Below, we’ve listed several Facebook ad targeting techniques that will help you reach out to your business’ most receptive audience. Last week, we discussed the process of creating an ad on Facebook, providing an easy to follow guide that covered the fundamentals of placing an ad on the world’s most popular website. Of course, there’s more to Facebook advertising than ad creation alone, so today, we’d like to dig a little deeper on the subject by focusing on the science of targeting your Facebook ads to reach your ideal audience.
To recap from last week, if you’re looking for a digital means to get the word out on your business, advertising on Facebook will expose your brand to a massive potential audience of up to 750 million users. Creating an ad is as easy as visiting Facebook.com/advertising and clicking the “Create an Ad” button, followed by the simple act of filling out a few fields to describe your company and provide a brief overview of the audience you’d like to reach.
1. Optimize Fan Interests
As we suggested last week, once the ad is created, its performance should be monitored. If you’re not seeing the results you’d like, you can go back and optimize your ad targeting. We briefly touched on the ability to optimize an ad to reach its intended audience by interests, which is done by way of specifying keywords that are relevant to your field.
If you already have an internet marketing strategy in place for your business, you may have already acquired a list of search engine keywords that are relevant to your business and may be tempted to copy and paste these into the interests fields. However, to do so would be a bit haphazard for Facebook ad targeting purposes. The most effective approach for ad targeting is to really sit and ponder over the keywords your audience is most likely to use in their everyday lives. In other words, use terms that are most likely to entice and appeal to consumers, and you’ll improve your results.
2. Segment Your Audience
Because Facebook allows you to filter your audience by region, age group, interests, etc., it would benefit your campaign to experiment with different demographics in order to determine which yields the best results. Simply test out two or more variations of the ad and compare the results. This is an effective way to learn more about your market while optimizing your ad to reach those who are most receptive to your product or service.
3. Leverage Existing Followers
If you’ve already acquired a sizable following on Facebook, you can utilize this to improve the performance of your ad! Experiment with the “Only show my ad to friends of the fans of Insert Company Here” feature. It’s a particularly effective form of Facebook ad targeting, because the names of those who like your page will appear to their friends within the ad, making them more likely to take notice (and hopefully take action).
Be sure and tune in next week for more social media marketing insights!
Image “Ad Targeting” courtesy of Flick user, David Berkowitz under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
You most certainly know how to keep a reader informed. Between your wit and your wisdom, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Excellent job. I really enjoyed what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it.