The Secret To Precision Targeting On Facebook

For a brand or a business, these numbers represent an opportunity to engage with your target audience and customers. These numbers mean a way to build a credible and trusted relationship with your clientele.

But how do you identify your relevant target audience among a potential audience of a billion-plus people? Ultra-targeted ads and messages are key to locating your customers among this crowd.

Facebook’s paid advertising allows for an incredible amount of advanced targeting, based on a growing list of demographics and psychographics. Even with a small budget, and as a new player in the online space, you have access to very precise audience targeting.

There are specific tools and techniques that a good marketer uses to find the brand’s audience among the billions we talked about. We happen to be in a particularly generous mood today, so we decided to share our trade secrets with you!

Here are our secret (now not so much!) tips to find your relevant Facebook audience:

1. People Make All The Difference 

One of the first things you do (for your brand) as a marketer: identifying the different Buyer Personas. This makes your job easier when it comes to the most important part of Facebook targeting: Audience Selection.

Facebook allows you to create separate audiences based on multiple parameters including Gender, Age, Location, Interests, and Behaviour. 

Use this feature to create ‘Saved Audiences’ for each of your buyer personas.

Remember, you can use the ‘exclude’ feature to leave out keywords, interests, and behaviours you don’t want associated with your brand. Knowing what to exclude can make a huge difference to how your ad performs.

2. Like Begets Like

Now, if you’ve been good about your ad targeting in the past, and are fairly happy with the kind of engagement you get, you’ll love this!

We’re talking about another ‘Saved Audience’ option: you can create ‘lookalike audience’ lists to find the following audience types in your chosen location.

• People who have engaged with your page in the last 365 days or less
• People who are similar to those who like your page
• People who are similar to your website visitors

Then, you can target 1% of this filtered audience.

“Why only 1%”, you ask? We’ve found that, when we increase this number, the CTR (Click Through Rate) decreases. This means that the CPC (Cost-Per-Click) increases, which is usually not worth it at the end of the day!

3. From Being Stalked To Being The Stalker

You may have, at some point, been “e-stalked” by a particular brand/ page whose website you have visited, regardless of where on the world-wide-web you are.

This is Remarketing.

The big G introduced this concept, and Facebook has created its own version using Pixel codes. All you have to do is embed the code on your website, select the triggers, and you could be a stalker too!*

We talked about a ‘lookalike audience’, right? The Pixel code is what enables this magic.

*We mean in a digital marketing context, not the creepy Bollywood villain way!

4. Allow The Ladies Into The Gentleman’s Club

We found, across our brands, that when ads are served to both genders, the male population always seems to be served more ads! But why?

Because Facebook has more men than women (‘fake or real’ is whole other story for another day). This is inconvenient when women are an important part of your potential audience. Try this simple trick:

• Replicate your ad
• Target only women

Bonus Tip: Tweak the visuals and messaging to be women-specific.  

5. Location, Location, Location

We’ve heard this dialogue in many movies, and of course, from Kevin Spacey (bad timing, we admit!) in the House of Cards.

This point is very important. It makes sense in any form of advertising: print, banner or digital. On the Facebook advertising platform, desktop and mobile are your primary real estate for advertising space, with mobile hogging the lead. On desktops: you can choose between the right column and the newsfeed. The latter wins by a mile. So remember, the winning locations are:

• Mobile Newsfeed
• Desktop Newsfeed

Apps on Facebook’s audience network and 3rd party articles are still in no-man’s land.

6.  Money Makes The World Go Round…

…and makes your ad reach more people too!

How much you spend on an ad is obviously very important, but the quality of your audience isn’t guaranteed. If there was a golden rule, it would be this: follow a trial & error method once all the crucial parameters we talked about here are set.

Watch this space: more on precision targeting, and a whole lot more, in our next blog!

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more tips to generate leads for your business, check out the guide we have created just for this!

– Co-Authored by Aarthi Srinath & Anusha Kousik

Aarthi:        Politically Agnostic Marketer. Chronic Multitasker. Workoutaholic. Cyclist. Mom.

Anusha:     Marketer. Environmentalist. Foodie. Multitasker. Rebel With Many Causes.