How to Spruce Up Your Facebook Audience Targeting

Your targeting opportunities are vast when it comes to Facebook. Billions of monthly active users voluntarily share personal details about themselves, which marketers can easily leverage to craft highly effective social media campaigns. With all of this invaluable consumer data at our fingertips, ranging from demographics to location, app downloads, websites visited, shopping habits, and interests, getting started can feel a bit overwhelming. Where does one begin?

It’s important to maintain ad relevancy throughout the customer journey front of mind. You’ll have a hard time capturing attention and sparking action if your ads aren’t relevant to your audience. And the true recipe for ad relevancy boils down to one very special ingredient: your audience. If you don’t know your audience or even worse, are targeting the wrong audience, then it’s going to be hard to create relevant ads that drive conversions.

Successfully targeting ads on Facebook is best done by leveraging your first-party data. And if you use Facebook’s retargeting and advanced targeting options then you can reach an extremely specific audience that is highly-relevant and likely to engage. Here’s how marketers can spruce up their Facebook audience targeting:

Reach New Audiences With Facebook Advanced Targeting

Let’s say you want to target Facebook users that look similar to your customers or prospect lists – you can do that. You can create a similar audience to target based on your current customers, prospects, Facebook fans, and website visitors. This audience is known as your lookalike audience because it’s similar to your current customers and/or prospects.

To create a lookalike audience, your custom audience must be created first. Custom audiences are the first step to achieving this type of advanced targeting, which allows you to reach those you already have a relationship with, such as your current customers or anyone that’s interacted with your business. It’s great for engaging with those who have already engaged with your business, but if you want to expand the size of your audience you’ll want to venture into lookalike audiences.

You can create your custom audience by simply syncing your customer data into Facebook’s database. This can include customers, your website audience, and any app activity. Facebook will then scan your first-party data against their user database to find matches, which would make up your custom audience. At that point, Facebook then scans your custom audience against their database to find Facebook users that are similar for you to target with relevant ads. Otherwise known as your lookalike audience. You can go from having 1,000 customers to 20,000 with this advanced targeting feature.

Take this example: Rather than focusing on the conventional conversion methods, such as online form fills, let’s focus on another one that many marketers don’t realize is possible with Facebook advertising: driving offline conversions.

Try targeting smartphone users with an inclination to call your business. Over 1.5 billion people visit Facebook on their mobile devices daily, and nearly 1 billion of those people only visit on their smartphone. And as we know, a smartphone is still a phone. It’s one of the reasons why Facebook and social advertising is generating billions of phone calls to US businesses. In 2015 alone, they drove over 7 billion call conversions. And compared to other digital marketing channels, Facebook and social advertising will see the largest growth in call conversion volume. It’s expected to skyrocket by nearly 200% between 2016 and 2019.

To drive calls from audiences similar to your ideal customers, you need to create a custom audience list based off of your customers who have converted over the phone. Then Facebook would find people similar to this audience for you to target. Now, you can get your ads in front of an extremely targeted audience that’s highly likely to engage by calling, especially if you utilize ads that are known to drive call conversions. For instance, you could use a “Call Now” button as your CTA to drive direct calls from Facebook.

Re-Engage Prospects and Customers With Facebook Retargeting

Facebook also offers marketers the opportunity to re-engage your current customers and prospects. They’ve already expressed interest in your product or service, making them an ideal audience compared to those who have not interacted with you or expressed any interests related to your businesses.

As mentioned earlier, you can create custom audiences from your database, your website, and your app.

Custom Audiences From Your Website or App: Over time, you can build a retargeting list by placing a Facebook pixel on your website or app. Place new ads in front of these audiences that customized to the pages they visited or the types of products and services purchased, inquiries made, and more. Ask them to make another purchase, such as showing a special offer for a product they were interested in or would be interested in. In sticking with call conversions, you could even retarget mobile users since you know they are more likely to call.

Custom Audiences From Your Contact Lists: Let’s say you want to drive calls. Upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses of customers or prospects that engaged or purchased over the phone. You can create a custom audience list to retarget them with ads more personalized to their interests while using Facebook ad tactics designed to help drive calls.

Now that you’ve learned how to spruce up your Facebook audience targeting, you’ll be one step closer to expanding your reach and increasing ROI with relevant ads. The learning doesn’t stop here though. Marketers also need to understand how to capitalize on the fact that Facebook is driving more than online conversions. Learning how to drive offline conversions will be key to fully optimize your social media advertising.

If you’d like to learn more about Facebook’s targeting capabilities for offline conversions and how other marketers are finding success, check out The Facebook Playbook to Call Conversions: How To Use Facebook Ads to Drive Quality Calls and Conversions.

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