Ever wonder how you should build and target your audiences on Facebook & WhatsApp?
What is the difference between saved, custom and lookalike audiences?
When should you use each audience?
How should you target audiences on Facebook & WhatsApp?
This guide will help better understand how to build audiences and target the correct users to deliver results for your business.
How Effective Facebook Audience Targeting Delivers MORE Profits…
If you happen to walk down the city street and see a sign with no relation to your interest, you are a victim of traditional marketing.
Facebook marketing, on the other hand, works on one big and extremely powerful engine.
And that engine is its ability to accurately target 2.50 billion active users, and more than 1.62 billion daily users.
You’ll get your ad seen by the people you define as important to your business – not random strangers who happen to walk by a store.
This engine is so powerful, that many fail to fully utilize its potential to skyrocket their marketing campaigns.
And the reason is because they simply lack the effective skills in creating highly targeted, key audiences.
So to fix this problem, and help you build awesome campaigns that deliver amazing result…
we’re going to teach you the “A-to-Z” fundamentals to creating your very own highly targeted Facebook Audience.
Why?
Because a better targeted audience will increase your ROI more than any other step of your campaign building process. And we’re going to show you using Audience Insight Tools.
And, if you get your audience right…
you’ll increase your key KPIs when measuring your campaign’s success, including:
- ROAS (return-on-ad-spend), and also
- lower your ad spend (ad costs).
Do you really want higher ROIs?
If so then, please, read on.
Understanding Your WhatsApp & Facebook Audiences
Every business’ goal is to deliver value for their customer.
And if you want to deliver more value than your competitors then you’ll want to get Whatsapp & Facebook Audience Targeting CORRECT.
Once you’re able to IDENTIFY who your customer is, you’ll be able to communicate directly to them.
And you’ll do this by leveraging the information to customize the right type of content to attract your prospects.
This Audiences = Content bridge creates the environment to allow your audience to want to take action.
If you fail to do this crucial step, you’ll end up speaking to the wrong people and your will campaign flop.
To begin,
here are the three audience targeting methods that Facebook uses and that you must understand to build a successful Facebook marketing campaign:
- Core Audiences: allow you to target people based on their location, age, gender, income, and interests. Saved Audiences.
- Custom Audiences: made from a customer list based on CRM data, such as, email and phone number or people who’ve interacted with your Instagram account.
- Lookalike Audiences: as its name implies, it tells Facebook to create a new audience based on existing data. We’ll go into more details on how to do this further below.
In this guide, you will learn the difference between each audience and how to use them effectively to target the right users.
How to Effectively Use Audience Insights to Find Your Ideal Customer
Audience Insights is Facebook’s tool to help make your life easier by getting to know your audience and build that Audience = Content bridge we talked about earlier.
This tool, as listed by Facebook, will help you mine gold by helping you discover:
- Demographics (gender, age, educational background, job titles, etc.)
- What people like (interest and hobbies
- What their lifestyle is like (relationship status, interests)
- Location and language
- How often they’re on Facebook
- Past purchasing behavior
- And much, much more…
Note: Audience Insights Tool is different from the Page Insights Tool. Audience Insights Tool looks at potential customers, whereas Page Insights looks at how your audience has engaged with your Page (i.e, likes, comments, and shares).
Audience Insights Tools is NOT the same as your Page Insights!
By inputting the information into this tool, Facebook Audience will create a report telling you their interests, hobbies, and even their lifestyle category (i.e. fashion, fitness, etc.).
In turn, you will be better able to target your audience.
Step-by-Step: How to Create Facebook Audiences
Step 1: Select your audience (i.e., Everyone on Facebook or People connected to your Page)
Step 2: Enter in your demographic information (i.e. age, location, gender, and interests) you believe your audience is interested in or passionate about.
Step 3: Review your results under the Page Likes tab. Here you’ll find the pages that your audience likes, and the top categories they would belong to.
Here you leverage the results from Facebook Audience Insights to better understand your audience and target users on WhatsApp!
