What is Audience Targeting?
Audience targeting is very important in Facebook ad marketing strategy. Audience targeting is the process of identifying specific groups of social media platform users interested in your product or service and trying to reach them. According to 2022 data, Facebook provides a lot of data to advertisers to find potential customers out of more than 2 billion monthly users. But to get this benefit every advertiser has to do audience targeting by specifying a target market. There are various targeting options for this. For example:
- Demographic targeting (eg based on age/gender/income)
- Location targeting (eg by city/state/country trends)
- Interest targeting (eg by reviewing consumer interests/likes/hobbies)
- and behavioral targeting (e.g. according to shopping habits, interest in using different products).
These options help you show your ads to the largest number of potential customers of your product or service. This way you can ensure that your messages reach the people who are most likely to become customers of your brand.
Types of Audience Targeting in Facebook Advertising
There are many different ways of audience targeting in Facebook advertising. Here are some of the most common and important types in detail:
Demographic targeting
People of different ages and different professions have different needs and preferences. In addition, people’s needs and interests vary according to age, gender, income, and education level. Advertising based on everything is called demographic targeting. For example, if you own a cosmetics business, you realize that your ad will be more effective if you advertise to people between the ages of 18-40. Again, you can target your ads to women/men aged 20-30 who live in a certain area and have a certain income level.
Location targeting
Facebook provides the opportunity to deliver ads to people according to location. Simply put, this type of targeting helps your product or service reach people based on location, including countries, regions, states, cities, and even specific zip codes. For example, you can deliver any ad only to people living in Sylhet or to people living in hilly areas. Your ad will reach all Facebook users in that location. It will even go to those who have come to the area for some other reason.
Interest targeting
This option of Facebook is very nice and effective for advertisers. You can easily find the right customers for your business based on their interests. This type of targeting allows you to reach people who have searched on Facebook for a specific topic, hobby, or need for a product or service. For example, if you are a bike business, you can target 18-30 year old youth and people who have interest in bikes. If you can deliver your ad to people who have searched for these related topics, you are more likely to increase sales.
Behavior targeting
The Behavior Targeting feature allows you to identify potential customers for your product or service based on the online behavior and activities of Facebook users. With this option, you can get an idea of who often uses their mobile device to browse Facebook or has recently shopped online. For example, you can show your ad to people who have already purchased other products similar to yours from different pages.
In this case, the focus is on the customer’s shopping habits based on their browsing i.e. personal preferences in daily life, travel or other areas. Advertising based on this type of data is basically called data-driven marketing. Overall, this type of targeting is very helpful in finding the necessary and relevant audience to run ads for your product or service. Because in today’s digital marketing era, the more information and data based advertising you can provide, the more likely your business will be promoted and expanded.
Custom Audience Targeting in Facebook Advertising
A powerful feature of Facebook ads is Custom Audience Targeting, which allows you to identify your own customers based on user data. With this feature, you can upload names, addresses, emails, phone numbers or a list of Facebook user IDs that match your existing customers, potential customers or leads. Steps to Create Custom Audience:
- Step 1- Go to Facebook Ad Manager and click on “Audiences” tab.
- Step 2- Click on “Create Audience” and open “Custom Audience”.
- Step 3 – Choose what type of data to use to create custom audiences. (e-mail address, phone number, Facebook user ID).
- Step 4 – Upload your data list or copy and paste it into the audience creation tool.
Once you’ve created your custom audience, you can target your ads to people who are already familiar with your brand or interested in your products or services. You can also use custom audience targeting to exclude your old customers from your advertising campaigns. In that case, you first need to decide if you really want to target only new leads and potential customers.
In practice, custom audience targeting is a very effective way to reach users interested in your ads and can help you improve your Facebook advertising campaign performance and ROI.
Lo0kalike Audience Targeting in Facebook Advertising
Lookalike audience targeting is a feature of Facebook ads that helps you reach more new users similar to your existing customers or audience. Steps to Create Localelike Audience:
- Step 1- Go to Facebook Ad Manager and click on “Audiences” tab.
- Step 2– Click on “Create Audience” and open “Lookalike Audience”.
- Step 3 – Select the source audience that you want to use as the basis for your localelike audience. Which could be Custom Audiences, Website Traffic, or Page Likes.
- Step 4- Now select the location and audience size of your localelike audience. Select the location and audience size for your Lookalike audience.
Once you’ve created your lookalike audience, you can show your ads to people who are similar to your old customers or audience, but weren’t previously aware of your brand. This will help you find and engage new potential customers interested in your products or services.
Some more advanced audience targeting techniques for Facebook ads are:
Retargeting: Retargeting is retargeting ads to specific customers who have already interacted with your brand.
That is, retargeting ads to people who visited your website or watched your video or added products to their cart but didn’t make a purchase for some reason. When it comes to Facebook marketing, this is a very effective strategy for retrieving potential buyers.
- Dynamic Product Advertising: Dynamic Product Advertising (DPA) is the act of showing ads for products of your choice to an audience that has a desire to buy. With this feature, your ad will automatically be shown to people who have visited your website/page but have not made a purchase or have expressed interest in a product similar to yours on another page/website. In this way you can encourage them to buy your products through your various offers, blog posts etc.
- Lookalike Audience Expansion: Use Lookalike Extensions to expand your Lookalike Audience. This feature allows Facebook to identify users similar to your Lookalike Audience and helps you reach a larger audience.
- Interest Targeting Overlap: Use interest targeting overlap to identify users who have an interest in your brand versus other competing brands. This will help you reach the specific audience interested in your products or services.
- Excluding Audiences: Use the Excluding Audiences option to exclude Facebook users who are not promising for you, i.e. they are unlikely to become your customers. This will save you money on advertising costs and help you better focus on potential customers.
Ultimately, hopefully, these audience targeting strategies will be very effective in serving you ads to your right customers. However, it’s important to change and refine your targeting strategies over time for maximum success. Hope you got a good idea about audience targeting in Facebook advertising. Also the above mentioned tips are very effective which will help a lot to grow your business.
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