How to Target Your Audience
Find Your People
Facebook advertising is part of an integrated marketing strategy, offering tools to reach broad or extremely specific audiences across Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook provides three distinct targeting strategies for marketers.
Examples
Ron is hosting a workshop for advanced wood carving techniques. He wants to advertise to individuals that share his enthusiasm for woodworking and carpentry.
Core Audience: With Facebook's interest data, Ron can target people that expressed interest in wood carving or carpentry.
Custom Audience: With the Facebook pixel installed on his website, Ron can target people that have visited Ron's website in the past.
Lookalike Audience: With a data source, such as website visitors, Ron can target a large audience of people that have similar characteristics of people that have visited Ron's website.
Audience Discovery
If you're just beginning your Facebook advertising journey, set aside a budget for audience discovery.
In other words, prospecting. Think of your ideal audience as the bull’s eye in a game of darts. If you threw just one dart, what would be the odds of hitting the bullseye? Much lower than if you threw one hundred darts.
In the world of Facebook advertising, those darts seem expensive if you’re not focused on the long-game. Taking prospecting into account when you create your advertising budget to leave you room for exploration. In other words, buy yourself a bigger pack of darts.
Lookalike Audiences and Core Audiences are great for prospecting and finding new potential customers.
Audience Retargeting
When your first ad campaign is underway, plan on doing as much work as you can to transition your audiences from “cold” to “hot.” “Hot” leads are those audiences that have already demonstrated interest in your brand. Interest can take several forms:
People who view products on your website (Cold)
Subscribing to your mailing list and/or following you on social media (Warm)
People who have purchased your product in the past (Hot)
The longer you advertise, the more people will express their interest in your brand. As these people go from “cold” to “hot,” they become less expensive to advertise to.
Custom Audiences are great for retargeting people that have already expressed interest in your business.
Key Takeaways:
Facebook offers a variety of target audiences for you to reach your potential customers
Use Facebook's lookalike audiences and core audiences to advertise to new people that may be interested in your business
Use Facebook's custom audience to retarget people that have shown interest in your business
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