You’ll know the age brackets, location, gender, and find out more about what their interests are and how engaged they are with the Pages (i.e., likes, comments, and shares) .
How To Access the Audience Tool on Your Facebook Business Manager
First log into your FB Ad Manager by going to this link here.
After you log into your Ad Manager account, and under “Tools” tab select Audiences.
As a note, you do need to have created a Facebook Ad Account and Fan page first before using and building new audiences.
Here are the 3 Different Kinds of Audiences you can user for your targeting
In more detail…
Core Audiences: Allows you to select core or fundamental information such as demographics
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Education
- Relationship status
- Parent
- and much more
The options are wide or narrow as you want it to be. This also includes behaviors (such as past purchase behaviors), as well as “interests” (i.e., sports, following certain brands, etc.).
Custom Audiences: Here you can give YOUR (internal information) CRM data to Facebook, and Facebook will use its powerful algorithm to target exactly these people based on the info you provided (i.e., email, phone number, and address).
Lookalike Audiences: Once you have sufficient data, you’re NOW able to build a new audience (to expand your target market) for people that share similar “interests” to your Core Audience.
Based on the information your provide, Facebook will go out and find an entirely new audience that looks a lot like your base audience.
Now you have a NEW audience, that is more likely to buy (based on existing past purchase data) to further increase your bottom-line.
Facebook Saved Audiences:
Saved Audiences will essentially help you build audiences based on demographics, behaviour and interest based targeting.
There are a number of options and ways in which you can create a new Saved Audience:
- Location-based targeting
- Demographic-based targeting
- Interest-base targeting
- INcluding and EXcluding interests
I will cover each in more detail below.
What is Location-based Targeting?
In your Core Audience section, you can apply location-based targeting by drilling down to the Zip Code, including city or region, and of course by Country.
When and why would you use location-based targeting?
Say for example, you’re running an ice cream shop in your city, and you want to attract more traffic to your business.
So, you run a promotion.
But, you only want your promotion to be seen by people within a certain radius-distance to your store’s location.
By running a location-based targeting strategy, you’ll be able to target individuals within a specified geographical vicinity.
And if they live closer to you, they’ll likely be able to visit your store more often and become a regular customer.
What is Demographic-based Targeting?
As a refresher, Facebook is, basically, a giant data machine, with all the demographic info available on approximately 2.5 billion active users.
So, the better quality information you provide Facebook in your targeting process, the more precise the demographic information Facebook will tap into, and the better your campaign results will be.
Demographics includes any information that categorizes a person into a specific group based on certain shared characteristics, i.e., age or income.
The more specific characteristics you define, the more specific and the more NARROW your targeted audience will be.
Facebook can access at its fingertips information on:
- What information you like?
- What you have bought in the past?
- What brands you like?
All this information that’s constantly getting bought up by Facebook becomes part of Facebook’s algorithms.
This highly detailed algorithm, on you, allows it to make a pretty accurate representation of the age, income brackets, location, and gender you’re trying to target.
What is Interest-based Targeting?
You, me, we all have interests.
The key in understanding Interests is understanding the difference in how you (the layman) sees and defines “interests” vs. the way Facebook, the marketing-algorithm machine sees “interests”.
For example, say you you sell basketballs.
Well, if you choose Kobe Bryant, as your Core Audience’s interest, you’re going to get a larger targeted audience.
Meaning there will be a lot of people in this group who likely do not play basketball.
Meaning you‘re showing your ads to a lot of people who would not be interested in buying a basketball.
For example, people may like Kobe for his other accolades off the court, his Oscar success, leadership, or post-basketball career.
But, if you choose a name that is less famous, that is also a well-known basketball player, but only known to more hard-core fans, such as, Tracy McGrady, you’ll find a more narrow audience.
These people will more likely find your ad interesting and thus more likely to purchasing your basketball.
To INclude and/or EXclude Interests?
