Let’s go over the basics of audience targeting when using Facebook & Instagram ads. There are three different ways that you can find your target audience on social media:
- behaviors and interests,
- look-a-like audiences
- custom audiences
When you are first starting, especially if you don’t have a following or an email list, you are going to need to start with behavior and interest targeting.
This means that you will be choosing everything from gender, educational level, marital status, financial status, amount of children, etc.
Once you have figured out the demographic of your target audience, then you will move on to the behaviors and interests.
These could be anything from a person’s job title to business pages and brands they follow. For example, you could target people who are fans of Nordstroms.
When you are targeting these, it can be really easy to get a really big, broad audience or a really tiny, specific audience.
You will want to keep an eye on Facebook’s meter to tell you if your audience is the right size. And while there in no “correct” audience size, you will need to test, test, test to see what works best for you and your business!
Once you have done the behaviors and interests targeting, and your ads are generating traffic to your website or sign ups to your email lists then you can move on to a look-a-like audience.
A look-a-like audience is based on an audience that you have already built. In order to do this, you NEED to have your Facebook Pixel in place on your website.
OK, back to look-a-like audiences, these audiences take a group of people that you already have (website visitors, page fans, email list subscribers, customers, etc.) and then Facebook will find people who are similar, aka look-a-like) this audience.
If you are just getting started and your audience is pretty small, then you should hold off on running any look-a-like audiences. A good rule of thumb is to have at least 100 people in your audience before creating a look-a-like audience.
Finally, a custom audience is when you use first-party data to create custom audiences.
These would be your warm audiences who have already said they are interested in you or your business — website visitors, email list subscribers, leads, customers, etc. Targeting your custom audiences is really important to stay front-of-mind. These audiences will also be much easier to convert into sales than a cold audience.
One question that I often get is: Should I be using the behavior and interest targeting or should I be using look-a-like audiences?
And the answer is BOTH! Everything about marketing is testing and trying to determine what works best for you and your business so by using both, you will be able to see what has the highest ROI for your business and determine what the best target audience is.
Feeling a little overwhelmed about targeting or just advertising in general? Check out this free training on How to Use Facebook & Instagram Ads to Grow Your Business.
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