the stage where you simply want people to be aware of who you are and what you do?

  • Know your audience

Consider which group of people you are targeting. Think about how many people you ideally want to reach. Bear in mind the ‘rule of seven’, which typically holds that someone will need to see your ad seven times before taking action.

  • Create your content

Create the content for your ad with your target audience and goals firmly in mind. Think about the decisions they go through, from awareness of a need to considering solutions to, finally, choosing what you offer to resolve their problem.

Once you understand the stage your target audience is at in this process, tailor your ad accordingly. (Clearly, it will need to be in video format.)

  • Create a custom audience

This will comprise those who have already interacted with your content or business. Create it based on current data on your website visitors, customers and those who’ve engaged with your brand in other ways. You can also use Audience Insights tools to enhance your understanding.

Aim to target those who watched 95% or more of your video – not just those who clicked on it but then moved away. At this stage, you’re still not focusing on getting people to buy anything; you’re building your audience.

  • Reach the magic 1,000 number

Run ads with that video until at least 1,000 people have seen 95% of it. (You will also earn extra Brownie points with Facebook for this.)

  • Create a lookalike audience from those 1,000 people

Create a ‘lookalike’ audience by identifying the common traits, demographics and interests of those who interacted with your video. This allows you to target those who ‘look like’ your custom audience – as identified above.

Choose the size of this lookalike audience while creating your campaign – you could go for the bigger reach of a larger audience or a more closely matched, smaller one. Learn more here.

You can now release a second video for this new ‘warmer’ audience, which you can move further along in the sales process.

  • Rinse and repeat!

Keep repeating to reach fresh audiences. Over time, you should increasingly get better at sending the right people the right message at the best time.

Summing up

We’ve been using Facebook as a marketing tool to help our varied client base for years. Talk to us about using the platform to reach a tailored audience with your brand’s ad, thus maximising your advertising investment.