The more important question to be asking is: WHY exclude and WHAT to exclude?
If you want target people based on interest, you’re naturally going to be including a whole lot of people in your audience.
Why?
Because people like multiple things.
And, the truth is, you’re also going to include a lot of individuals that you don’t want to target.
So, you don’t want these people seeing your ads, because they may not just not be interested, but they may actually HATE what your business stands for.
And this strong emotion may cause then to down-like or post negative comments down-ranking your page…
For example, environmentalist, anti-meat eaters (vegetarians, vegans) that have a polarizing emotion to your business/service may down-rate your service simply due to their polarizing view or stance on your offer or inherent ingredients.
It’s important to exclude these types of audiences based on their polarizing interests.
What is Behavior-based Targeting?
Behavior-based targeting allows you to target individuals who have previously made a purchase to similar products like yours or taken a similar action.
Facebook considers buying behaviors (taking action) as a strong indicator they are likely to take a similar action online vs. someone who hasn’t.
Meaning, if you sell a similar product, this targeting method will go find individuals who specifically like to buy products/services similar to your competitors.
You can also target specifically individuals who use specific mobile devices, i.e., iOS vs. Android. Say, you’re selling an app, or you’re selling products related to a specific iOS device.
What is a Custom Audience?
A key Facebook Audience group is your Custom Audiences, and it can bring some powerful targeting to your campaign game.
Why?
When you create a quality Custom Audience, you’ll be able to achieve the following:
- Awareness: for example, brand building
- Conversion: taking an action on your website/app (i.e. purchasing)
- Loyalty: preference to buy from you than from a competitor
And if you look below, you can find the goals along your marketing funnel.
Meaning, by creating a good custom audience you will be better able to achieve your campaign objectives with these objectives.
In your Custom Audience, you’ll be using data from either
- (a) from your website, purchase data, your CRM data, or
- (b) from Facebook’s data, i.e., Facebook page and it’s engagement metrics (likes, comments, and shares).
By using this data, you’ll be able to go out into the world of Facebook and target these users for remarketing, i.e., they’ve added an item to your cart, or took a specific action, but have not yet completed their purchase or action.
By using the data from your site or CRM, Facebook will be able to go out and find this specific individual and target them with your remarketing ads about the EXACT same product that they left ‘cart-abandoned’ earlier.
Pretty cool, right!
And why would someone want to “follow a specific individual” around?
Because usually the sale happens on average, after, 7 interactions and remarketing to them will help you achieve this process to closing the sale.
Make sure you watch the following video for more details on how to use custom audiences along you sales funnel:
Lookalike Audience – what?
What in the heck is a Lookalike Audience?
Basically, Facebook, after acquiring enough data from your real customers, such as purchases, now has enough data to be pretty certain on the type of customers “likely” to buy your product/service or take a similar action.
They know, now, because they have sufficient, from say, your pixel embedded on your checkout cart page.
Here, Facebook is collecting immense data about your customers.
This more accurate data about specifically who buys your SPECIFIC products/services can now say, “here are other “similar-type” people on Facebook that are also likely to take the same action.
And if you want, we’ll show your ad to these NEW people – this audience that looks like your existing ideal customer.”
Using its powerful algorithm engine, Facebook will go out and find everyone similar to your ideal customer (that you define it to be) and market to them, creating an entirely NEW potential buyers to grow your sales even further.
Take a look at the following tutorial for more info on how to further segment your lookalike audiences!
Final and Helping Thoughts…
Here was a brief, yet extremely powerful, look into the powerful engine of Facebook that operates on using its three major types of audiences as it applies to your marketing funnel:
- Saved Audiences
- Custom Audiences
- Lookalike Audiences
Now, you understand when and why you should be using them to avoid major pitfalls that can easily cost you a lot of time and money.
Building an effective campaign using Facebook Audience Targeting delivers you better campaign results while avoiding problems.
A stronger blueprint for your building effective campaigns will allow you to scale faster to your business goals.
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